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