Sometimes a bureaucrat can be a public treasure

By Frank Touby –

No matter who gets elected, it’s the civil service who actually are the government. At the most intrusive array of their powers and tasks, they’re the ones who’ll chase you for taxes, stuff you in prison, confiscate your property, even shoot you dead if they think you’re resisting enough to warrant it.

They’re the ones who run the machinery of government, who recommend what high-rise horrors should be built, what level of generosity to grant developers lusting for more lucrative intrusions on their neighbours and neighborhoods.

Bureaucrats can fix something that goes wrong in your neighbourhood, or delay repairs. When they’re professional and make things run as fairly and smoothly as possible, bureaucrats are a public treasure deserving of long tenure. When they’re not … well, that’s part of what David Miller was pointing at as he wielded his broom during his first campaign: the Mel Lastman civil service.

We need more such public treasures in our bureaucracy. It’s up to politicians to negotiate with these powerful insiders to keep them in support of the public purpose rather than satisfy their own conflicting wants and lusts for empire.

With his new powers as mayor and his 4-year term in office, David Miller has a chance to prove wrong those of us who recognized that he severely underperformed during his first three years. He didn’t clean up city hall. The back doors are still open for sub rosa deals and, contrary to common decency, lobbyists—a disgraceful, often deceitful, craft that mostly hurts the public—remain welcome in the Clamshell.

Worse, in many respects, Miller has allowed City Manager Shirley Hoy to gut freedom-of-information (FOI) responses and perhaps to take vengeance on those who blow the whistle—and she can spend our tax money in the reprehensible practice of butt covering. Miller’s butt gets covered, too.

All of which brings me to the finale of this 3-part saga of trying to get from Shirley Hoy’s (and David Miller’s) city hall information on spending that the public has every right to know—information the city is legally required to provide.

The Bulletin asked this about 16 months ago: How much was elite law firm Ogilvy Renault paid to provide what the fired city FOI director performed for about $100,000 a year? That ex-employee had the uncomfortable duty to be an official whistle blower and it was in performance of that duty that she attracted the wrath of Hoy—for not being a “team player” who would disclose embarrassing information—and was canned. The embarrassing disclosure had to do with wrongful shredding of documents around the award of a contract worth many millions of dollars. That disclosure led to even more revelation of civil-service hanky panky on the file.

After much delay and sidetracking we did get some answers, always the minimal and least revealing of replies. Before the FOI boss was canned, she was the one who released or withheld information based on her peer-recognized expertise in FOI and privacy laws and policies. It was a job that should have made her a commissioner, unassailable by the rest of the bureaucracy that could be threatened by the proper performance of her job.

Secrecy is key to butt covering; an indispensable condition that every human being would love to enjoy when caught in error or worse. That’s why the city’s FOI office was kept vulnerable to the likes of Shirley Hoy—and David Miller. Political or bureaucratic resistance to disclosure of truth could triumph and the office was brought under their control. Public be damned.

At her rate of pay and years of service, the FOI director could have been fired with or without cause for a settlement of about $200,000.

So it’s a valid question according to law—as a grueling and overblown provincial appeal process much later disclosed—that Hoy’s minions in city hall should have quickly answered regarding legal expenditures.

Oh no. They argued for more time. Then they claimed FOI exempted them from disclosure and used the Shield of Official Scoundrels, that access and privacy law exempts them, to claim immunity from the public’s right to know how their tax money is spent.

That consumed months of back and forth with the IPC/O, the awkward acronym for Ann Cavoukian’s empire, Information and Privacy Commission/Ontario. Were he a woman, self-promoter MP Garth Turner might pick her as his role model.

While she pontificates from on high about various information things both private and public, Cavoukian’s crowd nitpick over plainly meritorious information requests that fellow bureaucrats in lower governments have denied. That drags out the appeals for weeks and months. Information delayed by honouring frivilous objections is not a credit to IPC/O or to the public for whom information and privacy laws are meant to serve.

So what did it cost for Hoy to take an axe to an employee who embarrassed her? We do have a strong clue. It came inside a 100-page pile of almost totally irrelevant “disclosures,” that The Bulletin paid for by the page. The city did acknowledge that to handle just seven months of the fired FOI director’s workload, the bureaucracy had allocated $450,000 to handle work she did on her annual $100,000 salary. To their credit, Ogilvy Renault only tapped that account for $87,961.65 plus disbursements. But they were paid for more than just that.

We learned that in handling a mere 19 FOI and privacy requests and appeals, in 2003 and 2004, Ogilvy Renault billed for 377 hours at rates ranging from $280 to $325 per hour. The fired FOI director handled more than 3,200 information requests per year, plus privacy and FOI appeals.

And we learned that fighting the dismissal case brought by the fired FOI director, entitled to about $200,000 recompense, took 765 hours of high-priced legal talent at rates between $135 and $575 per hour. The total expenditure wasn’t disclosed.

But it took a further information request to get the meaning of that $450,000 city bureaucrats estimated it would take to replace the job done by their whistle-blowing FOI director who was just doing her job under impossible conditions. The city didn’t appeal that request.

The bits and pieces of information provided by the city and tempered by a foot-dragging IPC/O show how costly it was to taxpayers for the city manager to fire her. A further embarrassment to butt-covering bureaucrats.

Will that miserable record continue under Miller who is with us for four years? It’s likely. Miller shows no embarrassment over the fact that bureaucrats in charge of the silos can control the release of information the public is entitled to know. Already stung by criticisms over his undistinguished three years as mayor, the ability to seamlessly conceal information about further ineptitude in that office must be very tempting.