Denley: PSAC is being petty, but the Trudeau government has been inept

From the fuss the unions are making about returning to the office, you’d think the government was asking them to crawl to work on their knees. But the feds aren't helping their own case either.

Published Sep 17, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  3 minute read

Photo by Jason Lutes /Postmedia

The dispute between Canada’s incompetent federal government and its petulant public service unions would be darkly amusing if we weren’t paying billions of dollars on the premise that collectively they can run an effective government.

Let’s start with the unions, particularly the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC). The union is fighting tooth and nail to protect its members from the draconian and inhumane federal plan to make them work in the office three days a week. What’s next, slavery?

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Really, could the unions have found a more trivial, self-serving issue? Do they expect sympathy from people who’ve never had their cushy, work-from-home routine? From the magnitude of the fuss the unions are making, you’d think the government was asking them to crawl to work on their knees.

Just to emphasize the point that it’s all about them, not the people who pay their salaries, PSAC organized an ill-advised, and quickly cancelled, boycott of downtown Ottawa businesses.

In addition to the usual grievances and labour board complaints, the union has come up with a novel strategy. It went to Federal Court to argue that the back-to-work decision wasn’t based on data or studies.

While rational decision-making would be a new concept for the Justin Trudeau government, the union is being selective in its outrage. Did it ask for the data and studies that led Trudeau to increase the size of the public service by 42 per cent since he came to power in 2015? Sad to say, but if workers are not comfortable with irrational, data-free decisions, perhaps the federal public service isn’t the employer for them.

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Somewhat surprisingly, a Federal Court judge thought the union argument was worth court time, dismissing the government’s attempts to halt the matter and ordering a full hearing, despite the fact that the government’s approach is sensible and well within its rights as an employer.

If that’s all there was to the dispute, one would lean toward the government side, but the Trudeau government has made that exceptionally difficult. Once again, the competence deficit that is the hallmark of this government is on clear display.

The government announced its partial-back-to-the-office plan in May. Four months later, we discover that at least a dozen federal departments and agencies don’t have enough space to accommodate their workers even three days a week. This would be the same government that has a plan to cut its office space by up to half.

The subplot in this dispute is even more amusing than the main story line. Local municipal politicians are engaged in a tug of war over where public servants work and how they commute. In Ottawa, the ideal location for public servants is in a suburb, so they can use OC Transpo’s excellent services to get to work. Failing that, a public servant could provide value by moving downtown to help increase density.

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That’s upsetting for the mayors of some of the small towns that ring Ottawa. Some public servants moved to those communities during the pandemic. Why not? They were working from home. Now that they will be dragged out of Arnprior or Kemptville for one additional day a week, the mayors are upset.

They support work from home because it gives federal employees more time to shop and volunteer in their home communities. Shop and volunteer? Aren’t they supposed to be working?

It’s time for all the actors in this story to take a quick refresher on the point of having a public service. As the name implies, the 367,772 people who work in the core public service and government agencies are there to serve the public. They are not economic units, valued primarily for their ability to consume services. Their working conditions are determined at the bargaining table, not by protests and court actions. The elected federal government is in charge of the whole affair, not the unions themselves.

Not that hard to grasp, is it?

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist and author. Contact him at [email protected]

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