Western Producer staff
Raymond Protti, we hardly knew you. Twenty-two months into his tenure as the top dog at Agriculture Canada and more than two decades into his career in the federal civil service, Protti has decided to move on.
In June, he becomes the president of the Canadian Bankers’ Association, promoting the interests and defending the practices and profits of Canada’s billionaire business club.
What legacy does he leave, this 50-year-old Alberta native with a reputation in Ottawa as a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat?
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Well, he presided during some of the most dramatic upheavals in Canadian agricultural policies – the end of the Crow rate grain subsidy, the announced end of the dairy subsidy, dramatic cuts in the department’s budget, thousands of employees to be cut from departmental payrolls, a move toward deregulation and privatization that has left Liberals of the Eugene Whelan vintage shaking their heads in wonderment at the blurring of lines between Tory, Reform and Liberal.
Yet curiously, none of these dramatic developments really has Protti’s public stamp on them.
He played the role of the almost-faceless bureaucrat, implementing policies rather than really taking part in their creation. That, of course, is the classic description of how a civil servant should act, being heard in private and only seen in public.
But in the real world of Ottawa these days, deputy ministers more often than not are activist players in policy formulation, on a mission to make their departments conform to their view of what is needed (and occasionally what is wanted) by the department’s “clients.”
No one involved in the financial industry doubts what the deputy minister of finance thinks about tax reform, or what the deputy minister of transport thinks about deregulation and privatization, or the deputy minister of Indian affairs thinks about land-claims settlements.
But what, other than to reinforce government policy, does the deputy minister of agriculture think about the burning agricultural issues of the day?
Government insiders suggest he did not arrive at the Sir John Carling building with an agenda. Outsiders from the industry who have dealt with him suggest he can carry his end of a conversation about process but becomes more of a listener when the topic turns to content.
Watching Protti work a crowd at a gathering of farmers is a bit like watching American lawyer and National Hockey League president Gary Bettman attend a hockey game – he is seen watching the action, even if he isn’t emotionally attached to the game or even all that clear on the subtleties that give life to the traditions and the rules.
The “Protti years” in agriculture have been some of the most tumultuous ever.
When he leaves, it is unlikely that many will identify him with the changes.
He leaves agriculture, as he came to it, mainly identified as Canada’s former chief spy master, who headed the Canadian Intelligence Security Service before being assigned to a job he later called “one of the most complicated and difficult jobs for a deputy minister in Ottawa.”
Raymond, we hardly knew you.
