Whenever young public servants review the Great Recession of the early 1990s,
they regard the era as the “lost years”
for Canadian policy development and as either a grand comedy or a pitiful
tragedy.
They read in disbelief tales of long
lines of unemployed bureaucrats receiving semi-prompt, respectful service from the
now-defunct Downsizing and Privatizing Agency (DAPA) and wonder how it could
have ever been.
They listen to scratchy recordings of the premier’s slender
voice assuring provincial employees that all would be well under his “New Deal,” try to say "ray days" without laughing, and ask why people were so naive. They study the national emergency measures and first “Strategic Review” as
historic artifacts of little relevance today.
But we older bureaucrats still feel the sting of nostalgic pain; and some know that they will never erase the fear which coloured those dusty, dry seemingly hopeless days of the Recession. Many regard those years as “The Nutty Nineties” and something to try to forget.
Yet, for me,
remembering them and my time as a young boy growing up in the federal bureaucracy,
I can truly say that they were marked by many heart-warming experiences.
Instant obsolescence in computer equipment was a thing we had never heard about back in those old days. Keyboards
and ribbons wore out for sure, but we repaired them ourselves.
Shared copiers were the norm, and paper jams and toner shortages were seen as community concerns with everyone pulling together and taking pride in the
grand art of ”making do.”
Going into winter, we always ordered more supplies than we really needed, knowing that if a sheet got torn or punched by
mistake in the last days of the fiscal year, we would still be able to patch together a report to
meet the prescribed deadline.
That time of cutbacks and downsizing also saw the introduction of one-ply paper in the washrooms which spawned much amusement, shared merriment, and storytelling.
There was no such thing as ergonomic furniture in those days, and it was typical of the times to see office space and equipment allocated in a haphazard, hand-me-down fashion with comments like “well, maybe he’ll grow into it someday.” Newspapers were clipped up into little pieces and stuck together to be shared throughout the office.
Good cheer required ingenuity during the Great Recession. In those days before small microwaves and with cafeterias closing down across the Castorian Capital, the office coffee pot became the focus of some interesting experiments in home-brewing. Donuts and birthday cakes were often homemade and augmented by the excess vegetables from someone’s garden.
Of course, we were still allowed to serve alcohol at office functions back
then, and that helped a lot too.
