David Stonehouse News

End monopoly over federal jobs, MP urges

Ottawa resumes favoured

By David Stonehouse

A Liberal MP is pressing his own government to abandon a policy that rejects applications for the bulk of civil service jobs if the applicant does not live in Ottawa-Hull.

New Brunswick backbencher Charles Hubbard says the Public Service Commission policy is unfair because it shuts out job seekers from across the country.

"Really, 29 million Canadians have not been able to apply for jobs in the capital of our country," he said.

"There are a few jobs that they do advertise across the country, but for most jobs -- especially entry-level jobs -- most Canadians have been shut out, for probably 15 years," he says.

The federal government is poised to launch a major hiring campaign to fill thousands of positions that will come open with a wave of looming retirements.

"There has to be some public awareness and how unfair it is to the majority of Canadians," says Mr. Hubbard, who represents the riding of Miramichi. "I returned a call to a lady in my constituency [recently] and she said 'How could I apply for a federal job?' I said, 'It's darn hard. You don't see them advertised because they are not available to
you.' "

The policy was instituted to minimize the cost and work involved in filling jobs.

"We have one of the most concentrated federal bureaucracies in the world. In the U.S., 10% of the civil servants work in Washington. It's approaching 40% of the civil servants in Canada that work and live right here in Ottawa," he said in an interview from his Parliament Hill office.

"Is it fair to have people controlling this country bureaucratically who have never lived in Victoria, who know nothing about Edmonton, who know nothing about Shediac, New Brunswick, or Yarmouth, Nova Scotia?"

His comments come on the heels of a recent report revealing widespread " bureaucratic patronage" in the civil service -- back-door hiring by civil servants who hire people they know.

John Fryer, the head of a commission that examined labour management relations in the public service, said the trend is turning the bureaucracy into a "closed shop."

He added that people outside Ottawa, prohibited from applying for positions, "won't even have a whiff of these jobs unless they know someone."

Mr. Fryer's commission heard complaints that the only way to obtain a job with the public service is to know a manager and be willing to accept a contract or part-time job, giving the person hired an inside track on full-time work.

Mr. Hubbard's colleagues in the Atlantic Liberal caucus are also pushing to have federal jobs moved out of the capital, asking for a greater civil service presence in their own region.

Caucus chairman Dominic LeBlanc did not return phone calls but told a New Brunswick newspaper the group is pressuring the government to transfer more jobs out of Ottawa to the region.

"We want to continue to decentralize as much as possible," said Mr. LeBlanc, who represents the New Brunswick constituency of Beausejour-Petitcodiac. New Brunswick landed hundreds of federal jobs when the government opened the federal gun registry in Miramichi three years ago.