600 "members" get together and grant an award. I'm not impressed.
Nor are you up to speed.
National Post editorial board: Ocean
Picture, if you will, a world in which a study of snowfall patterns over southern Ontario, conducted jointly by NASA and Canada’s National Research Council (NRC), could plunge 11 public employees into a day-long public relations ordeal. Welcome to … Ottawa.
On March 1, Postmedia reporter Tom Spears was putting together a story on just such a study. “I’d just like to get a feel for NRC’s involvement,” he wrote to the NRC’s communications branch at 9:30 a.m. Shortly thereafter, in an email to his superiors — later released to the Ottawa Citizen through an Access to Information request — a communications officer suggested setting up an interview with someone with the NRC’s Institute for Aerospace Research, which supplied an aircraft and scientific equipment.
It sounds like a pretty simple operation. What could possibly go wrong?
Let’s just say everything. Six hours later, there had been no interview: One of the army of 11 federal employees dealing with the matter wasn’t “convinced” it was necessary. Instead, they spent the day massaging, trimming, tweaking, polishing and quadruple-checking a written response, eventually consisting of five bullet points, that was delivered hours past Mr. Spears’ acknowledged deadline and that lacked even basic information about the NASA/NRC project’s goals.
An hour after that, one of the army of 11 wrote to his colleagues complaining that the response failed to mention the all-important fact that the project had been funded by the Canadian Space Agency. And the next morning, when Mr. Spears’ story appeared, an apparently disappointed communications officer noted that the “NRC is mentioned only in the last para[graph], but with no mention of our science contribution.” No matter, the NRC’s head of media relations responded. Mr. Spears only “wanted to confirm NRC’s involvement in the project,” he said. That isn’t what he wanted at all.
Luckily for Mr. Spears, a NASA official was perfectly willing to talk over the phone about the project. And why wouldn’t he be? They’re studying snowfall, not planning to assassinate Castro. “It took about 15 minutes,” Mr. Spears recalled in the Citizen.