Nothing says prosperity like building a bigger bureaucracy - just ask George Orwell

Canada needs more journalists able to see the obvious and question it

Eric Arthur Blair - pen name George Orwell - at work at the BBC

Eighty-three years ago this week, on June 10, 1942, George Orwell made an entry in his diary that has left me stirred, shaken, and then stirred again.

I was looking for a quote in his four-volume collected Essays, Journalism and Letters to the effect that the Left – Orwell self-identifying as a man of the Left – must always tell lies because it has such scant history to call upon in support of its arguments.

The exact words, alas, eluded me, possibly because some light-fingered bibliophile in my house has made off with Volume Three of the four volumes, which is almost certainly where the quote would be found. Such, such is the luck.

As luck would also have it, though, the entry I came across was far more beneficial to me than a handy squelcher about partisan intellectual dishonesty. It confirmed my own long-held belief – Orwell would have rolled his eyes at my self-confirmation of my own idea – about how much is lost by remembering him merely as an eponymous prophet of the totalitarian surveillance state.

The 1984ing (and to a lesser extent Animal Farming) of Orwell obscures the recognition that he was one of the great journalists of the past 100 years. More, he achieved that status less for his opinions than for his extraordinary powers of observation. Anyone eager to test that claim can start by reading Revenge is Sour in which he transforms a few hours spent with a Jew among German prisoners of war into one of the most enlightening examinations of our hearts of darkness ever written.

Though his June 10 diary note is far from such a Gotterdammerung theme, in its own way it exemplifies the journalistic genius he possessed for seeing (and describing) the world in front of his nose, free of ideological distortions.

Orwell had been employed by the BBC for about nine months at the time. He writes of the Beeb’s “atmosphere (being) somewhere halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum (where) all we are doing is useless, or slightly worse than useless.” But that didn’t prevent him observing the following and writing it down for potential reference:

“The only time one hears people singing in the BBC is in the early morning, between 6 and 8. That is the time when the charwomen are at work. A huge army of them arrives all at the same time. They sit in the reception hall waiting for their brooms to be issued to them and making as much noise as a parrot house, and then they have wonderful choruses, all singing together as they sweep the passages. The place has quite a different atmosphere at this time from what it has later in the day.”

There’s no overt opining. No proselytizing. No being a loud mouthed schnook. No. Instead, there’s quiet observing. Passerby paying attention. After the fact drafting of an attempt at understanding. All of it brings us journalistically face to face with the vitality – the potential for beauty – of ordinary, practical work using the tools available. It stands in stark contrast to the “useless or slightly worse than useless” abstractionism going on among the great, the good, and the self-important in the BBC bureaucracy.

When I first read the diary entry, it stirred me with eureka-like enthusiasm. That’s it! That’s the solution! We can finally let go of the never-never-land fantasy of abolishing the CBC/Radio Canada. Parliament can instead issue an immediate edict for Mother Corp to hire a “huge army” of cleaning persons, issue them brooms, and unleash them to sing their hearts out. They would soon sweep away the journalistic detritus and parrot droppings in the Corpse’s downtown Toronto and Montreal buildings. A little bit of hallway husbandry married to some glorious working class song: That would fix the GD CBC.

Alas, I was quickly shaken by remembering: This is Canada. Bureaucratism is the irreversible necrosis of the national spirit.

Within months – weeks? – there would be a follow up Clean Canada Choristers Control Act. A federal agency with a $50 million annual starter budget would police against misinformation being sung by the cleaners. It would deploy a gender equitable intersectional analysis to prevent settler colonial bias affecting distribution of bass, tenor, alto and soprano voices. Above all, it would regulate the size and status of the brooms to prevent any unionized chorister feeling unsafe or excluded.

I exaggerate? Not so much. Consider this week’s confirmation that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s urgency to “fast track” projects deemed of “national interest” is about to spawn its own Major Federal Projects Office – a bureaucracy to reduce the bureaucracy of getting down to work and building Canadian things that Canadians need.

You might think some journalist somewhere might ask, like, you know, “Why can’t they just reduce the bureaucracy instead of, like, you know, creating another one with more bureaucrats? Kind of, you know, play DOGE Ball North: ‘You! Bureaucrats! You’ve been tagged! You’re out!!’”

But no. Remember, as I was obliged to, this is Canada. Those kinds of questions aren’t asked even by journalists who should be asking them because…those kinds of thoughts are no longer thunk here. (I don’t think they’re actually illegal. Yet.)

So, the commitment to “fast track” anything politically defined as a “major national project” to revitalize Canada’s failing infrastructure such as, according to the Financial Post, “ports, railways, highways, critical-mineral mines, oil pipelines and electricity transmission systems” (you know, the little things a country needs to be happy) will have to meet five crystal clear and beyond-debate criteria:

• whether it strengthens Canada’s autonomy, resilience, and security

• whether it provides economic or other benefits to Canada

• whether it has a high likelihood of successful completion

• whether it contributes to clean growth and Canada’s climate-change objectives

• whether it advances the interests of Indigenous peoples

There’s nothing about gender equitable intersectional analysis to prevent settler colonial bias, it’s true. Give it time. Because of course time, at least bureaucratic time, is of the essence. Setting these bench marks, the Prime Minister insists, is crucial to getting “major national projects” to the approval stage – the approval stage, mind you, not started – within two years. Yup. That’s gonna happen. Sing me a song.

And yet here again, Orwell’s journalism shakes the dark doubt from my soul and stirs it to hope instead. For his June 10, 1942 diary entry is written barely a year after the end of the Blitz. Bomb craters are still smouldering in London. The City is a wreck. But along comes a man – a great journalist of a man but a man all the same – entering the office early. He hears what sounds like parrots. He waits. He listens. He hears beauty being born anew.

A “huge army” of brooms sweeps clean the lunatic asylum where “useless or slightly worse than useless” bureaucracy prevails. It happened there. Might not the miracles wrought by those who do the work happen here as well?

(Peter Stockland is a past Editor-in-Chief of the Montreal Gazette)