The logic of Harperism:
Paul Martin’s government employed 452 people as “exempt” ministerial aides, advisors and other staff in 2005. This year, that number has swollen to 549 bodies on the public payroll.
The increase in exempt staffing is even sharper in the Prime Minister’s Office.
In 2005, it took 68 exempt staff to run Martin’s PMO. This year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s command-and-control centre employs 94 people — 38 per cent more than Martin’s, according to the figures provided by Treasury Board Secretariat.
Given the size of the federal government, which directly and indirectly employs hundreds of thousands of people, these are trivial numbers. One could fire the whole of the PMO tomorrow and the budget makers over at finance would hardly notice. The author of the piece is also Glen McGregor, who has spent years throwing brickbats at the Tories. This is a symbolic thing but symbolic things matter too.
There is a logic inherent to government: Either it shrinks or it grows, it cannot simply stand still. Like weeds if you're not actively uprooting and spraying they will always come back. There is always one more crisis, one more pressing need, that requires the careful attentions of the state. Once the principle is established that the state should be the mother, father and rich uncle to the nation there is no real practical limit to how big government can get, except how much it can extract from capital markets in the short-term and taxpayers in the long-run.
This is the basic problem with political centrism. It's never the same thing for more than a moment. There is a tendency to lean one way or another, no matter how carefully balanced your political ideas or strategy might be. Since it is always more popular to spend than to curtail, the slant is toward more government. I suspect that many Harper Tories thought they could enter power and manage Leviathan in a modestly conservative way. Thing is that a party doesn't manage governments in this day and age, the government manages the party. Unless there is a conscious will for deep reform the inertia of bigger government triumphs.
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