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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
The poet Thomas Gray certainly did not have civil servants in mind when he penned the lines:
Nevertheless, his words seem to be a most fitting epitaph for those public servants who lived between 1840 and 1867 in the United Canadas. Our historians and sculptors have rescued most of our leading politicians from oblivion, but a great web of silence has been woven around the personalities and labours of our bureaucrats. It will be argued in this paper that this silence is quite unjustified. It will be argued further that this neglect of the civil service by our historians has resulted in the presentation of an incomplete picture of the attainment of responsible government in Canada. A third set of observations deals with the shadowy area dividing administration from politics, that is, dividing the ministerial head from his highest permanent advisers. Obviously this selection of topics is not designed to provide a comprehensive and complete survey of the state of our public services before Confederation. What follows is, rather, a series of impressions, deliberately undocumented, which are advanced as a basis for subsequent discussion.
This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Quebec, on June 5, 1952.
1 The present ratio of federal civil servants is roughly one official for every one hundred citizens.
2 Lower, A. R. M., Colony to Nation (Toronto, 1946), 291.Google Scholar “With the formation of the Liberal-Conservative ministry of 1854 the local autonomy of the province of Canada passed out of the experimental stage. Government became visibly more efficient. New departments such as Agriculture were established and men of high calibre found employment in the Civil Service.”