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Unauthorized reproduction: Photos were not allowed in the "Cut and Paste" show at the Modern Art Museum in Edinburg, but I took this anyway. In pre-Reich Germany, freedom of expression was a thing, so artists made satirical images of Hitler to no avail.

On Monday I told my team I was leaving the Ontario Public Service. In rapid order, an invitation to my "I'm NOT Retiring" party went out. When my boss received hers she remembered to release the announcement I'd written for her.

So it's official. I spent the week booking lunches and coffee dates with people I want to see one more time before I leave.

Has anything changed since I announced? 

Yes.

People are interrogating me about my travel plans. And people who have almost never had anything to do with me are inviting me to their meetings and dropping by my office. 

The celebrity of impending scarcity, I guess.  

Thanks for reading!

39 days left!

Karen



  

Your Tax Dollars At Work - Office Edition

The sign says "Bicycles attached to this post will be removed at owner's expense."

The running joke at the office is the biggest burden we have these days is the government's efforts to reduce burden. 

Just about every week I receive an e-mail from a Director in a ministry I normally have nothing to do with telling me I can look forward to a series of weekly two-hour meetings to discuss improving customer service or easing business' path through our regulatory requirements. 

When I get one of these e-mails, I or one of my team will attend the first meeting to persuade them to leave us alone. This should be but isn't always easy to do. 

It should be easy because the Ministry of Energy doesn't generate red tape. No one in the ministry directly serves the public or business, so there's nothing to streamline there. The ministry doesn't build anything so there's no opportunity to economize. 99.8% of the ministry's budget is the subsidies on people's hydro bills. You can see the government's dilemma there: they've save money and lose votes.

This week's effort to squeeze Energy's square peg into a round hole was the government's announcement of a new unsolicited proposal framework. It includes energy projects, which is preposterous because the Ministry doesn't approve energy projects. The Ontario Energy Board has that job.

I set up a call with the ministry in charge. Our conversation went this way:

"You could have talked to us, you know," we said.

"It's not our fault," they replied.

By the end of the call the other ministry was 99% persuaded that energy projects should not be included. 90% of my effort next week will be directed at making up that last 1%.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen













  

Thanksgiving

Pretty Edinburgh street on the way to the Museum of Modern Art

As the insanity in the US picks up torque, as the federal election steadily accelerates toward the finish line and as the days grow shorter and colder, I feel most like hunkering down and covering my head.

I suppose it is a function of my increased age that I can't help but think that none of this (except the daylight thing) will end well.

An invitation to have sex on a bike in Edinburgh

The focal point of this weekend - the launch of the overeating season that runs from Thanksgiving to Easter - is, of course, food. I have company today and tomorrow, and Monday we're out for a fine meal at the Old Mill with Bruce's family. Then we'll stuff ourselves until the next equinox.

Pretty chicken fat pattern on the stock from boiled bones

The return of the cold weather means I can pre-cook evening meals on the weekend. I'll make soup or stew or a giant mass of pasta, portion it into Ziplock containers and put it in the fridge. During the week, just before I get home around 6:45, Bruce will reheat one of the containers and make a salad, so supper's ready when I come in the door.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen

Templates

By The Meadows, the massive green space next to the University of Edinburgh.

For outsiders looking in, the hallmark of the Doug Ford government is - with a few exceptions - the announcement of an unpopular measure followed by a hasty retreat from same.

For us insiders, the hallmark of the ambitions of the current crew in Queens Park is the multi-ministry working group. 

For red tape reduction, for real estate rationalization, for economic and transit development, all of which initiatives on their own are vast and complex, these are now given even more drama with ridiculous deadlines and murky objectives, and all stick-handled by giant working groups populated by every imaginable ministry.

In aid of these sprawling processes are templates. I have never met a bureaucrat that could not put together a  template so indecipherable that it might just as well have been made by aliens. I have also never met a bureaucrat that can properly fill one out.

If the space in a template allows for four words, the average bureaucrat will enter forty, but they'll make the font really tiny as a small concession to the form. If the template asks for one particular kind of project, the average bureaucrat will expend all effort on finding a way to get their project in whether it was asked for or not - and especially if it was not.

Forty-page templates requiring a week to complete are sent to bureaucrats a day before they are due, accompanied by stern warnings that the bureaucrat will need to not only complete their work in one day, but go through three levels of approvals as well.

In a classic "I must work for government" meeting - convened at 4:00 p.m. on Friday - I sat through a discussion of the "high level" outcome of a multi-ministry template-filling frenzy.

"High level" can mean a lot of things. For bureaucrats it means taking a concept such as "2 + 2 = 4" and turning it into "there was general support for addition."

So, late on Friday, I witnessed three colleagues deliver an unintelligible, high level distillation of the random multi-ministry content of their indecipherable templates. 

The crescendo came when another bureaucrat asked whether it was an option that none of this gibberish be used.

Yes, said the bureaucrat leading the discussion, it is an option that nothing will come of this.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen