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Published in Literary Review of Canada , June, 1994
Chapter Four
The centrality of public servants in the Canadian fabric is another aspect of the Canadian Hegel craze. For if Marx was the prophet of the proletariat, Hegel is the prophet of what Alvin Gouldner called, the New Class. This is the class of education and government employment; the class in which language and thought, as opposed to the market principle, dominate.
Canadian intellectuals enjoy an intense association with the state unmatched in the United States, and-at least since Thatcher-in Britain as well. Pierre Trudeau, after all, was a professor of constitutional law. Because of the close relationship of the Canadian state with culture, even some of our greatest artists have doubled as bureaucrats. I do not think it entirely irrelevant that Canadian expatriate John Kenneth Galbraith (1992: 70) may be the only voice in the United States pitched against the dominant trend to denigrate government bureaucrats, especially those who-as he writes in The Culture of Contentment-work "in the departments of government concerned with regulatory activity, tax collection and especially with welfare services."
George Grant marked it as one of Diefenbaker's major failings that he misunderstood and quarelled with the Canadian public service, and even went so far as to place a corporate head in charge of remodelling the Ottawa bureaucracy. As Lawrence Martin makes clear, one of the most damaging aspects of the Mulroney years was the critical blows directed by the Tories against the Ottawa bureaucracy. These have accelerated during the Kim Campbell interregnum, with the abrupt termination of almost 20 percent of the top rung of the public service, under the direction of convicted drunk driver, super minister Bernard Valcourt. With loud applause from editorialists and press pundits, the firings have been carried out in the cruellest manner possible, and without the due process promised under the Public Service Act. The hysterical Tory scorched earth policy in Ottawa is perhaps the best indicator that the neoconservative era has now ended.
Hegel was a New Class figure himself-as was Marx, of course. Yet unlike Marx, who fled Germany for the freedom of England's civil society, Hegel remained an academic, making the inevitable compromises that are part of the life of a tenured professor. These compromises bought him time to create the most profound theoretical system we have; and also help explain his favourable reception in this nation of compromises, our own Canada. |
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