View From the Legislature

There is something that often happens with governments that have been in power too long. A mentality develops that all the resources and the operations of government belong to the political party in power. And that is a problem.

Under our system of government the civil service, often called the bureaucracy, is non-political. These government workers are there to serve the public regardless of which political party is in power. That is why it was disturbing a couple of weeks ago to learn that a senior official in the civil service, an Assistant Deputy Minister, had sent out an email inviting individuals who work for government to come to the Legislature to view a political debate being orchestrated by the NDP government.

The debate revolved around immigration and whether or not the federal government would be assuming responsibility for immigrant settlement services in Manitoba. Currently, the federal government funds 95% of the settlement services but the Manitoba NDP have been operating the program despite not putting much of the money into it.

Because the NDP government wants to keep running a program they don’t pay for, they decided to orchestrate a debate at the Legislature and try to get people associated with the immigration community to attend.

So when the email went out from an Assistant Deputy Minister asking immigrant settlement workers to feel free to shut their offices, leave their clients, and come to the Legislature for the day, it raised serious questions.

Did the NDP Minister of Immigration give the order for this email to go out? If she did, it is a clear violation of using the civil service for political purposes. It also calls into question if other workers in the government were being pressured to leave their jobs and come down to the Legislature.

Unfortunately, answers are hard to come by because the NDP Minister of Immigration isn’t providing any answers. She hasn’t indicated whether she directed the email to go out from the Assistant Deputy Minister. She isn’t saying how many people the email may have gone to. She doesn’t want to indicate how many civil servants took time away from their jobs and responsibilities to come to the Legislature. Not only doesn’t she want to answer questions, she doesn’t even seem to know what all the fuss is about.

And that perhaps is the crux of the problem. The NDP have been in power for so long they no longer see the distinction between their political party and the civil service which is there to serve all Manitobans in a non-partisan fashion. And that is a very big problem indeed.