Friday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Friday reading.

- Susan Riley points out that nothing positive figures to come from the Cons' plans to slash Canada's public service:

No good will come of proposed public service cuts, if experience is any guide. Not a leaner, more nimble public service, certainly, and not a more affordable one. Any savings, history suggests, will be illusory, counter-productive or transient.
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It is "theoretically possible" to redesign a bureaucracy to reward enterprise, improve efficiency and prune outdated programs and unproductive individuals, says Carleton University business professor Linda Duxbury. And she believes the federal shop, which has grown relentlessly in the Harper years, is due for a downsizing.

"But the practical reality is that it rarely happens," she says. That's because politicians don't start by asking what they want the public service to do - and what skills will be needed - but focus obsessively on saving money.

And the easiest way to save money is to reduce staffing. Whenever the economy falters, politicians resort to easy caricature - the public servant as indulged, pencil-pushing slacker - and out come the pink slips and running shoes.
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Next week, Clement, nine other ministers and senior mandarins - along with a private consultant making $90,000 a day - will receive plans from 70 departments and agencies outlining potential five-per-cent cuts, and 10-per-cent cuts, in ongoing spending. And, while Treasury Board isn't promising retirement, or buyout, incentives to workers, apparently senior executives will get bonuses (bounty is such an ugly word) based on the savings they find.

It adds up to a disaster-in-themaking: impulsive cuts motivated by optics and ideology, with notional savings devoured by new priorities - more prisons, more foreign military interventions and those expensive fighter jets.

- But then, Dan Gardner once again notes that evidence of any expected positive outcome has been deemed utterly unnecessary as the Cons continue to push their dumb-on-crime agenda:

The Conservatives had long claimed that mandatory minimums worked. They campaigned on it. But they didn't actually have any evidence that this was true, so when I called the minister's office, the minister's office demanded the civil service whip up some evidence. Pronto.

What the civil service came up with was the best case they could make for the minister's claim. Lipstick on a pig, in other words.

Now, one might think the minister and his staff would have been taken aback by this experience. This was a key claim about a critical issue. And they had been forced to confront the fact that they had no evidence. Maybe that would make them worry a little. Experience some doubt. Even - let us speak in whispers - reconsider.

I don't know if they worried or doubted. But they did reconsider: From then on, the Conservatives stopped even pretending to have evidence to support their claims.
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Research is a drag. Assessing evidence is boring. Marshalling arguments takes work. And the Conservatives have made it absolutely clear that they have no intention of engaging in a meaningful, evidence-based discussion about crime policy.

Maybe that will change some day. I hope so. This is important stuff. I'd love to have the sort of substantive, back-and-forth debate that helps the public decide what is and isn't true.

But until then, I'll simply make an assertion - this government is cynical, contemptuous, and intellectually bankrupt - and leave it that.

- Apparently the NDP is doing more than just calling out Sebastien Togneri for trying to stifle criticism: it's also introducing terminology unfamiliar to Canada's media as to how parties try to shut down public discussion. So for the benefit of Jennifer Ditchburn and others who may be going off of audio rather than written references: the term is SLAPP.

- Finally, there seems to be an entertaining finger-pointing war going on between the Cons and the defence department over - with lower-level officials joining Walt Natynczyk in getting called out for overuse of publicly-owned jets, while Peter MacKay tries to answer for using a search and rescue helicopter to get back from vacation and a Challenger jet to get to a lobster festival. But let's note that there seems to be a common theme of expensive government transportation being used on both sides of the institutional divide between the Cons and the department - which may call into question whether there's a genuine need for planes which apparently weren't being used otherwise.