The Phoenix problem is a political one for Liberals

Grits wooed Ottawans on PS fixes, so that makes it a political problem

Perhaps, next to the words “boondoggle” or “debacle,” or any variety of unpublishable synonyms, the dictionaries of the future should have an illustration from an enterprising artist of the Phoenix pay system.

Man, oh man, has Phoenix been a train wreck. It’s bad news when the government has to beg retirees and public servants who’ve moved on to come in and help straighten out its pay system.

The roots of this crisis, as we know by now, are found in some seriously cynical politicking, when the Conservatives up and moved the pay centre over to Miramichi, N.B., part of a pay reform begun in 2009, and as compensation to New Brunswick for shutting down the long-gun registry. But this is now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s problem — and he’s enlisted the Privy Council Office to sort it out.

What this episode shows, at its core, is both the inability of government to handle massive change and the bullish insistence upon that change even when its virtues are no longer clear, if they ever were.

Roughly 82,000 public servants, some of them in Ottawa, have had trouble with their pay as the government has attempted, over the past six months, to switch over to the newfangled pay system. Put in the context of the 300,000 people who’re getting paid via Phoenix, this means more than one-quarter of them are having issues.

Everyone knew the transition was going to be challenging, and yet, here we are. The auditor general is being called in, and Public Services and Procurement Canada is opening a satellite office in Gatineau to help out — although it’s struggling because it can’t seem to find people to work at there, and it’s looking to fly in and house employees. Thirteen public service unions have headed to court, saying the government isn’t meeting its legal obligations as an employer.

This is the stuff of satire, which in many corners of this country keeps people convinced that the government is no good at anything whatsoever. It’s easy to imagine that, in the private sector, department heads would have been defenestrated for incompetence and everyone else working double-time to get it shipshape. Pink slips are doled out for this sort of thing.

The Phoenix debacle is archetypal of the worst suspicions we all have about government — suspicions bolstered by a second government train wreck, Shared Services Canada, which is providing dismal tech support to various government departments. The CBC reports that it’s hampering Statistics Canada’s work.

Government is humongous. Are huge systems the best way to handle a project? Maybe not. The Public Service Alliance of Canada has floated the idea of shutting down Phoenix — at least until it’s fixed.

The Liberals should be asking themselves the same question. Imposing colossal solutions on an unwieldy institution isn’t a smooth process, and while the right choice often isn’t easy, it’s quite possible that managing pay at the individual department level is a simpler way to do it. Trudeau’s assertion that now isn’t the time to learn lessons, though, isn’t exactly heartening.

The solution to finding oneself in a hole is, generally speaking, not to keep on digging. Especially if you don’t know which way is up.

Not only is this a human problem, it’s political, too. Ottawa-Gatineau basically gave the Grits a clean sweep in the October election, surely in response to all the sweet nothings floated to public servants, not to mention the bitter campaign waged against the Conservatives by the public service unions. This is a government concerned about image, its politics, its by-now tiresome “sunny ways” and “because it’s 2015/16” rhetoric.

When those words prove empty — as they are on the pay system — where does it leave the party?

Where does it leave the public service?