“Under the Harper government, one of the main challenges for the public service was having its knowledge and expertise put into question.” Andrew Griffith former director-general with Citizenship and Immigration

Prime Minister Stephen Harper once said he could write a book on what he had learned about the often-tense relationship between politicians and public servants.

“Probably the most difficult job, you know, practical difficult thing you have to learn as a prime minister and ministers, our ministers as well, is dealing with the federal bureaucracy,” Harper told the CBC’s Rex Murphy in 2007, about a year after taking office.

“It’s walking that fine line of, of being a positive leader of the federal public service, but at the same time pushing them and not becoming captive to them . . . I could write a book on that one.”

Harper, of course, has chosen to first write a book about hockey, which is due out in November.

So it will be Andrew Griffith, a former director-general with Citizenship and Immigration, who comes out first with the book that promises to give us some rare insights into how Harper’s government has been getting along (or not) with the public service.

Like hockey, there seems to have been a fair bit of fighting in the corners, as well as some serious competition about goals.

Griffith put a sneak peek of his book in the June issue of Optimum Online, a website of the Journal of Public Sector Management.

After leaving the public service for medical reasons, Griffith has already written one book about his battle with cancer and he plans to release this new book in the fall.

Several people sent the 1,700-word piece in Optimum Online to me after I wrote last week on the state of multiculturalism in this government.

It’s titled: “Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism” and it deserves a wider view, if only because it confirms what so many of us in Ottawa have been hearing, anecdotally, about the dispirited state of the public service in a hyper-partisan government.

“Under the Harper government, one of the main challenges for the public service was having its knowledge and expertise put into question,” Griffith writes.

As he recounts, it seems that things got really tense around the new citizenship guide, called Discover Canada, released with much fanfare by the government in 2009.

The “more conservative viewpoint on Canada, emphasizing history, the military, the monarchy, with more muscular language on Canadian values, challenged public servants who had grown up with a narrative more focused on contemporary Canada, social rather than military history, and the Charter (of Rights and Freedoms),” Griffith writes.

And with all this talk of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney being the star climber in this government, Griffith’s brief piece also shows what it takes for a minister to earn that status these days.

Kenney has been in charge of multiculturalism since day one of the Harper government, and has made little secret of his goal to fuse his cabinet responsibilities with the political job of building the Conservative base.

Kenney, for instance, apparently told his officials that his political insights counted as much, if not more, than standard research and surveys. Griffith describes this tension as a challenge that needed to be overcome by the public servants — many of whom greeted the work-culture change with classic stages of grief: anger, sadness, denial and, finally, acceptance.

“Officials relied excessively on large-scale surveys, similar research and existing stakeholders that did not take into account and, discounted input from, the minister’s extensive outreach to the various ethnic communities,” he writes.

“In particular, ministerial interaction with a wide range of communities provided more granular insight into issues particular to communities than many surveys and research on overall trends. While anecdotal in nature, the scale of ministerial outreach meant that public servants could not ignore what he was hearing from his ‘practicum,’ as he called it.”

On what kind of issues did Kenney claim better insights? Griffith, without getting specific, calls them subjects related to “integrity and participation” of various cultural communities.

Griffith also notes that Kenney and the public service had different attitudes toward risk — while the public service was thinking in the long term, the minister was focused on the short-term, political calendar.

Among those of us who watch politics, especially as cabinet shuffles loom, there’s a tendency to judge ministers by their public performances.

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But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of ministers’ jobs. If we want to know why Kenney has managed to become one of Harper’s top ministers, we should probably take a close look at what Griffith is telling us about how things unfolded in terms of citizenship and multiculturalism.

A big dose of politics into the public-service culture seems to be part of the recipe for Kenney’s success.

Is the same true for other ministers or the prime minister himself? For that story, we may have to wait for that next Harper book.

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