Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to refer to a commentary in the Globe and Mail titled: "Civil Servants Lead Lives of Quiet Collusion." It is by a fellow named Chris Dray. I will just refer to portions of it.
I am a public servant. I have been in the workforce for 20 years and spent half that time as an employee of one government or another. I have always done my best to do good work and like so many public servants, I have seen most of that work come to nothing. Programs go off the rails, studies get shelved, ideas get dropped or sent round and round from desk to desk until they grow stale or get lost along the way. At times it has been hard for me to justify the lack of results after all the hours of effort and money expended.
There is a quiet collusion amongst public servants about this kind of thing. We acknowledge that government is ineffective. We tell each other that there is nothing we can do about it. We absolve each other of responsibility. We blame others or the system for the global conditions. Yet, somewhere deep within us, there is an unthinkable thought that rises like bile to sour our outlook. Once you have to have that unthinkable thought, you pass beyond the comfort of absolution. As I sit at my desk, a single public servant very deep within the bowels of government, the unthinkable thought comes to me as a litany.
Whether you produce results or not, the pay is the same; whether you work hard or not, the pay is the same; whether you care or not, the pay is the same.
And as long as you don't take a risk, question too deeply or speak the truth to power, the pay cheques keep rolling in like waves on a beach.
In business, if you forget who your customer is or produce a poor product or let costs get out of hand, you fail and the price of failure is clear; You go out of business. This is not the case with government. In government, you can ignore the customer, as long as you satisfy the politicians, because that's who the money comes from. You can produce a poor product because, in most cases, the customer...