The neutrality of the civil service has been an issue lately, with the distasteful episode of the cheering (and booing) at Global Affairs last Friday on the one hand, and to a certain extent, the “un-muzzling” of scientists on the other. Michael Petrou explores the former issue here, while Paul Booth offers some advice for the “un-muzzled” here, noting that there is a balance to be struck between talking about one’s research while at the same time maintaining their role of civil servants where they are not supposed to be critical of the government of the day if they want to keep their jobs, because they have a role to play. At the heart of both is that they ultimately serve the Queen and not the government of the day, no matter how much their advice or carrying out of government policy is criticised. While ink has been spilled on the cheering as being proof that the Conservatives were right to be suspicious of “official Ottawa,” one has to note a few different thing, including simple demographics – polling data repeatedly shows, time and time again, that education levels will affect political preferences, with the Conservatives scoring best among those who only have high school diplomas, while those who have attained increasing levels of higher education increasingly support Liberals. The vast majority of the civil service is university-educated, so their sympathy with the Liberals should not be a surprise. Should they have cheered Trudeau? Probably not. I will note that for context, the one clip I saw of the cheering happened after Trudeau said that he would be taking their advice unlike the previous government, while the booing of that journalist’s questions were both to the fact that they crashed a private event, and that it was a question for which an answer had already been given earlier in the day. Not that this should excuse what happened, because they should have known better, and I know plenty of other civil servants who were also critical of what happened there. But on the other hand, we should also note that they are human, and that the Conservatives exacerbated any distrust of the civil service with excessive dickish behaviour (such as Diane Finley walking into a department she was taking over and telling the staff that they were all Liberals and that she would clean up the joint). We should hope that this kind of incident doesn’t happen again, and it may very well not. I’m also not sure how helpful it is to light our hair on fire about it either, but I could very well be wrong about that.

Good reads:

• As with all politics these days, the Liberals used Remembrance Day for some crass data mining.
• The new veterans affairs minister hinted yesterday that when they re-open those nine veterans service centres, they might not be in the same locations.
• Maclean’s crunches the data on rural voters in the last election.
• New science minister Kirsty Duncan has a bit of controversy surrounding her past research and position regarding CCSVI.
• Kady O’Malley offers her advice for the Senate.
• Ashley Csanady looks at the packaging of Trudeau’s feminist cred.
• Susan Delacourt noted Trudeau’s willingness to ask others for help – premiers, global partners, voters – for help in fulfilling his promises.
• Stephen Gordon writes that restoring the long-form census is not the end-all and be-all of evidence-based policy, as the Liberals have policies not supported by evidence.

Odds and ends:

Here’s a look at the ways in which the Centre Block is a permanent commemoration of the First World War.

After Remembrance Day activities, Trudeau headed to a Sikh temple to celebrate the start of Diwali.