Two days after he was sworn-in as prime minister, Justin Trudeau arrived at the Lester B. Pearson Building in Ottawa to a crowd of cheering public servants. The unusual scene in the lobby of the Foreign Affairs Department was described as a “rock-star reception,” one that, for some, confirmed Liberal sympathies within the public service; and for others were an indication of how unappreciated bureaucrats felt after a decade of cuts by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper had slashed the public service by seven per cent in 2012, and created outcries by cutting international development spending, reducing health care for refugees, scrapping Statistics Canada’s long form census, and muzzling government scientists.

Nearly 10 years to the day later, in the building next door, Cana

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