A Striking Position to Be In
Why Governments Can’t Ignore the Basic Functions of Their Jobs & What Happens When They Do
As observers of Canadian politics, we tend to love to follow the cut and thrust of debate and Question Period. We fawn over the latest horse race we see in the polls. We spend a lot of time focused on the slap, claps, and snaps on social media from elected offices (FYI - I’ll have more to say on this in an upcoming post). We tend to follow these things, many times to the exclusion of what democratic politics is truly about; the act of governing and doing it well.
One of the reasons why that might be the case is that for the most part, most governments govern in competent ways. You can disagree with specific policies and approaches, but normally the professional gears of government continue to function and do so in a highly professional manner. Even in the most difficult moments, like during the Pandemic, we see that happening repeatedly.
Conversely, normally when we do pay attention to the basic functions of government its because of its failures to do the basics. We say prime examples of that lately with passport application delays, a result of elected government neglect of the basics of the job. But while we are used to having one-off stories like that over time, its rare that you see something come along where the entire functioning of government is affected. Well folks, we are on the precipice of one such moment, one that we haven’t seen in a generation or two:
I must admit my surprise that things have been allowed to get to this point under this current Liberal government. Even in the years of the most anti-public service governments, like the Harper Government, we never saw things get to a point like this. 120,000 public servants are in a legal strike position, with another 35,000 Canada Revenue Agency employees likely to arrive there before the end of the week. That affects just about the entire public service folks, from borders, to airports, to seaports, to office workers and everything in between. Most immediately the spectre of 35,000 CRA employees going out on strike, just as taxes are due, would be the first of many extreme headaches for the Liberal government.
While there are many issues at play in this potential strike, a few will surely grab the headlines. There is the issue of pay, as federal civil servants have fallen further and further behind with inflation. The fact that there are employees of the Government of Canada who have fallen so far behind that some are forced to depend on food banks to feed their families is beyond abhorrent and embarrassing for the national government of any G7 nation.
There is also the issue of working conditions and the future of work in the office, which is one issue that I expect will be thornier and will not be as well received in the public. Ironically before COVID hit, the Federal civil service was going through an exercise about the future of work, their offices and alike. It was inevitable that the idea of working from home was going to end up in that conversation and potential future, but COVID thrust that forward. Now federal civil servants are facing the same decisions that many in the private sector already have about what they want their future of work to look like.
For the Treasury Board Secretariat, this is a case of multiple chickens coming home to roost, ones that could have had coops built and ready to house them when they arrived. Instead, here we are. The spectre of losing thousands of highly qualified employees to other workplaces that pay better and give more flexibility is one that would keep most major employers up at night in a tight labour market where everyone is struggling to find the staff they need. The fact that TBS has allowed enough of these issues to fester to get to the point where most of the civil service is ready to go on strike shows that they apparently weren’t as concerned about those issues as other employers might have been.
That especially damning given that some civil servants are still dealing with the fallout from the ill-fated Phoenix pay system brought in by the Harper Government. After tens of thousands of civil servants had their lives turned upside down by non-payment, over-payment (and subsequent collections), and general upheaval that system created in completing the simple task of paying people their wages, the bar for any government coming afterwards to clear regarding labour relations with the civil service was practically laying on the ground. But here we are, having gone from that low, to the point where we might see the first full scale civil service strike in almost two decades.
The government has put themselves behind the eight ball here but there is still time to get this right. The size of the strike mandate that PSAC components have is overwhelming and as someone who used to work in the civil service federally, I’ll admit my shock at its size. In my experience, it takes a whole lot to push federal civil servants to the point where they give a 90% plus strike mandate. We’re not just talking about office workers in downtown Ottawa and Gatineau here. We’re talking about cleaners and cooks on military bases in places like Kingston and Cold Lake, clerks and maintenance workers, tradespeople, Coast Guard search and rescue teams on three coasts and the Great Lakes, food inspectors, teachers, firefighters, and the people who process EI claims and those same passport applications we were rightly worried about in the Fall.
If the government doesn’t find a solution at the bargaining table and fast, this could become another big turning point in the downfall of the Liberal government. If they have to resort to back to work legislation with the support of the Conservatives, it will get even worse and all their talk about anti-scab legislation and mandating union jobs on clean energy projects will start to ring hollow. We’ll see where this all leads but let’s be clear on one thing; we’re at this point because the government hasn’t been taking care of the basics of their job. If they had, PSAC would have more likely been holding a press conference announcing settlements today than announcing potential strike action. I’m sure that’s what they would have preferred. Yet here we are, and regardless of where we go from here, it’s clear that a dose of more attention to detail and the mundane basics of governing could have avoided it all.