Objective Ottawa Insiders?
Top civil servants shaped government's Freedom Convoy response.
Part 1: Objective Ottawa Insiders? Part 2: Canada's Activist Civil Service Part 3: Going Nuclear on the Truckers Part 4: The Many Meanings of Violence Part 5: Shallow, Self-Serving Sanctimony
In the halls of power, the Privy Council Office is known as the PCO - which conveniently rhymes with PMO - the Prime Minister’s Office.
The head of the Privy Council Office is called the Clerk. Janice Charette currently fills this position, and is a powerful personage indeed. As the country’s top civil servant, she meets daily with the Prime Minister. When the Queen died in September, she was part of the official delegation that flew to London for the funeral.
Ms. Charette’s job is to place a full range of policy options before our elected politicians. After these politicians (primarily, the Prime Minister) choose from that menu, she gives marching orders to the federal bureaucracy. The Clerk is the head of the civil service, the big boss. It’s her job to ensure government decisions are carried out.
On November 18, Ms. Charette testified at an Emergencies Act hearing. So did her second-in-command, Deputy Clerk Nathalie Drouin (video here - transcript here). Three additional members of the Privy Council Office testified around the same time. In the Freedom Convoy drama, PCO personnel may have been behind the scenes, but they were deeply involved.
Collectively, their hours of video testimony and hundreds of pages of official transcripts shed light on what took place in the halls of power. But before we go there, there’s a critical idea we need to wrap our head around.
PCO employees are supposed to be neutral. It says so right there on the PCO website (see the top of this post). That entire team is supposed to perform its duties in an “objective, non-partisan” manner. They’re supposed to be honest brokers. Professionals. Their first duty is to the Canadian people - not to whomever happens to occupy the Prime Minister’s office.
Even at the best of times, this a high and rigorous bar. Sometimes, we humans fall short. Sometimes, our political beliefs, our worldviews, cloud our judgment. We may think we’re being objective, but an outside observer would conclude otherwise.
I’ll be publishing a long, exhaustive article tomorrow. Until then, here’s a question worth pondering: Would it be healthy for our democracy if an organization as influential as the PCO were dominated by woke political activists?
Part 2: Canada's Activist Civil Service Part 3: Going Nuclear on the Truckers Part 4: The Many Meanings of Violence
No !