Wasted efforts

Sun Media shows its partisan and ideological colours in its report on the Cons' decision to scrap an Ottawa orientation for new government employees. (Which principle of journalism is it that demands the use of "black pit for taxpayers" rather than any phrase which could suggest there's any potential upside to the program?)

In contrast, the Tyee's Peter MacLeod offers a reasoned defence of the program:

(F)unding a program where the police have a direct experience of Parliament, where agricultural analysts might visit Ottawa's prized experimental farm and where immigration officers have a chance to meet their department's minister sounds like a reasonable initiation to what used to be considered important, valuable and publicly-useful careers.

MPs, of course, should be the last people to grouse. They'd shout murder if anyone suggested that flying back and forth to their constituencies each week was lavish and unnecessary. And so they should. Crazy as it may seem, those air tickets are a small price to pay for keeping politicians even marginally connected to their communities. In a country as big as Canada, spending a King's ransom on travel should surprise no one.

So the problem isn't that we have too many publicly-funded government travel programs. It's much more likely that we have too few. We need programs that bring civil servants to Ottawa -- especially as the civil service struggles to replace thousands of retiring baby-boomers -- and we certainly need programs that bring Ottawa-based civil servants to spend far more time on the frontline in other parts of the country as well...

(T)here are some corollaries. Join a top-flight consulting firm and you'll be spending a minimum of two weeks at an Ivy League university, boning up on your maths, learning the company lore and all the while staying in a premier hotel. Become a taxpayer-supported academic and it's almost required that you attend a conference or two a year, which usually just happen to include cushy accommodations in comfy climes...

So low have civil servants fallen in the public's mind that even those programs designed to restore a sense of professionalism and reinforce an ethos of public purpose are immediately derided as waste.

This is the real tragedy and the real scandal. That civil servants make an easy target -- well, unfortunately, that's not news at all. The government should continue to spend this money.

Unfortunately, MacLeod proved absolutely right in his concern that the Cons would axe the program without any real consideration of the possible benefits. And in the rush to tie "bureaucrats" and "waste" together, it's gone completely unreported that the program itself was designed to improve ethical awareness among federal employees in response to the Auditor General's concerns arising out of the sponsorship scandal.

Mind you, the change in direction probably suits the Cons well in the long run. Not only will the newly-hired civil servants lose out on the benefits pointed out by MacLeod so as to feed into the Cons' anti-government rhetoric, but a less-informed civil service may also be less able to prevent Harper and company from getting their hands into the cookie jar. But for the rest of us, it would be far better to see a reasonable investment in our public servants now than to sacrifice ethics and training on the altar of anti-government ideology.