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bureaucracy
Wages, salaries and benefits for government workers are the most significant single expense in the provincial budget.
Part of the problem is that when there are so many bureaucrats, we get a phenomenon referred to as "circling back."
Provinces should follow the lead of Manitoba, Quebec and British Columbia and reduce their needlessly heavy regulatory burdens. They should do so for the sake of all Canadians, from the owners of businesses large and small, on down to little girls who just want to run a lemonade stand without being harassed.
In Ontario, we are burdened with a bloated, ineffective, demoralized health care bureaucracy. Kathleen Wynne and Eric Hoskins solution to this? Lay off nurses and start a fight with doctors. Franz Kafka couldn't have come up with something this convoluted.
For the early part of my government "career", I took the "performance review" seriously. I actually thought that it was important to meet or even exceed my goals and that this would lead me to a higher position. Luckily, I eventually figured out that the whole exercise was an elaborate sham. Whether or not you met your goals, or even had goals for that matter, was totally irrelevant.
What is red tape, exactly? It's the extra time you spend applying for or renewing your passport or driver's license when the process isn't straight forward. It's the confusing rules and processes around seemingly simple tasks. And, it's costing us all billions of dollars a year.
Every year, provincial health care systems across Canada dutifully reduce the volume of services they provide in preparation for the summer vacation season. This planned-for reduction has the inevitable effect of lengthening waiting times for Canadians over the summer months (and during Christmas holidays). The added twist this year is the slowdowns might be extended in a bid to reduce expenditures.
We'll drive, copilot, change the tunes, serve up the beverages, adjust the heat and ensure government doesn't fall asleep... but someone has to open the doors so we can get in the car. Unlock the doors of government and let citizens in, that is the mantra of imagineCalgary, now firmly in the hands of hardened bureaucrats. The language of imagineCalgary is not their mother tongue and they are struggling with just the basic translation, let alone the incredibly lofty and epic targets found within the imagineCalgary tome.
Whose job is it to help vulnerable Canadians solve their problems? The Canadian public service or your member of Parliament? The correct answer is our public service, however, many MPs commit a large amount of time and staff resources to getting constituents in the back door of bureaucracy.
