USQUE AD MARE
A History of the Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services
by Thomas E. Appleton

The Fisheries Reform and Modernization

Having scanned a few of the more interesting people and policies of the past hundred years, we must now review the process of change by which the old administration, with its outside and inside services, was transformed into the present comprehensive organization.

The Casey Report of 1877, interesting as it is to modern eyes, brought little immediate change in the state of the Civil Service. Casey himself, although not for want of trying, was unable to sustain the parliamentary impetus he had aroused and none of the bills which he subsequently introduced survived a second hearing. There was another Royal Commission in 1880, a Board of Civil Service Examiners was appointed in 1882, but no significant changes came about despite desultory tinkering with the Act and a faint stirring of political interest in succeeding years. Eventually, thirty-three years after Mr. Casey first moved the resolution which led to his report, the Civil Service Amendment Act of 1908 became law and led to modernization.

The main result was the establishment of the Civil Service Commission which replaced the former Board of Examiners. It was of this Board that Professor Dawson remarked in his book The Civil Service of Canada that they had greatly exaggerated the educational benefits to be derived by candidates from preparation for entrance examinations confined, as he put it, to "penmanship, the Magna Carta, and the Capes of Nova Scotia." With the advent of the new Commission, entrance standards were revised, and appointments to the inside service, with a very few exceptions, were made after competitions and placement by merit. Most important of all, the Commissioners were placed on a judicial plane and could be dismissed only by the Governor General on address by the Senate and the House of Commons. These changes brought a real advance towards the constitution of the modern service.

The 1914 war brought setbacks; with the departure of many volunteers for army service and the introduction of emergency wartime legislation, interest in civil service reform declined. After the Armistice a new wave of enthusiasm was generated, the inside service or Departmental staff was tightened up, and a start was made towards cleansing the old taint of patronage, a survival of colonial days, from the numerous field positions of the outside service formerly filled by that means. Slowly but surely this process of modernization made steady, if not spectacular, progress despite the depression and the second world war until, with the renaissance which began to take place in Canadian life in the nineteen fifties, a marked improvement came about. This change was characterized by the inclusion of technical and professional disciplines undreamt of not long previously, and a corresponding breadth of outlook in the whole service which, in the past, had mainly been composed of administrative and operating staff with little in between.

In 1963, sweeping changes were heralded when the decision was taken to introduce collective bargaining into the civil service. This decision, which came about at a time of changing public attitudes towards the relationship between employers and employed, necessitated new procedures which the Civil Service Commission had never been designed to administer. At the same time an increased responsibility was placed on the Treasury Board which, more than ever, became the control panel between the power house of parliament and the circuits of government departments. In 1967 the Civil Service Commission was dissolved and a new body, called the Public Service Commission, was created.

With this change, the Civil Service Commission takes its place in the history of Canadian government. Despite an instinctive and illogical rumbling of discontent expressed at times towards the creaking mills of the Civil Service Commission, it was for fifty-nine years the faithful guardian of virtue throughout the entire service, and the lever by which great movements of reform, latterly taken for granted, were put into effect. Perhaps, in the relationship of government bodies, as in the affections and animosities of families, an undercurrent of mixed emotions is but a healthy sign of life.

Today, after a century of achievement, employees of the Marine Service of the Department of Transport, ashore, afloat or in the air, serve without fear or favour; with every reason to be proud of the past, they are efficient in the present. As to the future, only this is certain: the world of shipping, as with all human affairs, is characterized by change. A new adaptability, plainly to be seen in Marine administration, expedites a progress which, if leisurely in the past, has never failed to meet the demands of the age.