There is nothing surprising in this story of an employee of the CISSS de la Montérégie-Est being suspended for stealing a toast peanut butter for residents of the CHSLD du Chevalier-De Lévis, nothing.
Shortly after the scoop absurd of Montreal Journal (And the one of The Press concerning a “theft” of a slice of pizza), the whole Nation pinched itself: are we dreaming or what?
Well no. We don’t dream.
This is the kind of nightmarish situation that a bureaucracy ends up producing, as the number of small-box forms proliferates.
A few days before this matter broke, I read the Québec Ombudsman’s annual report1a small compendium of absurd bureaucratic delusions.
I want to talk to you about a bus ticket.
In October 2021, a guy is in prison. Under a ministerial decree, COVID-19 obliges, certain detainees can be released, if they are not dangerous. The type is eligible for it. He can be freed.
Small problem: the prison is 700 km from his home…
No worries, the bureaucracy has a little box for this kind of situation: the cost of interregional bus transportation ($100, in this case) is covered by the prison.
Except that…
Except the guy still has to go to the bus station to get on said $100 state-paid coach. From the prison to the terminus, you have to take public transport: $3.50.
But the guy doesn’t have that $3.50: he’s in jail.
You see me coming, huh…
The prison refused to pay the $3.50 ticket!
Why ?
The boss of the prison consulted the “Provincial Instruction on Releases” (yes, it’s a thing that exists, the “Provincial Instruction on Releases”). Their interpretation: the public transport ticket to the bus station, you only have to pay for it at the end of the inmate’s sentence.
And not as part of a permission to go outwhich is the status of this detainee, as of October 25, 2021, under the health emergency.
Decision of boss from prison: we don’t pay for it, your ticket at $3.50. Stay inside, man!
Wait, it’s not over, this trip to Absurdistan.
I let the Québec Ombudsman tell the rest:
“Rather than adopt the simplest solution, and therefore pay the cost of public transportation ($3.50), the establishment in question approached the detention center in the region where found the citizen’s residence with a view to transferring him there by police van, escorted by two officers. As this establishment was located at a certain distance from the establishment of departure, the man had, on the way, to stay in another detention establishment which was, at the same time, in the midst of an outbreak of COVID-19. In addition, the first establishment indicated that a temporary absence granted in one establishment could not be applied by another establishment. Following this reasoning, a new analysis of the case of the citizen by the establishment of his region was necessary. At the end of this study of his file, the management of this establishment could finally authorize his release under the terms of the ministerial decree. »
I’m not making this up, it’s all on page 95.
Paying for a simple $3.50 bus ticket would have avoided seven days of gossip and countless bureaucratic negotiations. It would also have avoided an unspecified cost to the public purse: the guy ended up being transported to his region by police van, with prison guards! Imagine the cost of gasoline, the salary of the guards, probably per diem…
I quote the Québec Ombudsman: “There is no doubt that it would have been more advantageous to proceed otherwise, both for the citizen and for the correctional services…”
The Public Protector’s report is full of similar cases that affect all ministries, where bureaucracy bogs down in the comfortable perimeter of small boxes – as airtight as the prison of Guantánamo – rather than saving time and money by paying the metaphorical $3.50 bus ticket.
We will say that it is specific to Quebec. Maybe. I don’t know if the bureaucratic machine in Quebec is less flexible than that of Saskatchewan or Wisconsin. I suspect that it is the nature of any bureaucracy to produce stupidity at the best of times and inhumanity at the worst…
I was talking recently with a doctor I know who had syncope with this story of toast. He’s there, at the front, at the hospital, and he’s already suggested that management pay for the ER warriors’ snacks, like donuts and toast…
“Nice idea, replied the management, but we can’t.
– Why ?
“That would put us in competition with the company that runs the hospital cafeteria. »
Politics may have the finest ambitions in the world, but it’s not politics that leads, it’s bureaucracy. The machine, its small boxes and the thousands of people paid not to see beyond these small boxes.
Christian Dubé, for example, wants the health network to become “an employer of choice”. We wish it! But “the” health network doesn’t exist: there are dozens of networks, hundreds of managers, thousands of regulations, tens of thousands of procedures codified in millions of little boxes…
In the end, this bureaucracy produces inhumanity, it is inevitable.
It produces employees suspended for having eaten a toast with peanut butter, employees suspended for having balked at the boss in private discussions2 and depressed employees who are harassed by the attendance management consultant (that’s a real title) of the Health Unit (it does exist) to be asked repeatedly: “When are you coming back? Do you take your pills? »
It is this machine that leads the state, and not the other way around. It is this machine that imposes its own logic, a machine in which there is nothing illogical about hanging dangerous food eaters. toast with pinotte butter on the job.
Where, boss, inhumanity? I can not see, bossthere is a toast with pinotte butter that hides my sight.