September 1975. I was in Ottawa, working as an assistant to the then-minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board when I took a phone call from an irate Saskatchewan farm woman.
Her husband had gone to the elevator that morning to take out a much-needed cash advance. The forms weren’t in yet.
She was crying on the phone, taking out on me her stress, her anger and no doubt her fear.
“How would you like it if you needed your paycheque and someone from the government told you you couldn’t have it,” she asked. I could do nothing but listen.
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Off the phone, I found out what had happened: there was a rule in the federal government in those days that nothing could be released to the public until it was available in both official languages. The French version of the cash advance forms weren’t ready yet.
Bureaucracy. I remember, a few years ago, phoning a provincial government office for a form that I needed with a fair degree of urgency. It would take about two weeks to get it to me, I was told.
Why, I asked. Well, it had to be requisitioned, then someone had to locate it and put it into the departmental mail to be picked up and sorted and put into Canada Post.
I was furious. I phoned the office of the minister responsible. I had my form in a couple of days and I bet there is a bureaucrat somewhere who was furious with me.
Then came AIDA.
Labor Day long weekend. Phone call from the AIDA office for hubby.
I would have him inside in half an hour, she would phone back. No, there was no need to take a phone number, the 1-800 number wasn’t in operation on Saturday, but she would phone back.
As directed, hubby was in, twitched in vain for almost an hour and left again. I tried to get a number but government operators don’t work on weekends.
First thing Tuesday morning, I got the number and called, sat for 10 minutes listening to a message about how my call was important, then got through to a nice voice that told me the person I needed to talk to was in training.
I wrested a non-1-800 number from the voice and said I would call back. Did. Got a voice message. Left a number and a semi-irate message. Got a phone call the next morning. No apology, no acknowledgement that maybe she should have called back, just a recitation of the information she needed from three years ago.
Farmers and those groups that represent them are always talking about “educating the public.”
Maybe we should start with the bureaucrats who are supposed to be serving us.
