Skip to main content
editorial

This is an awkward time for federal public servants.

Here they are in a legitimate uproar about failures in the Phoenix pay system that has created real hardship for thousands of them in recent years.

But while there is sympathy for their plight, the most obvious take-away from the fiasco has been that public servants should be easier to fire.

In a recent public letter to the Prime Minister, Chris Aylward, head of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, offered other solutions. He called for a public inquiry into the Phoenix scandal. He suggested the union should have been consulted more fulsomely. He hinted that having more civil servants would have ensured the job was done better.

These ideas shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Canada’s federal civil service is by and large excellent. Reputable British researchers ranked it the most effective in the world last year. The bureaucracy may have a cultural problem, as Auditor-General Michael Ferguson argued in a report on the Phoenix debacle, but it does not need to clean house.

Still, there is clearly cause to at least sweep out the stables a bit. Remember that it emerged in a parliamentary committee last week that none of the three senior civil servants Mr. Ferguson directly blamed for the Phoenix failure were fired. One retired and two were shuffled into different posts in the same department.

By way of partial explanation, Michael Wernick, Canada’s top civil servant, said it is “extremely difficult” to fire any civil servant below the rank of deputy minister, thanks to the legislation that governs their employment.

Mr. Wernick believes Parliament should amend the Public Service Employment Act to make dismissals for incompetence a real possibility. We agree. Grievous failure, if proven, ought to be cause for firing. That’s healthy: It weeds out bad workers and reaffirms the value of the good ones.

Government workers shouldn’t be immune from these principles, even those in a high-performing civil service like Canada’s. That is especially true if you believe in a strong public sector. If voters are to support big government, they must first see that it’s possible to get good government.

Interact with The Globe