BRIEF FROM THE REGIONAL DISTRICT
OF MOUNT WADDINGTON
Ending the centralisation and expansion of rural service management in urban centres
The communities of the Regional District of Mount Waddington (RDMW)
are well aware of what typically happens when the Federal Public Service, ADMs
and DMs are under pressure to cut areas of the government’s operations to
reduce costs:
1) Rural and rural-remote operations are sacrificed to
protect expansionist central administrative units in Ottawa and major centres
under the guise of “restructuring”, “modernisation”, “consolidation” or all
three together.
2) Rural and rural-remote offices of various federal
departments are wound down by attrition over a number of years to lessen the
blow and community outrage when the final axe falls.
3) “Temporary” staff reassignments and accommodations to
larger centres are made permanent and the positions in the rural areas are not
re-filled.
4) Federal Public Service job opportunities become
progressively less accessible to rural Canadians, encouraging urban
out-migration for professional advancement. Professional working families have
to leave and recruitment of this demographic to rural areas is rendered progressively
more difficult.
5) Rural professional and service businesses that typically
work for the Federal government are encouraged/ forced to locate to larger
centres.
6) Rural stakeholders must travel to urban centres to
discuss their own local affairs with even junior level management who have
little understanding of local context.
As this Conservative government draws much support from rural
Western Canada, RDMW encourages the Cabinet to re-think all advice they are
given from entrenched senior public service management concerning the
restructuring, modernisation and consolidation of any aspect of the Federal
Public Service outside of major urban centres. The recently announced
operational cuts to Environment Canada have all the potential hallmarks of the
above approaches by senior public service managers. It is our view that
Cabinets of all political stripes are regularly and deliberately distracted
from the fatted calves just down the road from Parliament Hill and outdated
bureaucratic organisational models in cities like Vancouver. We urge Cabinet to
clip the wings of the central bureaucracies in order to maintain and indeed
restore essential rural services and functions of the federal government. It is
important for government to recognise itself as a driver or animateur of rural socioeconomic
development and to educate senior public service officials of that fact and responsibility
across all ministries and agencies, not just those tasked with that specific
remit. It is currently expedient to reduce or cut rural or regional services
rather than the wasteful activities in the central bureaucracies - this must
change.
Aside from the impact of reduced service, employment and business
in rural areas, the impacts of centralisation by the Federal Public Service are
suggested to be as follows:
1) Escalated public wage, salary and benefit packages that
reflect higher residential, childcare and daily commute expenses for workers
and their families with jobs in downtown urban office locations.
2) Expensive, consultant-driven departmental initiatives that
could have been executed internally and to a higher standard by local federal
staff in the past yet are now beyond the massive city bureaucracies tasked with
doing the same job. The Pacific North Coast
Integrated Management Area initiative is a perfect example of this. Many
of the consultants involved in such initiatives are former local area staffs
who were cut in previous rounds of public service consolidation.
3) Larger, stronger and more effective collective
bargaining units that have little incentive to promote decentralisation or
subsidiarity in decision-making.
4) Greater indirect costs as rural communities become
increasingly dependent on the federal and provincial governments for reactive
one-off social programs that could have been mitigated or avoided had the original
services remained in place and simply been progressively modernised in situ.
A general policy move to cut
from the centre and restore the tried and true decentralized service model for
the benefit of all Canadians and the federal budget is, in our opinion, both
necessary and economically progressive. The Regional District of Mount
Waddington will continue to lobby on more specific
matters separately through appropriate channels.