An "Anti-Social Agenda" - Harper Gag Orders Resisted by Public and Unions

Anti-Social Agenda of the Harper Government - Muzzling Dissent by Civil Service Professionals

by Jim Nugent - TML Daily

The Harper government is continuing its efforts to prevent civil service professionals in scientific, technical and other cultural fields from speaking out against the anti-social direction in which the Harperites are dragging the country.

The latest reports about the government imposing gag orders on civil service professionals involve Library and Archives Canada (LAC), a federal cultural institution operated by the Ministry of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages.

Management of LAC is currently holding information sessions to inform its archivists and librarians about the terms of the gag order being imposed on them under a new code of conduct which came into effect January 2013.

Employees are being warned that management has given itself the right to take punitive actions against employees over any public revelations about LAC's operations and policies. LAC professionals are banned from making comments to the media. Even revelations about LAC arising from personal emails or social media could result in disciplinary measures.

The code of conduct singles out various professional activities as posing a "high risk" of revealing information about LAC to the public. It imposes a series of restrictive criteria and requirements for written management approval of these activities whether carried out on or off the job. Activities listed as "high risk" include participation in conferences of archivists, librarians, historians or other academics, collaborations with other professional institutions and part-time or voluntary teaching.

The use of a code of conduct by the Harper government to gag the LAC professionals is part of a series of similar measures being put in place across the federal civil services. In April 2012 the government issued a ministerial decree requiring all federal departments to establish codes of conduct for employees like the one imposed by LAC.

This decree was issued at the same time that the government announced measures in the 2012 budget to cut 19,200 jobs across the civil service which is hollowing out the functioning of many government departments and leading to the elimination or privatization of many important government services. The government's order for new codes of conduct across the civil service with stiffer gag orders and punitive measures is to suppress civil service workers from speaking out against its aggressive, nation-wrecking and anti-social agenda.

By declaring their right to act as the professionals they are a matter of national security and declaring the exercise of their right to conscience illegal, Harper is making sure the intellectual and professional strata are rendered a disorganized powerless force. It is a very dangerous situation for Canada.


The codes of conduct changes are presumably intended to create a self-censorship chill among individual professionals to prevent them from speaking out as people with expertise in various fields where the government is causing damage to the public interest.

Only the unions of the civil service workers are left to speak out in defence of their rights in this situation and when the unions speak out the government then tries to marginalize them as speaking for "special interests." This means that nobody represents the public interest.

In the case of LAC, there is a lot for the Harper government to hide.

This important cultural institution is one of the areas of the civil service where devastating job cuts and wrecking by the Harper government are underway.

On April 30, LAC presented 450 workers with notices that their jobs would be affected by cuts and 215 positions were eliminated. These cuts were part of the first wave of more than 3,500 civil service job cuts that were made shortly after the 2012 budget.

The cuts to LAC announced last April included:

- the elimination of 21 of the 61 archivists and archival assistants that deal with non-governmental records;

- the reduction of digitization and circulation staff by 50 per cent;

- a significant reduction in the number of staff that deal with preservation and conservation of documents;

- the closure of the interlibrary loans unit;

- supports for provincial, regional and university archives across Canada;

- LAC will no longer manage archives for other ministries such as the Citizenship and Immigration Canada and Transport Canada archives which will result in their destruction.

"The cuts to jobs at Library and Archives Canada are an attack on one of Canada's most important cultural institutions. Staff at our national archives and library are the stewards of our collective memory. These cuts will further undermine the capacity of Library and Archives Canada to fulfill its legislated mandate to acquire, preserve and make accessible Canada's history," said a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of University Teachers, one of the unions representing LAC workers.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared he will turn the Museum of Civilization into the Museum of History. What kind of history does he have in mind when he is destroying Canada's collective memory and its custodians? It is a very serious question.