Just fire Christiane Fox already | Opinion |
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Just fire Christiane Fox already | Opinion
Randall Denley: Justin Trudeau treated ethics violations like parking tickets that don't have to be paid. Mark Carney should set a better example.
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It’s time for Prime Minister Mark Carney to fire Christiane Fox before she becomes a stain on his own reputation.
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The deputy minister at the Department of National Defence broke a key ethics rule, offered a lame defence of her actions, and doesn’t seem to understand why helping an acquaintance get a job in her department is a problem.
Does that sound like the sort of person who should be heading a major federal department?
Carney has a reputation as a demanding boss with high expectations, someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. And yet, the PM has had nothing to say about the Christiane Fox problem.
It’s a bad look for a leader who wants to portray his version of the Liberal Party as “Canada’s new government.” On this matter, the new government looks a lot like the old government. Who can forget former PM Justin Trudeau’s historic accomplishment of being the first prime minister found to have an ethics violation, not once but twice.
Trudeau treated ethics violations like parking tickets that didn’t have to be paid. It would be a big mistake for Carney not to set a better example.
To briefly recap, Fox helped an acquaintance from university days, Bjorn Charles, get a job he wasn’t qualified for when she was the deputy minister at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
That action led to an investigation by ethics commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein, who concluded that “Fox used her position as deputy minister to give Mr. Charles preferential treatment, by ensuring he met with departmental officials quickly, seeking updates about his hiring, giving him internal information and pushing for a higher job classification.”
Von Finckenstein said, “Clearly, the true intent behind her interventions was to help Mr. Charles find new employment, and this occurred under her watch through the creation of a position in her department to fit Mr. Charles’s needs,” he said.
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This is not a nuanced situation or a conclusion that’s really open to debate, but Fox claimed that she was trying to add diversity to her department. Charles is a Black man. She further says that his job as a gym manager provided useful customer service experience.
At best, that would have been a clumsy way to improve diversity and could create the impression that Black public servants require special help to succeed. At the time Fox was the deputy at immigration, her department already 1,539 Black employees, 12.7 per cent of the total. Hiring Charles didn’t exactly break new ground.
Fox steered Charles into a job he wasn’t qualified for and in the end, did not succeed at — although he remains employed by the government in another department.
Fox’s pathetic refusal to admit a mistake compounded the problem. She just doesn’t get it, even now. Anyone can make an error in judgment, but the expectation is that they learn from it. The unwillingness to do so suggests that Fox isn’t quite the star that she was perceived to be when Carney made her deputy at defence just last December.
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Surely one would expect Fox to understand that merit, not favouritism, should dictate who gets hired in the public service. She had been a deputy minister since 2017 and even sat on a committee that reviewed ethics. If it’s OK for a deputy minister to ignore ethics rules, what kind of message does that send to people in the public service? Or to taxpayers, for that matter.
The timing isn’t exactly great. Carney promised to cap, not cut, the public service but now he’s reducing it by about 30,000 jobs. People who are losing their jobs surely wouldn’t want to see a minister giving an acquaintance special treatment.
Carney needs to make a rational evaluation of the situation. Are Christiane Fox’s merits, whatever they may be, sufficient for him to turn a blind eye to an ethics violation? It’s easy to talk about high standards, but the test is what a boss does when someone fails to meet them. So far, Carney is scoring a zero on that test.
Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist and author. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com
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