OTTAWA — A partisan government advertising campaign paid for by taxpayers raised alarms from the outset among senior public servants who serve Prime Minister Stephen Harper, The Canadian Press has learned.
The Privy Council Office, the non-partisan bureaucratic arm of the Prime Minister's Office, has never been comfortable administering the website for the Economic Action Plan - and informed Harper of its misgivings at the time of last January's federal budget.
Those misgivings were heard, but overruled.
While the story is being denied by both PCO and PMO, the extraordinary claim originates from several sources within the famously discreet Privy Council Office.
The fact the story is being aired at all - even under the cloak of anonymity - suggests just how far the Conservatives are stretching the traditional boundaries of partisan behaviour in Canada's professional bureaucracy.
For the record, a PCO spokeswoman said there has never been any disagreement.
"At no point did PCO raise any objections to developing the site," Myriam Massabki said in an email.
"Website development is consistent with PCO's role in co-ordinating the implementation of the government's agenda."
Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for the prime minister, said the story was "entirely false."
"The site is legitimate and appropriate and we reject that characterization entirely."
The actionplan.gc.ca website, linked to by a massive advertising campaign that has cost at least $34 million, has been widely criticized as an exercise in Conservative propaganda on the taxpayers' dime.
In interviews with past and present government insiders, The Canadian Press was told the Tories are trampling the admittedly grey area between partisanship and policy.
More than one career bureaucrat said they've never seen anything so blatant as the current use of the office for self-promotion.
None would speak on the record, some for fear of reprisals, but many said it is a story that needs to be told.
"You have a political party that is not constrained by what conventionally would be perceived as overtly partisan actions," said one former insider.
"I can tell you every funding program across the government is being politicized," said another public servant.
"They do it for their own needs and they don't do it to help people. Welcome to Stephen Harper's world."
The Privy Council Office doesn't even have a line item accounting for the cost of development of the economic action plan website. The $2-million budget went to Finance, but PCO developed the website with frequent input from the PMO.
"Expecting public servants to manage government communications that has a partisan spin to it is a misuse of public power," Peter Aucoin, a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University, said in an interview.
There has always been a healthy tension between PCO and PMO. The bureaucrats provide policy advice with political implications, while the PMO provides political direction with policy implications.
Aucoin, a retired professor of public administration who has extensively researched government advertising practices, said governments of all stripes in Canada have nudged their bureaucrats into partisan behaviour.
"But this (current ad campaign) is ratcheted up to a scale beyond, and you can see why the PCO is uncomfortable with it," said Aucoin.
"It's so blatantly obvious. If this isn't partisan advertising then nothing is."
Dropping such a campaign in the lap of PCO is doubly perplexing, because the Privy Council Office is mandated to oversee all government advertising to ensure it conforms with existing rules, including non-partisanship.
Others point to Harper's appointment of an assistant deputy minister, Malcolm Brown, to last summer's intensely partisan Employment Insurance working group as an abuse of the bureaucracy.
The message, said Liberal MP and panel member Mike Savage, was clear for all public servants: You're on the Conservative team.
"I think it set a bad tone for the working group and our interaction with other (public service) officials," said Savage.
"It was a negotiating process. I don't really think it's the duty of the public service to negotiate in that way."
But the Tories reject the characterization.
"The public service of Canada prides itself on being non-partisan," said Soudas.
"And under this government we also pride ourselves on the fact the public service does a good job and does so in a non-partisan way."
Not all observers lay the blame on the Conservatives.
"This government is no worse than previous governments," said Donald Savoie, a professor of public administration at the University of Moncton and a leading author on government organization.
"It's doing what previous governments for the past 25 years have done - and that's to push the public service as far as they could to make it responsive to their political wishes. And that's the problem."
Savoie argues the demands of modern governance, including access-to-information pressures and a 24-hour news cycle, make politicians feel "vulnerable" and increase pressure on the public service to backstop elected officials.
"The public service is not in a position to speak truth to the media on this, because it's not allowed," he said.
"I don't think politicians want to speak truth to this, because it doesn't serve their interests."
That applies equally to Liberal and Conservative governments, in Savoie's opinion.
"Somebody's got to step up to the plate and say, 'Here is the role of the public service in the modern era. Here's what it can do. Here are the lines you don't cross, and so on.' It hasn't been done."
Others said the Harper government, under the direction of his former chief of staff Ian Brodie, was respectful of the traditional public service boundaries in the early years of the Conservative minority.
Kevin Lynch, the powerful former clerk of the Privy Council Office, used his retirement speech at a tribute dinner last month in Ottawa to praise Brodie for his "great understanding of the institutional roles and responsibilities of government and the public service."
He also referred to "the importance of building an effective and respectful working relationship between the new government and the public service."
Some suggest that respect for partisan lines has fallen away since Brodie departed for the private sector in the spring of 2008. Lynch stepped down as PCO clerk in June.
Harper's current chief of staff, Guy Giorno, earned such a reputation for partisan government advertising under former Conservative Ontario premier Mike Harris that the next provincial government brought in strict rules in 2004 to bar the practice.
Harper himself said all the right things when he paid a video tribute to Lynch at his retirement dinner.
"The Canadian public service has the admiration of the entire world," said the prime minister, "for its competence, its professionalism and its non-partisan devotion across our country and its people."
Aucoin contrasted those soothing words with Harper's outburst in the last weeks of the 2006 election campaign, when he warned that a Liberal-dominated judiciary and bureaucracy would thwart Conservative power.
"Stephen Harper came in (to office) saying that we had a Liberal civil service, and he said we would have one for some time - presumably meaning that at a certain point in time we'd have a Conservative civil service," said Aucoin. "That's all on the record."
"It's this perception that the civil service is there to be used."
During a recent address in Ottawa to departmental audit committees - groups made up of former senior civil servants - Aucoin referred to the politicization of the bureaucracy as "a form of political corruption."
Some of his listeners, he said, were shocked by his use of such a term and asked if that's really what he meant to say.
"I said yeah, it's a misuse of political authority," Aucoin recounted.
"It's not illegal, necessarily. But if we're going to talk about values and ethics - and we're not going to make them criminal - then there's got to be a sphere of behaviour that's inappropriate."
Regardless of the blame game, Savoie agrees.
"I think the time really has come for a fundamental look at the public service: The role of a professional, non-partisan public service."