John Robson: Even Bureaucrats Are Finding Excessive Bureaucracy Intolerable

The Peace tower on Parliament Hill is reflected in the windows of the Bank of Canada in Ottawa on June 1, 2022. The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

Commentary

You know how dealing with the government can drive you mad, including that pre-emptive warning not to use the language so hard to suppress when told they’re experiencing a “higher than usual call volume” for the 20th straight year? Turns out you’re not alone. And while misery may not love this kind of company, maybe the bureaucrats can help us claw our way back to sanity.

Yes, them. Because when I say you’re not alone I don’t just mean all the others on hold cursing the bot offering baffling opportunities to learn more about the muzak tormenting them. I mean the person scrambling to get to your call from the other side is also on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Possibly not the near side.

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, a federal Canadian Department of Justice report found that “mental illness” now accounts for nearly half of federal employee disability claims. Moreover, Blacklock’s adds, this characteristically jargon-rich document “follows an earlier study that found employees are ‘drowning in a pool of repetitive, menial and uninspiring tasks.’”

Well, that’s administratium for you, you may say. The bigger a bureaucracy is and the less real work it faces, the more fake work it generates. It’s the Peter principle.

No, wait, it’s Parkinson’s law: Bureaucracy expands without regard to the work involved. C. Northcote Parkinson’s main examples being the British Colonial Office, which reached peak employment as the number of colonies plunged to zero, and the British Admiralty, which swelled in inverse proportion to the Royal Navy. (Thus the British Ministry of Defence now has five ministers, seven budgets and 60,000 civilians for under 200,000 military personnel.)

The Peter principle says people who demonstrate competence keep getting promoted until they finally reach a job they’re bad at. Which is also clearly an issue here, though if you’ve dealt with, say, the Canada Revenue Agency you know some go-getters reach their level of incompetence remarkably fast.

Here it is timely to invoke G.K. Chesterton’s maxim that the opposite of funny isn’t “serious,” it’s “not funny.” Because expanding bureaucracy, with its powerful built-in causes, is both at once.

Remember Tocqueville’s warning against covering society with “a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which … enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to … a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” And now there’s a new proposal to make everyone wear lifejackets in all boats at all times, killing fun including the joy of competence essential to good citizenship.

Our bloated, incompetent government also bungles everything from military procurement to plowing snow without blocking driveways. And surely it’s extraordinary that with over one in five Canadians working in the public sector, there’s still nobody to answer the phone.

Such things are dangerous to a nation. And to the bureaucrats, because people busy with things that matter don’t go about strapping strong swimmers into PFDs.

I realize from a purely materialistic point of view that government employees get far better pay and absurd consequence-free job security. (Better than they realize it, judging by the self-pitying online ad the algorithms keep sending me demanding huge raises for these exhausted pillars of society. Not for them, apparently, Burns’ prayer to see themselves as others do, for instance taxpayers.) But a bureaucrat does not live by bread alone. To spend one’s day doing “repetitive, menial and uninspiring tasks” eats away at the soul.

As Chesterton also says, “at bottom the only good news to any son of Adam” is that “Your life has not been useless.” Their professional one generally is.

Of course, private sector bureaucracies can be nightmarish too. But much as many corporate middle managers might like to empire-build, they can’t unless there’s something resembling profit in it. Whereas governments that spend nearly half of GDP and borrow like there’s no interest rate can pay people to stay home experiencing existential dread, then hire expensive consultants to fail to do their work for them.

So is the process irreversible? Will our civilization end not with a bang but with an interdepartmental memo? Perhaps not, because even the state faces material, moral, and morale limits.

For at least 60 years, and arguably 100, we’ve responded to any problem real or imaginary by giving governments more responsibilities, powers, and money. And certainly there is a fanatical class dug in on the commanding heights that cannot grasp, say, that private health care has the same relationship to socialized medicine as supermarkets to collective farms. But even those inside it are starting to find excessive bureaucracy literally intolerable.

So give me your huddled public servants yearning to breathe free. Like the rest of us suppressing the urge to cuss, collapse, or both. We can all do better, and feel better doing it.