The Quest for "Modern Administration": British Columbia's Civil Service, 1870s to 1940s

Abstract

Soon after being appointed in the early 1920s by Premier John Oliver to the position of supervisor of assessors and agents, Lieutenant-Colonel Ross Napier, an officer in the Canadian forces during the Great War,2 began to speak out on what he saw as the thoroughly unprogressive and inefficient nature of British Columbia’s civil service. It was a role he would take on again at the end of the decade. Napier was a modernizer who “preached consistency, standardization, and rationalization of the bureaucracy.”3 What he saw in British Columbia was the opposite, a provincial civil service – now a half-century old – marked by politics, patronage, and inefficiency. The province’s failure to develop what Napier called a “modern administration”4 was evident in the “blatant pandering to patronage”5 that he believed to be as pervasive in the late 1920s and early 1930s as at any time in the province’s history. It was also evident in the chaotic nature of government administration in rural British Columbia. In his July 1921 report on the government agency office in Princeton, for instance, he noted that the government agent there had “been in the service