Common sense and the bureaucracy

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This article was published 25/08/2023 (937 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHEN Common Sense Fails

As a former politician and senior administrator, I always believed that people responded to facts. Facts are important, and I once felt that when the facts were established, common sense would prevail. At one time, I assumed that if people were faced with a problem, once the facts were known, you could count on them coming to a seemingly inevitable conclusion. Often the same conclusion I had come to, that is.

It turns out, that isn’t true. That doesn’t necessarily mean that my conclusion, come to after long moments of intense consideration, wasn’t the right conclusion. It means that the facts don’t matter sometimes.

If you have read the book Willful Blindness, you will know what I mean. We all do it. We all can conveniently miss what is staring us in the face. Willful blindness is a real thing. In government, it sometimes seems pervasive.

When combined with another shortcoming endemic in bureaucracies — inertia — problems can linger indefinitely. The less sympathetic among us may feel that the reason for the inertia may be the prospect of job loss or job disruption. These considerations may cloud understanding when people are faced with change in a bureaucracy. Over the years, I came to appreciate more acutely Upton Sinclair’s reminder that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I have an example that I think illustrates the point. This, let’s call it an experience, started about 1999 and involves high school students in work experience. Work experience, for the uninitiated, are programs where students, high school students in my case, go to local businesses and organizations to gain hands-on work experience at a workplace.

As a school superintendent at the time, every fall towards the end of September, I was asked to sign numerous official looking documents, filled out by dedicated teachers and dutifully signed by school principals. The department-mandated documents recorded which students were going to which workplaces and their schedules for that fall. It sounds rational, and for several years I signed the sheets deluding myself that my signature was an important part of the process.

One day, after diligently signing off on work experience forms, I began to wonder if all this paper work was really necessary. I had a dim recollection that many years earlier, an amendment to the Workers Compensation Act was made to include all students involved in work experience under the Workers Compensation Act. I began to wonder, out loud of all things, why so many people had to be involved in preparing documents to identify students, who by legislation, had automatically been included.

I called an administrator in the Department of Education and asked why, every year in September, and only September, busy teachers and school administrators were busy filling out forms that seem to be redundant. He confirmed that indeed all students in Manitoba were covered by workers compensation legislation. The decision, he told me, was made because of concerns some employers had with having young students at the worksite not covered by the WCB. That made sense. So far so good.

The difficulty came when I asked him what was the purpose of all the paper work served, if all students from certified educational institutions were covered automatically by legislation. Why couldn’t the department simply forward the list of enrolled students directly to the Workers Compensation Board?

Well, the administrator explained, most patiently, one had to keep track of the students. When I pointed out that school divisions only fill out such forms in September and that the department was missing many, many students who only signed up for courses that included work experience the following January of the school year, he hesitated for a moment.

I assured the administrator that I was only trying to reduce the paperwork for the department, teachers and administrators. I was glad that students were automatically covered and that business partners could participate knowing that they were not responsible for compensations issues should there be an unfortunate accident.

I asked the administrator if there had ever been a student injured after starting a work experience in the second semester, in January. He happily said, yes, that had happened. I asked if the student had been covered, even though he had not been registered in the September enrollment sheets for a work experience course, and he said, of course, they are covered by legislation!

So, I asked again why were teachers and principals and superintendents doing all this work when it was unnecessary. I had several conversations with others in the department about my frustration. Why couldn’t we stop doing something that seemed to me so clearly unnecessary. Why was all this paperwork required from busy people?

I also noted that there were department employees managing (some would say, shuffling) paper for this pointless endeavour. I told him that I assumed that the deputy minister could find more meaningful work for these departmental employees.

For the next several months, every time I ran into a department official, I would ask if we were still bothering teachers with what I deemed needless paper work. Usually my enquiry was met with an uncomfortable laugh.

One day, perhaps a year later, I got a call from the aforementioned administrator with the good news. Not that the paper-work pushing had stopped. Teacher and principals would still have to fill in the forms, but superintendents (hallelujah) would no longer have to sign the forms.

What a victory.

The administrator seemed delighted with his solution. He seemed to think that my concern was about my negligible contribution in signing stuff, as opposed to the more real paperwork work being done at the school level at the busiest time of the year. Not to mention the lunacy of having someone at the department tasked with gathering and filing all that “important” information.

My last attempt to stop the insanity ended about 10 years after my first exchange with said bureaucrat. I called a school principal to see if teachers were still preparing and signing these meaningless forms.

Sadly, they still were.

And as far as I know, the madness continues.

Jerry Storie is a former provincial cabinet minister, school superintendent, and Dean of Education and Associate Professor at Brandon University.