For the public service, the election issue is respect

Several ridings in Ottawa look likely to be tight races between Liberals and Conservatives. Lo and behold, last week the leaders of both parties took the time to write open letters to the public service. The styles of the two letters are different in interesting ways.

In Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s letter, the word “respect” appears seven times, and the words “trust” or “trusting ” three times.

Neither word appears in Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s letter.

This is a key distinction, because the heart of the issue for public servants is whether this government respects them. It isn’t so much about the details of sick leave as it is about how the government has framed it. As president of the Treasury Board, Tony Clement has said that “absenteeism is unacceptably high” and that “the biggest factor is unionization and the psychological entitlement mindset that goes with it.”

The government sees this as a battle between public service unions protecting malingerers on one side, and taxpayers on the other, and it has emphatically chosen its side.

Harper’s “letter” is not, then, in any real way a letter to worried or angry public servants. It is a campaign message to voters at large. In Ottawa, everyone either is or knows a public servant, but the voting records suggest there is plenty in the Conservative world view to appeal to the capital’s bedroom communities.

The trick for Harper now is not to somehow win over the entire public service in the next two weeks, but to take the air out of the issue in Ottawa and keep other issues top of voters’ minds.

The letter includes some standard talking points about low taxes and helping families, and attacks the credibility of rival parties and public-sector unions when it comes to sick leave and pensions.

“I want to give you the facts to correct this misinformation,” writes the prime minister. It’s hard to imagine such a patronizing approach making any public servant feel more respected. When has being told, “You’re wrong to be angry” ever made anyone less angry? But it might play well with a voter who simply wants to know whether there’s anything to this issue.

The post-Reform Conservatives have always suspected that Ottawa’s public service was packed with Liberal sympathizers. If this is true at all in 2015, nine years into the Conservative ascendance, it must only be selffulfilling prophecy. It certainly isn’t a legacy of Liberal power when so few networks and players survived that party’s nearextinction.

Public servants in Ottawa also have no particular reason to look back with fondness at the party that presided over deep cuts in the 1990s, while it was kicking public money to its cronies through the sponsorship program.

But it is certainly true that plenty of alienated public servants are now eager to vote anything but Conservative. The NDP — which is looking to at least hold on to the West Quebec ridings and Ottawa Centre — recently put out a plan for what local NDP candidate Paul Dewar called “stability in the public service.” Dewar said public servants “deserve to be respected, listened to, and allowed to think again.” There’s that word “respect” again.

All you have to do to get a wild cheer at any all-candidates’ debate in Ottawa is utter the words “unmuzzle the scientists.” This phrase has become a kind of code here, a shorthand for a concern that is much bigger than the narrow question of, say, whether a scientist ought to be able to go on a morning current-affairs show to talk about sharks.

It’s about Munir Sheikh, Richard Colvin, Linda Keen and Kevin Page. It’s about the shabby treatment of serious people who have been painted as partisan stooges over the last nine years for doing their jobs and speaking their minds. It’s about expertise in general, and whether it has any value to a Conservative government that has shown it simply does not care what research or the Constitution have to say about supervised-injection sites or the criminalization of prostitution or anything else on its political agenda.

If the prime minister had any intention of convincing disgruntled public servants that his skepticism about technocrats and unions has disappeared, he’d need a much longer letter. But he has no such intention anyway.