The leader in your mirror
Part 2: For a return of responsibility to our public life
This is the second part of a two-part essay about the things this election won’t solve. The first instalment is here.
1. Too busy to think
Over dinner last year, an acquaintance in the middle ranks of the public service told me he routinely ends the day with 400 unanswered emails, newly arrived that day, in his inbox. This is absolutely routine. Everybody with a government job has stories like this.
It’s amazing what you can miss in that kind of blizzard. After a Canadian diplomat attended a garden party at the Russian embassy shortly after Putin invaded Ukraine, it was revealed that emails discussing the visit had been sent, in advance, to the foreign minister’s chief of staff and to the deputy minister. Most people in Ottawa read the story as, “Why did these top officials not stop the diplomat from attending the party?” I read it differently: Why in heaven’s name were questions about an afternoon’s social arrangements clogging the inbox of the DM and the minister’s chief of staff?
It is a rhetorical question. Questions about everything clog everyone’s inbox. This is because in Ottawa in the last decade, no one person makes any decision. When faced with a decision, a typical Ottawa person will MIRV into dozens of people on the same email chain, “touching base” and “looping in” and “tweaking the wording” and “how about this”-ing until they all leave the office (or, more recently, until they clamshell their laptops at home) with 400 unanswered emails in their inboxes.