Have you ever considered a new career?
Try this one on for size: Canadian foreign service officer. Apparently you get to spend between 50 and 75 per cent of your time surfing the internet at the office, reading news and sports, downloading pornography and emailing the most interesting links to your home for further study.
The pay? Somewhere between $76,010 and $104,026 a year, plus a rare defined-benefit pension plan. And the best part of all? Apparently, little to no direct supervision of your work by anybody.
The Harper government took exception to this job description by in 2009, when foreign service officer, Franklin Andrews, assigned at the time to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, was found to have been spending between half and three quarters of his time, over the course of seven months, surfing the internet and viewing pornography. Andrews was fired, after a thorough investigation where he had ample opportunities to explain his unique approach to doing the taxpayers’ business.
You can probably imagine the rest of the story: the porn-surfing bureaucrat filed a grievance through his union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) demanding that he be reinstated to his job and demanding full back pay – and benefits.
The federal government stuck to their guns, waging a pitched paper battle before a federal labour adjudicator. And what a war of words (and pictures) it was.
On August 4, Public Service Labour Relations Board adjudicator Kate Rogers issued her 15-page, 10,000 word decision. The facts could not have been more clear.
“(Andrews) acknowledged that, for four months in fall 2008 and for three months in summer 2009, he spent more than half his workdays surfing the Internet for non-work-related purposes and, part of that time, viewing pornographic images,” Rogers wrote. “There is absolutely no doubt that (Andrews) spent seven months being paid for work he was not doing, using the employer’s equipment and electronic network for purposes unrelated to his job.”
But, wait for it:
“Given (Andrews’s) length of service, clear disciplinary record, and acceptance of responsibility, I believe the penalty of discharge should be mitigated in this case,” Rogers concluded, overruling senior officials at the Citizenship and Immigration department, and ordering that Franklin Andrews be reinstated to his job, retaining his rank, classification, pay and benefits.
This could only happen in Ottawa and only in the vast self-serving network of insiders called the federal public service.
Even if the porn viewing and wasted tax dollars is somehow not enough reason to fire him, it’s pretty clear they don’t need him around if “he was acting partly through boredom and insufficient work” as Andrews claimed in the hearing.
This raises an important question: how many other bureaucrats are suffering from boredom and insufficient work? Even if they’ve not yet resorted to filling the void with sports, news and pornography, it’s highly likely Andrews is not the only one under-worked in their federal public service. Perhaps it’s high time the Harper government trim the public service to ensure no bureaucrat is bored and can spend up to 75 per cent of their work-day slacking-off.
Harper and Co. have picked fights before with the public service alliance and won. During the last round of bargaining with PSAC - they ended the practice of awarding severance pay for every year worked, even if government employees quit their job voluntarily.
Prime Minister Harper and his cabinet need to get back in the boxing ring again with PSAC. If they expect to be taken seriously by their unions, their employees, and most of all, by the taxpayers who pay all their salaries, the cabinet needs to go to the wall on this one. They need to appeal this decision and punt this high-paid slacker from the government payroll, once and for all.
Next, they need to conduct a full staff review to lay off all those bureaucrats who, while they may not have sunk to the level of viewing porn on the taxpayers tab, may also be suffering “boredom and insufficient work.”
By Gregory Thomas
Canadian Taxpayers Federation