March 22, 2011
The Oda affair has dominated the attention of Parliament and the media in recent weeks. The mysterious insertion of the word “not” in a document and the contempt charge against CIDA Minister Bev Oda have been the focus of considerable media interest. The McLeod Group weighed in on this matter in a letter to Speaker Milliken. (That letter can be found on this website.) Experts, such as David Dacherty of Sir Wilfrid Laurier University and Ned Franks of Queen’s, say Minister Oda should be held in contempt because she deliberately misled the House.
There are other issues in this affair that concern the McLeod Group. While ministers clearly have the right to ignore the advice of their deputies, they must not make them the scapegoats when something goes wrong. This is what Tony Clement did so blatantly in the brouhaha over the long-form census. That prompted Munir Sheikh, the head of Statistics Canada, to resign. And this is what Minister Oda did when before a Commons committee she testified that the Kairos proposal no longer fit with CIDA’s objectives, suggesting she was acting on her department’s recommendation. By adding “not” to a document that had already been signed by two senior officials, she misrepresented their views in a way that would be treated as outright fraud if this were a banking situation. What surprises the McLeod Group was that there were no resignations in this case.
Public servants are supposed to provide ministers with their best advice, and that advice ought to be “fearless, unvarnished and professional” as Mel Cappe, the former Clerk of the Privy Council said on CBC Radio’s The House. In short, the mark of a professional public service is that it speaks truth to power. Public servants can even push back a little, if a minister chooses a different path. They should, for example, caution ministers about the potential risks and consequences of not taking the bureaucracy’s advice. When a minister gets into hot water, having ignored the advice of the bureaucracy, that minister ought not to pin the blame on public servants. Clearly, that is misrepresentation and it’s a good way of alienating the public service and prompting high-level resignations, which inevitably become public. No right-minded minister wants that.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Oda affair and the long-form census debacle is that these have undermined the integrity of Canada’s public service. This should be of great concern to all Canadians because of what it does to the morale of our public servants, to the reputation of the public service as a whole, and to public policy.
When ministers regularly ignore the advice of their department, it causes the bureaucracy to second guess the minister. That is precisely what is happening at CIDA. Public servants there are designing programs to suit the whims of Minister Oda (or to whoever is calling the shots above her). The situation is exacerbated in Ms. Oda’s case because she micro-manages the Agency. Some of CIDA’s public servants have become fearful and increasingly partisan in what they send up to the Minister’s office, the opposite of what should be the case in a well-functioning public administration. One consequence is that we see important, longstanding policies—Canada’s principled stance on gender equality for one—being steadily eroded, diminished without public consultation and without public debate. This is in part why Canada’s international reputation has been in such sharp declined since the Harper administration came to power. This concerns the McLeod Group. We hope that it will concern voters in the next election.