By Lloyd Kerry, Ottawa Citizen
As a federal public servant who retired this summer, I was starting to feel ashamed to call myself a public servant after what I've seen in the media lately. The federal government has constantly tried to deflect criticism of their ineptitude onto the backs of my fellow Canadians who serve the public with pride.
But, then I realized I have nothing to be ashamed of. I'm proud of my work.
I did my job and did it well for 37 years. I started working for Agriculture Canada (as it was known then) in July 1976. It was hard work. My coworkers and I took it quite seriously and did our best to increase our country's ability to develop and grow the best food supply in the world.
We did not sit around waiting for pay day, or extend our vacation days with sick leave. Over the years, public servants like me dealt with various prime ministers.
There were troubled times in the past: wage and price controls with Pierre Trudeau, strikes for fair wages and working conditions with Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien, and Paul Martin's gashing at the throat of the public service in 1995 when he was minister of finance.
My union also fought with government for decades to get pay equity for female public servants. Imagine. What a novel idea: paying women the same wages as men! But none of this has compared to the constant contempt, harassment and belittlement this government has thrown into the faces of all public servants. Every time they feel pressure from another blunder, they leak some dubious, often unsubstantiated, facts to the media to try and make public servants look bad.
Treasury Board President Tony Clement has been relentless in trying to discredit the public service. He has said the average public servant takes 18.2 days of sick leave a year.
Here's an example from an actual public servant. In my 37 years, I averaged a whopping four sick days a year, and most of my co-workers used a similar amount. Where Clement got his numbers, I'm not sure, but it's likely he's including employees on long-term disability, so if you have someone who has been fighting a serious disease or recovering from a major injury, you may be including 52 sick weeks in a year for one person. That will skew your average. Or, perhaps he was using the absentee rates from members of Parliament and senators, as they are also public servants.
Regardless, the best way to win a war (and it seems that is what is happening to the public service) is to divide and conquer. Try to find some abuse of a privilege, or make one up and get some questionable numbers to back it up, it doesn't matter. We all know public service jobs are often higher paying and have more benefits than private sector jobs, so let's make the public jealous of public servants. Show an example of something like severance pay, something that a lot of private citizens don't get. That will stir them up, make them resent the public servants and garner support to get rid of them. It doesn't matter that all of these benefits were achieved at the bargaining table under fair and just Canadian labour practices.
Don't bother doing something about blatant abuse of taxpayers' money (can you say "senator"?); that would really stir up the voters. No, let's trash the public servants. Trouble is, when you trash public servants, you trash their families as well, and insult their friends and the people they do business with. They are all voters, and 2015 is coming.
So. I'm now one of those private citizens and my respect for public servants has grown, not diminished. When I hear a new attack on the public service, I just shake my head.
Where was I on my last day of work? No, I wasn't on sick leave, nor gazing out the window waiting to escape. I was in my lab, putting samples in the spectrometer for a client because I knew his work was important to him. A co-worker came down to get me. "The whole building is in the lunch room wondering where you are. They have a cake for you."
That's respect. You can't buy that. You can't legislate that.
You have to earn it.
Lloyd Kerry lives in Charlottetown, PEI.
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