By: Jim Taylor

RCMP scandal reflects broader malaise


Quick! What do all these names have in common? Kenneth Lay. Conrad Black. Alphonso Gagliano. Donald Rumsfeld. Giuliano Zaccardelli.

        Give up? They’ve all been accused of, and in some cases convicted of, subverting a bureaucracy.

        Granted, that’s not the official version of the charges. But that’s the common thread.

        Every large organization turns into a bureaucracy. As German sociologist Max Weber theorized a century ago, “It would be sheer illusion to think… continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices…”

        In Weber’s view, “a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability.”

        To paraphrase a saying attributed to Jesus, “Wherever two or three are gathered together, they will create a bureaucracy.”

        Even the smallest social unit, the nuclear family, develops systems and procedures to share responsibilities. The system is not always equitable, as many harried parents will attest, but it is a working system.

        What Weber did not anticipate was the ease with which bureaucracies can be subverted—indeed, their own willingness to be subverted.



Five examples

  Enron’s collapse in 2001was not totally unheralded. But the vast majority of employees preferred not to believe persistent rumours about bribery, scandals, and unethical practices.

        Conrad Black spent the last three months on trial in Chicago for allegedly diverting some $60 million from corporate coffers to his personal use. The prosecution claims that the money should have gone to investors in Hollinger International, instead of into Black’s lavish lifestyle.

        Black’s lawyers contend that his board of directors approved these transfers. Jennifer Wells, in the Toronto Star, called the directors “toadies.” Though dominant in their own domains, they preferred to play along in Black’s.

        The federal Sponsorship Scandal occurred under former cabinet minister Alphonso Gagliano. In the name of preventing Quebec from declaring independence, dutiful civil servants siphoned some $250 million into pockets of Quebec Liberal supporters. Hundreds of staff must have processed those contracts. But their job was not to question why. Their job was to make it happen.

        Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve probably taught 1000 Ottawa civil servants a course called Eight-Step Editing. In all that time, I can remember only one person who described himself as “a shit disturber,” deliberately exposing the potential errors of his masters’ ways.

        The rest kept their heads down.

        Donald Rumsfeld, of course, manipulated the FBI, CIA, Department of Defense, Pentagon and Colin Powell to deceive Americans into invading Iraq—at a cost to date of about $500 billion, more than 3500 American lives, and up to 100,000 Iraqi casualties.

        Finally, Giuliano Zaccardelli, the former Commissioner in charge of the RCMP, is accused of dragging the Force’s reputation through the mud.



Weakened by its strengths

 Lawyer David Brown, who headed an inquiry into the RCMP, described Zaccardelli as an “autocratic” leader who punished whistleblowers, misused the force’s pension and insurance funds, misled parliament about Maher Arar, and left the Force’s management structure “horribly broken.”

        Brown’s report concluded that the RCMP’s “paramilitary” structure allowed those abuses to go unchecked.

        Nationally syndicated columnist James Travers called it a “cultish xenophobic cohesiveness that thwarts oversight and reform.”

Zaccardelli joined RCMP in 1970 after graduating from Concordia University in Montreal. He moved up quickly through the ranks. He told Concordia’s magazine that in addition to a passion for public service, “I also bring an insatiable appetite to succeed, to do well.”

        “I accept that by most definitions I may be a bit of a dysfunctional person and a bit of a workaholic,” he added.

Zaccardelli was promoted to RCMP Commissioner, commanding some 25,000 RCMP members, in 2000. By then, the Force was already facing criticism for burning barns, spying on Members of Parliament, targetting homosexuals, and overreacting against demonstrators at the APEC Summit in Vancouver.

        In Travers’ words, “Liberals appointed the weak, very political Zaccardelli rather than search for leadership strong enough to challenge the status quo.”



A Canadian icon

  I don’t cite these allegations to disparage the RCMP. The Force is far more than a red-coated tourist icon. It has probably had more influence in the shaping of Canada more than any other institution.

        Without the RCMP and its predecessor, the Royal North West Mounted Police, western Canada might well have become the northwestern United States.

        Only the unimpeachable integrity and scrupulous fairness of early officers kept Canada from descending into the lawlessness of the American “wild west.” It headed off “Indian wars” before they happened. It made the Klondike Gold Rush the most law-abiding gold rush in history.

Canada’s self-image as a nation of peacekeepers, as a people whose ideal is “peace, order, and good government,” results largely from 150 years of the RCMP.

        Inevitably, there have been occasional rotten apples in the barrel. Now, it seems, a few reached the top, and contaminated the entire institution.

        The lesson for all of us is to recognize how easily bureaucracies can be subverted. It doesn’t require a massive conspiracy. It may not even require evil intent. Indeed, the more efficiently a bureaucracy subdivides massive tasks into manageable parts, the more likely that the individuals will focus only on the narrow task at hand and avoid the larger perspective.

        A century ago, Max Weber recognized that risk. As organizations “reduce every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine,” he wrote, the worker, “seeing himself in this light, will merely ask how to transform himself into a bigger cog.”

        Bureaucracies are everywhere. Bureaucracies are inevitable. They were created for a purpose, to provide a necessary service.

        The bigger the bureaucracy, the more impersonal it becomes, and the more likely its members are to lose sight of that purpose.

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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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