So here is the problem:
The Line offers this commentary on the story:
This military fiasco is alarming because it’s a sign that our state-capacity issues are now extending into areas that previously worked. Not only are we struggling to do new things, we’re forgetting how to do things we used to be able to do. This goes beyond what our typical gripes about state capacity. This is something else. This is state atrophy, or rot.
Now that the public is paying attention, we suspect we’ll see some reasonably rapid progress. The government will throw bureaucrats and maybe consultants at the problem until it goes away. This is how they have reacted to similar issues: we hurled ground staff at airport delays until they cleared, and bureaucrats at passport offices until the backlogs eased.
But we have to ask why we now require exceptional redeployments of staff to maintain typical levels of service. And we don’t like the answers we can come up with. Ottawa has added tens of thousands of civil servants, at an annual cost of tens of billions, in recent years. During that time Ottawa has also sharply ramped up spending on consultants; the annual cost now surpasses $20 billion.
And yet.
What the hell is going on?
I'll tell you what's going on.
I retired.
And of course its not just me. Its my sister and my brother and my husband and my neighbour and my friend and thousands of other Boomers just like us.
We worked as civil servants for 40 years, from Trudeau Pere to Trudeau Fils, and we knew how to get things done within a government bureaucracy that always had changing priorities, newly announced programs, shuffled deputy ministers, temporary program directors, acting managers, part-time technicians, job-sharing leave replacements, and out-of-date technology.
We knew how to walk a requisition through a dozen required signatures in an afternoon, persuading the technical and financial staffers with smiles and donuts, to get something authorized and get the cheque issued.
We knew how to phone up a director and tell him that something was going haywire and he'd better get on top of it before some reporter noticed. And his assistant knew who to call to get the problem fixed before it could explode all over everyone's desks.
We knew how to jury-rig the new improved systems so they would work the way we knew they were supposed to, after the consultants and technical experts had set it up and gone home.
Then we retired.
And now, the people who have only ever worked with computers are trying their best to do the job. They're great people, and they're working hard, but they don't know the systems like we did, and more importantly they don't know how to get around them like we did.
Its not easy to cajole a computer into working a little overtime, just this once, to help out our brave troops in Poland.
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