19 Mar Why governments don’t fill political jobs through open competition

Here’s another follow-up to my post criticizing Halifax journalist Tim Bousquet’s sexist personal attack on Laurie Graham, the Cape Breton-raised former journalist who will receive $160,000 a year as principal secretary to Premier Stephen McNeil. Previous instalments here and here.

Every government—every government—has a handful of jobs that are political in nature. These are never—never—advertised or filled through open competitions. Contrarian reader Doug Keefe, a former Nova Scotia Deputy Attorney General, explains why:

It’s fair to argue about the salary but wrong to cry foul over this appointment. [The principal secretary] is not and never has been a civil service position, so no need to have a competition. These positions are intended to be confidential and loyal to the person in office. And are never competed.

Yes, they have legal obligations regarding record keeping, etc., but our system tries to keep a bright line between the politically neutral civil service, which has a duty to serve whomever the voters send, and the very small number of people who are partisan supporters of the party or office holder.

These positions play an important role as an interface between the political and politically neutral. They can be played well or badly. I’ve seen both. When you have a person of talent and integrity in one of these positions, Nova Scotians are well served.

I don’t know Laurie Graham. For the record, I don’t care who she’s married to. She’s had her own career.

I guess it’s not 2015 anymore.

I was surprised at how many people are oblivious to this distinction. I’m old enough to remember the days when hundreds of highway workers and other government employees lost their jobs when the government changed. My neighbour, a highway foreman, literally didn’t bother showing up for work the day after the election. Everyone knew his job was gone. Nova Scotia was a very different place.

Ending routine patronage in government employment took a long, hard fight. The late Premier John Savage played a crucial role. Winning that fight is probably the most important forward step governance has taken in our province.

Are some job competitions empty exercises that simply ratify the person already favoured for the job? Sure. But based in my brief experience inside government, hiring panels usually take the process, and their obligation to fair play, seriously. And sometimes competitions turn up an unexpectedly strong applicant who snatches the job away from the candidate assumed to have the inside track.

Writing in this morning Halifax Examiner, El Jones stays neutral on the Laurie Graham hiring, but adds an important point the rest of us missed, about the unbearable whiteness of Nova Scotia’s civil service:

When we criticize cronyism, patronage, insularity, the Nova Scotia way of doing things, and so on, we also have to say the word “white” in there. These positions are about power, and they are also about race, and how white people get and keep power.

It’s a strong piece, and the rest of the Jone-curated issue is a gem. It includes pieces on loneliness in prison:

Loneliness in prison is like, there’s birthdays and Christmas and all these other special occasions. And if you get a card, you can live off that all year. You can take that card out and look at it and think, someone cared enough to send me this. People don’t even know what it’s like, how much that means. But some guys, they never get cards. And they see other guys getting mail or out talking on the phone and then they get mad and they’re taking it out on someone else.

Nova Scotia’s shocking failure to investigate jailhouse deaths:

That the province doesn’t require an inquiry in the case of overdoses in custody suggests that the province feels that once drug addiction is present, the event can safely be “blamed” on the addict. This leaves aside questions such as whether drugs were given to the inmate to manipulate, threaten, or even to deliberately harm them. It also removes the specific site of the death — the fact that the person was in custody — suggesting that the person would have died anywhere. When the death can be attributed to prior conditions or the inmate’s own “fault,” then the fact of the jail and of the specific stresses and damage done to bodies because of custody can be ignored.

It should be a basic truth that those who take someone’s freedom assume the obligation to keep them safe. A prisoner doesn’t control their own body in the most literal ways. They cannot call for medical help. They cannot go to a doctor on their own. They often cannot even call for help when distress buttons are disabled (sometimes because officials got annoyed at prisoners pressing them too much). By suggesting that overdoses are self-explanatory and require no further inquest, the province is refusing a duty of care towards the people in the system.

A droll sendup of Sweden’s demand for a Europe-wide ban on live North American lobster, after 30 were found in Swedish waters:

Of course the lobsters’ handlers are cleverly playing dumb and not revealing our super-secret methods for seeding our lobster operatives into Swedish waters.

“Part of the mystery is how the lobsters ended up in Swedish waters. There’s no way they could travel such a distance on their own, says Gilles Theriault with GTA Fisheries Consultants, based out of New Brunswick.”

And  something called “Shoe Lasting Machine Patent Day”—on March 19! (Only partly a joke.) Check out the whole issue here.