By: Jim Taylor

Policy reversals test credibility


Once, I worked for a boss notorious for changing his mind. Staff got called into his office in the afternoon; he announced his decision; we filed out back to our own offices.

        The first time this happened, the boss’s second-in-command cautioned me confidentially, “Don’t start anything until tomorrow. He’ll probably change his mind overnight.”

        He often did.

        If you’re thinking that boss shouldn’t be in management, what do you think of a federal government that does the same thing?

        I’ve served on our local museum’s board of directors for almost 13 years. In all those years, the museum always received a federal grant to hire a summer student. The grant came from a variety of sources as Ottawa juggled its alphabet soup of acronyms for ministries and departments, but the funding always came through.

        At one time, we knew in early April if our application had been approved. Year after year, approvals began arriving later and later.

        Our treasurer joked that the delays were deliberate—a means of discouraging organizations from applying for grants. Maybe he wasn’t joking.



Widespread rejections

This year, when our summer student started work, we still hadn’t received approval from Ottawa. But we weren’t worried.

        The day after she started work, we received a letter from CSJ, the Canada Summer Jobs program. It said, in part, “Your application… received a rating of 25 out of 70. It did not rank high enough in the list of assessed applications to be funded… We are unable to offer you CSJ funding at this time…”

        You might think, from the wording of that letter, that our application had been individually evaluated.

Hardly. The day after our rejection letter arrived, I left for Newfoundland. Every local museum that I visited told me the same story. Without exception, they had all been rejected.

Newfoundland, I gathered, has 65 community museums.

        At Cape Spear, I was told, “A lot of museums will not be able to open at all without those students.”

        At Twillingate, I was told, “This is the fourth-oldest community museum in Newfoundland. We’ve been in operation for 34 years. This is the first year we’ll have to try to keep open with just our volunteers.”

        At Lewisporte, I was told, “We applied for two, and got none. We probably won’t open at all this summer.”

        Other parts of Canada were equally hard hit. In Cape Breton, plagued by chronic unemployment, only 100 students were approved, compared to 1000 last summer.

Alberta has the opposite problem from Cape Breton. A booming economy means low youth unemployment. But the effect was the same.

        "A lot of museums have been turned down flat," said Gerry Osmond, executive Director of the Alberta Museums Association, representing about 220 museums.

        "For some of the smaller sites, these are their only staff," Osmond said. "Without these student grants, they can’t hire any staff, which means some of them can’t even open their doors."



Unexplained criteria

No one has yet managed to fully explain the 70-point scoring system used by the Canada Summer Jobs program to evaluate applications for funding. Jane Taber tried, in the Globe and Mail.

        “A group receives nine points if the youth unemployment rate in its area is 12.1 to 13 per cent,” Taber wrote. “If a student has a disability, is aboriginal or a member of a visible minority, that scores five points; a group chalks up four points if the job is in a high-crime area.

        “It was never clear, however… whether there was a specific score out of 70 that needed to be attained in order to qualify for funds.”

        The mayor of Campbellton, just out of Lewisporte, scoffed at the rating system.

        “I know why I didn’t get a grant,” she said. “They asked if I would hire aboriginal students. I answered no, of course—there aren’t any of our aboriginal people left in Newfoundland. The last Beothuck died in 1829!”



Flip-flop

  A week after turning down all funding, however, the federal government reversed itself—just like my former boss. It announced that all non-profit groups who received student funding the previous year would receive it again this summer.

        Just not quite as much.

        Service Canada had previously justified its refusal to offer grants for summer employment on financial grounds. The rejection letter stated that “the demand exceeded the budget.”

        Last fall, according to the Ottawa Gazette, the Conservative government “axed the existing $97.5 million program as part of their budget cuts. They replaced it this spring with Canada Summer Jobs, an $85.9 million program.”

        Of that, $77.3 million was allocated to non-profit and community organizations.

        Liberal MP Mike Savage (Dartmouth-Cole Harbour, NS) charged that the government had “botched” this year’s program.

        Deputy Minister Janice Charette more or less confirmed that assessment. “We did not anticipate the degree to which applying the new criteria would affect public sector organizations who had previously received funding to deliver important services to communities,” she told parliament’s Human Resources Committee.



Squeezing the services

 To restore funding to last year’s organizations, but still stay within budget, Service Canada simply cut back on the hours they would pay for.

        Our local museum, for example, used to be funded for 14 weeks, from mid-May to the Labour Day Weekend. This summer, our student will be covered for only 12 weeks—from June to September—a 15 per cent reduction.

        Other locations got bigger cutbacks, forcing them to reduce the number of days open, or to seek alternate sources of revenue.

        Face-saving flip-flops are becoming a trademark of this government. On the environment, on income trusts, and now on community service funding—one day’s definitive decision is reversed a little later.

        Older readers may remember how former Conservative leader Robert Stanfield was haunted by a news photo of him fumbling a football.

        The present government wisely avoids footballs. Policy fumbles are harder to capture in photographs.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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