The Decline of the Canadian Civil Service

The other day I was attempting to find a human being at Immigration Canada to ask a very specific question. I found out that this was pretty much impossible. All the email addresses that I could find were automated to ensure that no one's precious time was wasted answering my dumb question. I tried to call, but I got an automated answer that started off by saying that the computerized system wasn't working, then led me through a very complex series of questions where I was directed to punch in a series of numbers to access the aforementioned non-functional system. Towards the end of this process, I heard another recorded message said that unless someone had sent in the forms I was trying to understand in before October of last year, they were still waiting in the queu and wouldn't be part of the automated system (ie: the one that isn't working) yet. At the very end, another recorded message said that I could dial zero to get in contact with a physical person. When I did that, another message came on saying that there was an "unprecedented" number of people trying to get through the phone lines, but that they understood that what I was trying to figure out was a big deal in my life and I could always hang up and call later. At that point my phone call was disconnected. (I tried later, where I found out that you can't punch in the zero until after you've done all the other things first. Then I got the same reply and got hung up on again.)

In despair, I called the local MP's office and asked the woman who answered the phone if she had an idea about who to ask to find out what I was interested in knowing. It turns out that this knowledgeable lady was an expert on the subject in question and quickly answered all my concerns. I suspect that phone calls like mine are very common and many people contact their local MP's office to try to navigate various aspects of the civil service which has become pretty much impossible to talk to.

I'm not going to rag on about immigration services. I've had the same problem with other agencies. For example, a few years back the city zoning department wanted the fire department to inspect my home. I dutifully said "OK" and waited. It took the firemen six years to contact me to do the inspection. At that point I was told that I needed an electrical inspection.

Booking an electrical inspection involved having to wait an hour or two to get through the phone lines to talk to someone. (Contractors have their own, non-public number. They can also fax in requests.)

I also remember many, many years ago trying to get through to a human rights hotline for a complaint about a workplace issue. Same grotesque long wait on hold followed by a blank statement that a man can't complain about women being badly treated in his workplace. (Sorry for trying to be helpful---.) I've learned that if I want to contact a "help line" to use a computerized free phone line (like Google hangouts) so I don't burn through my limited number of monthly cell phone minutes all on one call. I put the laptop on "speaker phone", and do dishes, cook, can veggies, write a novel, whatever, until someone finally finds the time to answer me.

To be totally honest, I'm kinda in awe of the way Immigration Canada has managed to automate the process in order to free up employees for other tasks. If it all works fine, I'll probably forget about how freaked out I have been about not being able to get a human being to answer my inane, fear-driven questions. (A giant complicating factor affects me. I suffer from PTSD and this sort of Kafkaesque dependency on invisible, unapproachable, and, ambiguous authority pushes all the buttons of my underlying psychological problem. I doubt if anyone would be totally happy with what I had been going through---but I descend into a state of physiological terror whenever I have to deal with this stuff.) What I really want to talk about in this opinion piece is the reason why the department has had to do all this automation in the first place. (Trying to look totally objectively at a situation is one of my PTSD coping mechanisms.)

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I did some looking around on-line and found this interesting graph on a government of Canada website.

In case you can't make it out (click on the image for something easier to read), the graph is comparing the size of the public service workforce (scarlet) to the population (light blue), real Gross Domestic Product (green), and, cost of the programs that the civil service is administering (dark blue) over 17 years, (2000 to 2017). As you can see, fewer people have been administering more and more things for more and more people. Looking at this, it's pretty easy to understand why it is that I have a hard time finding someone to answer my questions and allay my quaking fears.

Usually these cut backs happen when we get a conservative government. Please note that the downward curve in the federal civil service manpower happened from 2009 to 2015. Stephen Harper was Prime Minister of a majority government from 2011 to 2015. Coincidence? I think not. It all comes down to an obsession with cutting taxes. They call it "finding efficiencies", "ending the gravy train", whatever tedious nonsense Doug Ford is currently peddling in Ontario, or, something else. But it always boils down to cutting back on front-line staff which increases wait times and forces management to introduce even more automation.

