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A friend recently regaled me with the story of her latest encounter with the system. She went to settle the bill after a trip to the dentist, only to discover Phoenix had cancelled her coverage. The people in the dentist’s office were unfazed — the cancellation of insurance is a new way Phoenix is screwing people over, but it has already become quite common.

The insurance company advised my friend that for help she had to contact Phoenix, the equivalent of descent into the nine circles of bureaucratic hell.

“When you call, you reach a call centre of people who can’t help you — human answering machines. How does that make any sense?” she wailed. “The people you call don’t have any access to your file, they can’t change anything. All they can do is create a ‘ticket’ so that apparently one of the magical little elves will someday look at your file and decide to fix it.”

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

There’s no secret why no one can help — as public services minister Carla Qualtrough revealed last month, the unresolved pay problems faced by federal civil servants have reached 520,000, with pay corrections taking more than three months on average (the number has since risen to 589,000 according to the government’s own website, suggesting things are getting worse, not better).

My friend is typical in that she has four other complaints pending, including that someone who is not her husband is listed as her beneficiary if she dies, and the issuance of pay stubs that suggest she has paid thousands less in taxes — and has been paid thousands more in net pay — than is the case.