Federal agencies have approved more than $140 million in grants to Ukrainian refugees, records show. Figures were based on the fraction of eligible Ukrainians who applied for funding: “I am really humbled when it comes to how much we should all respect Ukraine.”
A federal program to pay $5,000 rebates to electric car buyers went more than 150 percent over budget, say auditors. Rebates cost taxpayer more than three quarters of a billion and were “an ongoing concern.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs is a bloated bureaucracy with 18 assistant deputy ministers and 90 directors general but few employees who know how to speak a foreign language, say former diplomats. “The current situation in the department is dire,” retired staff wrote in a report to a parliamentary committee.
VIA Rail paid millions in bonuses even as it pled hardship in lobbying cabinet for a Covid bailout, records show. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation yesterday disclosed Access To Information records showing 650 VIA managers received bonuses at taxpayers’ expense: “If VIA Rail has enough money laying around to hand out millions in bonuses and raises during a pandemic then it shouldn’t be relying on taxpayer bailouts.”
Most Canadians would never report a tax cheat since it is “none of their business,” says in-house research by the Canada Revenue Agency. Taxpayers in focus groups said informing on neighbours with tax troubles felt Communistic: “There is great reluctance to report personal or business tax evasion even when certain.”
Deputy Finance Minister Michael Sabia wanted to ‘keep the heat off the bank branches’ after accounts belonging to Freedom Convoy sympathizers were frozen, according to internal emails. His complaints went to the RCMP Commissioner and cabinet: “This is a MISTAKE.”
The Commons transport committee yesterday by a unanimous 11-0 vote summoned Minister Omar Alghabra to explain repeated breakdowns in air and rail service. MPs agreed to launch hearings Thursday on travel snafus that stranded Canadians passengers from Kelowna to Havana, Cuba: “We want answers from the Minister.”
Public employees cannot take photos of citizens without consent, a privacy commissioner has ruled. The decision came in the case of a Yellowknife hospital employee who allegedly attempted to take a cellphone snapshot of a visitor who complained about a mask mandate: “That action was inappropriate for an employee of a public body.”
All eligible MPs have completed mandatory ethics filings after a lone Liberal scofflaw was named and shamed for late filing in 2020. “If someone deserves to be punished for handing something in late, I am guilty,” MP James Maloney (Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Ont.) said at the time.
Cabinet this year proposes to launch its long-promised national buyback of prohibited firearms starting in Prince Edward Island, according to a federal memo. Islanders own few guns and represent a low “risk assessment” before RCMP expand the program nationwide, it said: “Prince Edward Island will be used as a pilot.”
The Department of Public Safety in internal emails complained it had “better things to do” than take reporters’ questions about its use of the Emergencies Act. Records show the department instead wanted news media to focus on discrediting the Freedom Convoy: “Get in on this growing narrative of the truckers.”
At least 2,400 former soldiers, sailors and air crew are homeless in Canada with the actual number likely higher, says the Department of Veterans Affairs. An emergency fund to provide impoverished veterans with winter parkas, food and shelter went over budget last year: “It is minus 40 and all the shelters are full.”
Disproportionately few Filipino and Chinese-Canadians are in federal prison, says a study by the Correctional Service of Canada. No reason was given. Findings were drawn from a decade’s worth of data on the penitentiary population: ‘Research on ethnocultural offenders should be conducted regularly.’
Years of observations
in men’s washrooms
led me to conclude:
the last thing you touch
before washing hands
is your belt.
The one item
you never put
in the laundry basket.
I see you in the meeting room,
hand resting on your belt.
There’s a smile,
a handshake.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 2012 a Department of Transport engineer celebrated his promotion as supervisor by triumphantly needling a coworker over his expense claims. “Why twist the knife?” a labour adjudicator wrote later. The coworker responded by slapping the manager so hard it sent his eyeglasses flying. Interestingly, the supervisor was cited for what author Alexander Abdennur calls “camouflaged aggression” while the employee who responded with a slap was awarded $25,000 in damages.
Dr. Abdennur examines office politics in the same manner Jane Goodall studies primates. He likens bureaucracies to an “animal world” of “petty grievances” and vendettas, “vengeful rumination” and predatory score-settling where managers are like small birds that “freeze when they see the shadow of a circling hawk.”
Camouflaged Aggression In Organizations does not single out public sector employees per se. They are only human, and as a 10th century Arab poet put it: “When nature grows a straight branch, humans attach a spear head to it.”
Rather, the same common forms and strategies of aggression occur in all workplaces, public or private, that share the same elements of the federal bureaucracy. They must be large (plenty of places to hide), money must not an immediate worry (meaning there are no immediate consequences for shenanigans), and coworkers must not be burdened by pressing deadlines.
“Some social and psychological manifestations of aggression can be suppressed or denied but aggression will not go away,” writes Abdennur. “Like a chameleon, it only changes its appearance. We can express our aggressive feelings toward individuals and make them suffer without confronting them.”
Take moral segmentation, for instance. “Moral segmentation occurs when one isolates the norms that pertain to the work environment from the values that govern one’s family and other aspects of one’s life,” explains Camouflaged Aggression. “For example, a manager may casually partake in a decision that results in a devastating blow to the career and family of an employee but react with exaggerated guilt and self-recrimination upon forgetting to feed the neighbour’s cat.”
Then there are outright disorders like contrived histrionics. “The essential feature of this disorder is immaturity, emotional instability, pervasive and excessive emotionality and attention seeking behaviour,” writes Abdennur. “Individuals with this disorder are self-centred, vain and uncomfortable when they are not the centre of attention.”
Here we are thinking of the Department of Employment manager who claimed PTSD and barricaded herself in her office by taping together cardboard boxes, or the Statistics Canada analyst who claimed harassment when a supervisor left a sticky note reading: “Come and see me right away.”
“How is it that accomplished individuals who occupy secure positions are so easily and irrationally intimidated by rather nebulous threats?” writes Abdennur.
Camouflaged Aggression is raw and fascinating with a quirky voyeuristic quality, like watching primates in a zoo. It is beyond sociology. It is entertaining.
By Holly Doan
Camouflaged Aggression in Organizations, by Alexander Abdennur; University of Alberta Press; 216 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-4910; $33.99