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It's not just a problem with cutbacks in staff, however. There's also a problem with the constantly expanding regulations that get imposed upon the civil service as more and more time-consuming and expensive regulations get piled upon each other over time.

I had this issue come to my attention with a thunderous crash when I recently listened to a conversation between two doctors on a CBC podcast. A young man was interviewing a baby-boomer who had come across the boarder to Canada from the USA during the Vietnam war. He was not only a draft-dodger, if memory serves, he was also technically a deserter because he had had his med school paid for by the army. He says he showed up at the border and twenty minutes later he was a landed immigrant. If this sounds insane, here's a CBC article that says that the government treated draft dodgers as legitimate refugees, but called them "immigrants" in order not to annoy the US government. (Scroll down to halfway through the piece to the point the heading that says "Welcome, Draft Dodgers".)

Contrast this "quick and dirty" entrance to the country with the huge amount of paperwork and scrutiny that I'm having to go through to get my wife of seven years to immigrate to Canada, and it's obvious that the workload has expanded by several orders of magnitude. So not only do we have fewer and fewer people doing the job, the job itself keeps getting bigger and more complex. No wonder management is desperate to automate the process as much as it can.

I suspect that part of this is simply legitimate. The world is more complex and that means that civil servants have more things that they have to take into consideration. But I also believe that part of the complexity has come about because people refuse to consider the "opportunity costs" that come from bitching about what are ultimately very trivial or nonexistent problems.

Opportunity costs are the resources you waste or potential things you could do that are no longer possible when you pursue a particular course of action. For example, consider an experience I once had while managing a local community economic development project. I had applied for a grant position where I would hire someone through a job experience program. The position was for a full-time salesman who was supposed to help the project get "buy-in" from the community. The position was set to be filled and then a story broke in a newspaper and a member of the opposition party stood up in Parliament and lambasted the government about "waste" (this was in the pre-"gravy train" era).

Instantly, the bureaucracy managing the program that administered the grant went into "risk avoidance mode" and things shut down totally while people ran around in circles to cover their collective asses. This meant my grant sat on a desk for about a year. I eventually got the money, but by then "the moment" had passed and the project went down the toilet.

I'm not going to blame the civil service for destroying that project. At that point hiring a staff member was a bit of a "hail Mary play" anyway. It did teach me never, ever to apply for a government grant again, however.

I'm not going even blame the civil service for going into "ass protection mode". They had far more important and useful projects that they needed to keep from being accused of being "pork" and destroyed.

I'm not even going to blame the government of the day for breaking the glass and telling the civil service to jam on the breaks brakes. They needed to protect their "brand".

The people I do blame, however, are the media who made a huge fuss about a scandal that really wasn't much of anything; and; the opposition parties that were more interested in tarring the government with a "scandal" than considering the effect that this fuss would have on the numerous people---like me---who were going to end up having to deal with an increasingly risk-averse civil service.

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People love to complain about "the bureaucracy". But the thing is that our modern society simply couldn't exist without one. It is what ensures that we have a single-payer medical system, that our children get educated, that the roads get cleared of snow, that our electrical appliances don't kill us, that we don't die of food poisoning, etc, etc, etc. The problem is that if we starve it of resources and pass regulations that tie it's hands so tightly that it cannot do it it's job, it no longer works efficiently. At that point we blame it when instead we should be blaming the people that are keeping it from doing its job well. 

We are entering into an election soon. If you hear a politician complain about "fat cat" bureaucrats who need to be "cut down to size", try to remember the long, long wait times that have resulted from past attempts to "find efficiencies". If the government needs the money, then maybe we need to raise taxes on the hyper-wealthy people who have been making out like bandits instead of starving the civil servants who keep the wheels of society turning.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!