A couple of interesting things have happened recently that illustrate how much the culture of power in Ottawa has changed since the 2006 election.

Let’s start with an unusual news conference by Julie Dickson, superintendent of financial institutions. Dickson is a very seasoned bureaucrat with keen survival instincts, which probably explains why she is one of the few people to hold the superintendent’s job after coming up through the ranks of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. (In the past, Liberals and Conservatives have preferred to give this job to chartered accountants as patronage appointments — people who will owe the government of the day something.)

At Dickson’s April news conference, she flatly said that asset-backed commercial paper wasn’t part of banking or any other form of deposit-taking, so don’t expect her or anyone else at OSFI to take the rap for the ABCP mess. She does have a point in her so-called “clarification.’’ Securitization, of which ABCP securities are a major component, was invented to bypass the banking system in the first place. So, commercial paper shouldn’t be a prime worry of OSFI.

For the record, no one — at least publicly — has pointed any fingers at OSFI. In fact, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has tried to dump the whole mess in the laps of the provincial securities commissions.

But the current government has raised the practice of punting blame to others to an art form. So, Dickson was probably quite wise in drawing a line in the sand now, just in case recrimination spreads toward Flaherty.

Dickson held her news conference in Toronto. But her message seemed to be aimed as much at Parliament Hill as at Bay Street. Since then, Dickson has held a second news conference, in which she seemed to underscore the point — in case anyone at the Privy Council or the Prime Minister’s Office didn’t get her drift.

What is interesting is that, in the past, no civil servant would have taken this kind of preventive action. Instead, they would have waited until they had the opportunity to testify before a parliamentary committee. Or they would have sent a briefing note to the minister’s office. This is because there has always been an unwritten contract in the British parliamentary system: the bureaucracy lets the government do the talking, in return for not being blamed or attacked publicly.

But that practice was before prime ministers started calling civil servants Liberal-appointed hacks in public; or before governing members of Parliament would even countenance a non-confidence vote regarding Elections Canada, making Canada look like a banana republic; or before the governing party would provoke an RCMP raid on its headquarters by instructing staff and officials not to co-operate with the elections watchdog.

Times in Ottawa have continued to get interesting. Auditor General Sheila Fraser stunned a parliamentary committee by announcing that the PMO intended to require all officers of Parliament, including her, to clear any statement with the PMO before making it public. Officers of Parliament report to Parliament, not the government — as the name implies. Still, it was unheard of for an officer of Parliament to blindside a government this way.

Fraser said unequivocally, as someone who is supposed to be an impartial watchdog over government operations, that she would not comply with this coming directive. In fact, she might as well have declared that the prime minister’s fixers and handlers would have to pry any statement of hers out of her cold, dead hands.

Other officers of Parliament, such as Language Commissioner Graham Fraser, quickly chimed in that they would not comply either, and the government made a quick retreat. Government House Leader Peter Van Loan said proposed guidelines for government departments had inadvertently included the officers of Parliament. But Van Loan refuses to make these guidelines public.

Subsequently, we learned through some fine investigating by the Hill Times of Ottawa that, for months, PMO officials had been circulating guidelines that applied to officers of Parliament without ever consulting those officers. In all, says the auditor general, there are 25 items in the Treasury Board proposals that should concern officers of Parliament.

It’s not surprising that few people outside the government think the Treasury Board guidelines were simply a mistake. And since the government has had public squabbles with almost a dozen senior civil servants, onlookers are probably right.

@page_break@So, what does the current power struggle mean for Canadians, particularly business executives who must deal with government officials? For starters, the practice of government relations in Ottawa is going to be very complicated for the rest of the Harper government’s time in office. With the politicians and major parts of the bureaucracy functioning as competing entities, it is important for business not to be caught between them.

Corporations and industry associations are going to have to work very hard to stay neutral during this increasingly nasty family feud in Ottawa. And it is going to take a great deal of lobbying skill to get the two sides to agree on anything. IE