Civil servants and the culture of waste

There is a rhythm to these periodic media frenzies over the spending habits of public servants.

First come the waves of indignation in the popular press at the latest revelations of official profligacy: the $3,700 the minister of health paid a party supporter to ferry her around by car for a couple of days in the Toronto area; the $6,600 the minister of the environment paid a photographer to document her every move at the Paris climate change conference; the $12,000 three bureaucrats spent on meals at the same conference.

There follows the counterattack from the bored sophisticates — journalists, consultants, and others of the expense account class who cannot believe we are spending so much time on this sort of populist rabblerousing over a couple of pricey meals. Have we no more serious matters to concern ourselves with?

Inevitably, there is a Globe and Mail editorial, huffing at Canadians’ crabby refusal to maintain their officials in a style befitting a G7 country. This week’s instalment did not disappoint. “We have to stop demanding that our cabinet ministers book the middle seat in economy,” the paper advised, “or bed down at discount hotels.” Oh? Why, exactly?

For the most part apologists outside government avoid defending the expenses themselves, as in the environment minister’s efforts to present her photographer’s services as a laudable attempt to “communicate to Canadians the work that the government is doing on their behalf.” It’s just considered infra dig to object.

If you’re picking up a whiff of condescension in all this, you’re not wrong. The sort of people who get worked up about officials perqs are, in the sophisticates’ view, the sort of people who simply do not understand how things work, and media organizations who pander to their resentments are engaged in a kind of class war.

And besides, they will say, what about the much greater waste of funds involved in, well, most of government? People get upset about the proverbial $16 glass of orange juice, it is often explained, because it is “easier to comprehend” than a multibillion-dollar highway that ought not to have been built.

Do they? Or is the public’s outrage perhaps motivated by the suspicion that the two are related? It is quite possible to be disgusted by the little bits of waste without losing sight of the large. Small things can be indicative. The person who is rude to waiters may well be capable of much worse. And the sort of petty grasping that leads people to expense sticks of chewing gum is unlikely to end there.

It isn’t only that it all adds up: thousands of civil servants, hundreds of MPs and senators, dozens of cabinet ministers, all treating the public purse in various ways and to varying degrees as their own. It’s the habit of mind it reveals. The civil servant who expenses $4,000 in meals in the space of two weeks — nearly $300 a day — is not just acting out of his own sense of entitlement, but the confident expectation that others will see it the same way. He is not, after all, stealing the money, or concealing his actions in any way. He filed for those expenses, because he believed they would be approved — as indeed they were.

That’s not an individual predilection. That’s cultural. As with the fracas over Mike Duffy’s expenses, as earlier with the Oda Ado (history’s first palindromic scandal), the problem is not so much with people breaking the rules as with the rules themselves. It is, on the one hand, that it did not occur to those who drafted the rules to prevent this sort of thing. And it is even more the mentality that whatever the rules allow is fair game.

This attitude belongs to no party or government. It is not even reserved to the public sector. It happens wherever and whenever people forget whose money it is. This is, it should be said, all too easy to do. The minister who is engaged in the daily business of persuading the public that her party stands for all that is right and should — no, must — be in government for that reason, will over time persuade herself of the same.

And so the necessary propaganda, all those flattering photographs of a smiling minister meeting whosit and whatsisname, will eventually appear to her, not merely as expressions of personal vanity or attempts to gain partisan advantage, but as a public service — communicating to Canadians “the work that the government is doing on their behalf.” I imagine the prime minister has justified the personal photographer who follows him wherever he goes along the same lines, as the prime minister before him did, and the one before him, and so on.

Politics is insidious that way. Indeed, one is inclined almost to say it’s not their fault: the nature of the job is to corrupt even the best intentioned. It is for the rest of us, rather, not to let ourselves be corrupted in the same way. If we keep seeing these scandals crop up, again and again, it is less because of the fallibility of those in public life than because it is, at some level, tolerated outside it.

Perhaps, as a corrective, we might consider this. Suppose, instead of booking private drivers or hiring photographers or ordering expensive meals, the people in question had just helped themselves to the same amount in cash. Would we be so bored by the whole business then?