This Phoenix won’t be rising

EDITORIAL: WHAT OTHERS THINK

but it doesn’t. It is equally hard on the Liberals, who eventually pushed the launch button in spite of many warnings about Phoenix being broken.

An unmitigated, foreseeable disaster, and the best the two governments responsible can do is point fingers at each other. What an insult to all the people harmed, and to Canadians overall.

The most disturbing thing about Michael Ferguson’s report isn’t the ugly details about who knew what and when, or about the collective failure of two governments to act in the best interest of their public service employees. Rather, it’s the damning revelation about the culture of Canada’s civil service: “There’s something in the culture that makes people believe that they can’t bring forward these problems ... It was very evident that this system was not going to work.

“In order to prevent an incomprehensible failure like Phoenix from happening in the future, the government has to understand which parts of its culture are causing that type of action.”

This “culture of obedience” is frightening. It means that senior government officials aren’t hearing anything they don’t want to hear. Indeed, the report confirms that on many occasions, senior project staff who knew about critical Phoenix problems either didn’t report them, or actually misled their political masters rather than risk delivering bad news. Think about the ramifications of that on other past, present and future projects.

Some, including unions and the NDP, have called for a public inquiry into the Phoenix debacle. No doubt that would be good theatre. We’d rather see this government promise to fix the problems, and then demonstrate how it has done so, in order for Canadians to regain confidence in what is clearly a broken bureaucracy.

An editorial from the Waterloo Region Record (distributed by The Canadian Press)