Why shouldn’t the NDP choose its own friends? THE SKY is not falling, even if the New Democratic government has made a few patronage appointments and plans four thousand more of them. Yes, there are appointments that stick in the taxpayers’ craw. One brand new job was created for an ardent party man who will decide upon the suitability — for which we may read political cor- rectness — of all candidates for patronage jobs. His pay will be just a bit less than the premier’s. A new position was created for another party spear-carrier who is going to study the future of hydro in B.C. We already pay a commission to do that, and there is a cabinet minister who is also responsible for hydro’s directions. Paul St. Pierre ! PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES We're well rid of them. Who wants bridges built by engineers whose qualification is buying 44 ...foremen on a culvert repair crew in Nova Scotia changed each time the party in power changed. 99 Oh well, now more. We can hope that he will pocket his pay quietly and not work or, if he does become active, that he will be one of those government ad- visers who are consulted but not listened to. Maybe this sort of clumsy politicking indicates that Premier Harcourt has forgotten that two out of three voters in this province didn’t want him. Maybe in 1996 some outraged citizenry will still be able to temember who was appointed to what this year. Maybe some of them can hold their breath until 1996, and maybe Mr. Harcourt will pose naked for the fire department’s calendar. [ don’t think so. Patronage has a long history, and it isn’t all dishonorable. It is going to continue, and so it should. As for the expense of a few silly appointments, consider how much money the previous government gave to buggy-whip manufactur- ers. In the early days of this coun- try, all government jobs were patronage appointments. Even within my lifetime, foremen on a culvert repair crew in Nova Scotia changed each time the party in power changed. It was a patronage job, like multitudes of other little jobs. A Down East postmaster who hung on through three successive changes of government said, ‘No government can change faster than I can.” But it wasn’t always funny. Those were wretched customs. votes in beer parlors? We made the big change by removing almost all civil service jobs from political control and dispensing them by public com- petition. Merit alone would decide. The Chinese had devised the system a couple of thousand years before us, but, no matter, we managed it, creating a system free of all political influence and guar- anteed to bring the best and brightest into the civil service. it hasn't worked out exactly as planned. Canada’s best and brightest, it turns out, almost all live in Ot- tawa, Victoria and other capital cities, in every one of which there are families that have now had four and five generations on the government payroll, By the second or third genera- tion, if not in the first, they have fost all contact with the reality of private business. They don’t know much about the tough and cruel ways of politics either, and do not care. The federal civil servants have the mightiest union this nation has ever seen. They have almost com- plete job security. They will retire to pensions fully indexed to inflation rates, a gift from the taxpayers so munificent that the day may well come that it brings about the final economic collapse of the nation. As for those highly praised competitions, they are often less than meets the eye, some being announced after the successful candidate has been chosen. Then the competition is a mere tiresome formality. Somehow or other, the civil servant's nephew will win. In this province, outsiders who have tried to enter our civil service have discovered, after making good scores in competitions, that people applying from within the civil service start with 15 bonus points, presumably for proving they aren't dead. When poiiticians make ap- pointments, they are public. Those arranged by civil servants for their own favorites are almost always secret. How do you like it, public or secret? The NDP government could be faulted for inventing jobs to pro- vide rewards for political hacks. But those cases are few. Most of the patronage ap- pointments are for work we have long believed needs doing. Why shouldn't the government choose political friends to do it? By our system, imperfect as it may be, the people of British Columbia chose a party that said it had a new direction for this province. 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