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The case of the three bumbling bureaucrats who buggered up the federal payroll system, costing the Treasury a billion dollars or so and keeping tens of thousands of fellow civil servants from receiving their regular paycheques, carries a special resonance in Ontario, where their provincial cousins are feeling unusually vulnerable.

Vulnerability is not a sensation familiar to those employed by the government. One of the key aspects of the paycheque affair — the one that burns less favoured workers across the country — is the fact that the three guilty parties can’t be fired. They can’t even be named, lest someone actually criticizes them for their ineptitude and hurts their feelings.

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We’re told that two of the three — all in relatively senior positions — have been reassigned. One retired. We don’t know what they’ve been reassigned to — cleaning the restrooms in the Langevin Block might be a good start — but we do know they remain protected within the vast coddling arms of the public service. They didn’t get their performance bonuses, poor fellows, though there’s always the chance they can make up for it if they do a better job on their next assignments. Actually, check that — the bar for bonuses is evidently set so low they appear to be all but automatic for anyone who doesn’t comprehensively mishandle a job as badly as they did theirs.