Even rumor of another executive order from the White House raises $millions in small donations from
paranoids on the American right. In Canada, the paranoids are unarmed, still
believe in positive government, and are highly aroused by new org charts.
Former public servant and
Green Party leader Elizabeth May put on a vivid display of this Canadian
variety this past Tuesday.
In the Globe and Mail, over the alarming headline “Environment department
on chopping block, May says,” Gloria Galloway reports:
“Green
Party Leader Elizabeth May says senior sources who would lose their jobs if
they went public have told her that the Conservative government is planning to
eliminate the federal environment department and merge any remaining functions
with Natural Resources Canada. The government categorically denied the
suggestion.”
Outside the House of Commons,
May repeated that she believed that the threat was “credible” and emphasized
that she’d been warned about the approaching elimination of Canada’s Ministry
of Environment by “multiple and well-connected sources.”
In Question Period, Stephen
Harper only suggested that she was misinformed. The cold bastard didn’t bother
to get personal or complain that May had lost her avowed attachment to "evidence-based"
politics.
Elizabeth May and certainly
Ms. Galloway should know that farfetched rumors move in packs, at lightning
speed, amongst the well connected. It’s court courtesy.
Even imagining that Harper’s
government would want to strip this highly educated and self-consciously green
country of its flagship environment ministry; even if he thought he could sell
streamlining staff overheads by creating, say, one Ministry of Sustainable
Development—and wanted to spend time and political capital trying—the
argument that Harper’s new organization would crush the greens is nonsense.
Let’s pretend they merge, and
then let the numbers help us figure out who is the big fish and who’d be eaten:
According to Treasury Board
of Canada Secretariat, the brutish Ministry of Natural Resources has 5,520
full-time employees while the fair maiden Ministry of Environment has
5,774. Those are the numbers for fiscal
year 2012-2013—after 7 years of budget-making by Harper and his bean
counters.
This is surely, a pretty "even
Stephen" proposition that, on the face of it, couldn’t swallow up the bureaucratic
culture or clout of either former ministry.
Further, a merger wouldn’t make
it any easier for an incompetent government to escape the wrath of environmentalists
or energy interests.
Conflicts between professionals
and energy and environment priorities would carry on. Complex and contentious
decision-making would continue to frustrate the Prime Minister and provide
stories and great leaks to good journalists.
The change would primarily be
felt internally. Cabinet meetings would feel smaller, and one less minister would
be fighting in front of the Prime Minister. The merged bureaucracy would reach
more compromises within the bureaucracy, without burdening the Cabinet with
their differences. Briefing books, policy papers, planning meeting, briefings
with the minister all would be coordinated to encourage agreement, order, and
civility. Where officials couldn’t agree, one side would usually stand down and
let the other "own" the file.
The desire to get to peaceful
decisions, with less fighting at the top, does lead premiers and prime ministers
to try bureaucratic mergers. Possibly, Elizabeth May picked up on that sentiment—and
simply couldn’t resist assigning pitch-black motives to Stephen Harper.
In pursuit of more rational
and smoother decision-making, energy and environment ministries have been merged
before. In fact, May’s most experienced fellow opposition leader, former
Ontario Premier Bob Rae, did just that when he merged the Ontario ministries of
Energy and Environment in the early 90s.
(Full disclosure: I was one
of the Assistant Deputy Ministers assigned to make it work. The environment side of the new ministry was
about 10 times bigger than the energy side. But because of the demands of
politics, the legislature, the press, stakeholders, and unscheduled economic and
environmental problems, the minister and the Rae Government had to give each
side roughly equal time.)
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