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Newly assigned to a “non-job” and with four years to retirement, Manitoba bureaucrat Jack Dalgliesh whiled away the hours by reading the classics; 156 of them to be exact.

“I may have worked at most 10 days a year for roughly $93,000 or $94,000 a year,” the now-retired Mr. Dalgliesh wrote in a message released Tuesday by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

He was ready and willing to work, but with almost no assignments, he took to reading Tolstoy, Twain, Atwood and Dickens, among others. He made his way through 1984 and Brave New World, two books following protagonists trapped in bureaucracy-heavy dystopias.

An experienced accountant with more than two decades of experience in government, Mr. Dalgliesh said he had been relegated to the Manitoba Information Technology Branch after trying to blow the whistle on Crocus, a disastrous labour-sponsored investment fund.

“Everybody in the government knew it was going to blow, everybody who was involved with the file knew it was going to blow, and the NDP government was promoting it 18 months before it blew,” said Mr. Dalgliesh, speaking by phone from Winnipeg.

“It’s unbelievably nuts,” he added.

In the early 2000s, the Manitoba government assigned Mr. Dalgliesh, then with the provincial Department of Industry, to examine the Crocus Investment Fund, a labour-sponsored venture capital fund that had been heavily promoted by the province’s NDP government.

“There was a feeling of disquiet as it became apparent that Crocus had a real problem on its hands,” Mr. Dalgliesh told the CBC earlier this month in his first interview since Crocus’ 2004 collapse.