Gutting state capacity and undermining belief that the state can get things done has been a project -- undertaken for decades. Lowered expectations, diminished capacity.

Then we lament that the state can't get anything done, which further supports the push to farming out.

But part of the reason we want to maintain state capacity is that public bodies work expressly in the public interest, and there are clear, if imperfect, lines of accountability.

When we abandon that, we get things like the WE scandal.

It's so bad that some of us can't even *imagine* the CSSG administered through the public service, which to me is indicative of the problem itself.

And if, indeed, the PS didn't have or couldn't muster the resource to admin any sort of CSSG...well, again, there's the problem.

Also, to say "But this was all during a pandemic," well, all the more reason that we ought to maintain high levels of capacity and, you know, *plan* for this sort of thing. Because it's happened before. And it'll happen again.

But we have fallen so far down the rabbit hole of P3s and diminished state capacity that we accept things as normal and necessary that ought to be questioned.

That's why "common sense" is suspect -- because it's manufactured, political, and far from universal or immutable.

I mean, even PM Trudeau wanted this done in-house. My sweet lord.