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07/30/2003 Archived Entry: "A Bureaucrat's Defence"

A BUREAUCRAT'S DEFENCE: Mr. Janes also writes: "My taxes are thousands of dollars higher than they were two years ago because the PCs realized they could pay for the Common Sense Revolution — tax cuts in 905 and 613 — from Toronto property taxes." This simply isn't true. Yes, I can repeat the party line and blame both underfunding from the Federal government and the general incompetence of Mad Mel and his gang, but the "Common Sense Revolution" did occur. It wasn't simply a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

One statistic alone should be enough to prove this. As part of my preparation before starting work with the provincial government, I did some research on the structure of the bureaucracy. During that time, I came across this startling fact: in spring of 1995, at the very end of the Peterson/Rae reign of terror, "there were approximately 81,250 employees and 1,925 senior management staff working in 457 branches of [the provincial] government. In the spring of 1999, there were approximately 64,000 employees and 1,686 senior management in 332 branches." Doesn't sound like that much, right? Well, consider this: in 1970, the province of Ontario directly employed 62 000 people. And I can tell you from direct experience that the number of people now employed with the province is even lower than it was in spring of 1999, somewhere around 60 000. This is actually quite an amazing achievement: our province in 2003 has a provincial bureaucracy which is below the staffing levels it had in 1970. All this was achieved through a campaign of downloading, outsourcing, early retirement, not bothering to hire for positions that became empty, combining positions, and outright cutbacks. How amazing is this? It's so amazing that I, a Mike Harris Tory, after working for the bureaucracy for two summers now, have come to the conclusion that the provincial government is now chronically understaffed.

Have I gone native? Hardly. I work in an office tower in which the province owns twelve floors of space. There are parts of four ministries there: Citizenship, Labour, Tourism and Recreation, and my home, Culture. Back in the bad old days, the Ministry of Labour had all twelve floors to itself. It now has six. My Ministry has something like 80 full-time, non-political staff in total and our mandate is to supervise the cultural institutions of the entire province. I'd write more, but I think I'd be violating my oath of secrecy (yes, they made me swear an oath).

Replies: 1 Comment

Wow. I always said I'd never work for the government/bureaucracy, but you've somewhat restored my faith in, well, something or other. Of course, with all these staffing policy changes, my chances of being hired are practically nil :-)

Posted by Kathy Shaidle @ 07/31/2003 11:59 AM EST