Point of View 2-Book Bundle. Douglas L. Bland
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the increased size of the cabinet, the reliance on committees attended by senior public servants has facilitated the transfer of power from the cabinet to the Privy Council Office and the Prime Minister’s Office.
There is rarely a more anticipated event in Ottawa then the day a new cabinet is unveiled at Rideau Hall. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that in choosing a ministry the first minister is cognizant of many factors unrelated to merit. Every region, and ideally every province, requires representation. Linguistic and ethnic considerations are also taken into account. The number of women in cabinet is important as is the number of francophone individuals; Aboriginal representation and the presence of visible minorities are all matters of great interest to those respective communities. Given the desire to include as diverse a group as possible around the cabinet table, it is hardly surprising that talent is not always the most prominent consideration and that cabinets have grown dramatically in size.
Compare how Canada’s government is chosen to how Canada’s national hockey team is chosen. On January 7, 2014, Hockey Canada announced the lineup for the 2014 men’s Olympic hockey team. Not a single member of the Edmonton Oilers, Calgary Flames, or Toronto Maple Leafs was named to the roster. This choice stands in marked contrast to that made for the All-Star team, where great care is taken to attempt to assure that all NHL teams have at least one representative. Of course, the NHL All-Star game is a show game — there is no hitting and little defence, it’s just a glitzy performance. In contrast, the Olympic hockey team represents the best of Canadian hockey, with its members chosen on the basis of merit and individual talent and the contribution a member can bring to the team. At the Olympics, a gold medal is on the line; the All-Star game is mostly for show.
For those in charge of the political system, a Canadian cabinet will ideally be a microcosm of Canadian society, with as many identifiable groups as possible represented. This priority has been the largest contributing factor to the increase in the size of Canadian cabinets. A survey of the current Canadian ministry will reveal ministers of Chinese, Sikh, Métis, and Inuit backgrounds. Meanwhile, there are parliamentary secretaries who hail from the South Asian, African, Taiwanese and Greek communities.
Although Canada’s government is becoming more inclusive, this reality reinforces the ever-decreasing significance of the cabinet and the merit of those chosen to sit inside it. As power has been continually transferred from the cabinet to cabinet committees and from those to the PMO, the quality of cabinet ministers has come to matter less and less. Identity has become more important than talent, and so there has been a general decline in the latter — a decline proportionate to the cabinet’s diminishing influence.
In recent years, cabinets, ceasing to be deliberative bodies, have become increasingly merely ornamental. The members are chosen because of the demographic they represent and their role is reduced to the equivalent of the prime minister’s cipher. The growing trend is to have policies, priorities, legislative initiatives, and even budgetary plans developed in the Prime Minister’s Office and by its unelected staffers. The cabinet has, for some time now, been a representative body not dissimilar to an NHL All-Star team, existing largely for show, but devoid of the power and significance it once had and still deserves.
The growing imbalance between the legislative and executive branches of government is exacerbated by the use of the government’s discretionary power, allowing the cabinet to govern by Order-in-Council or by ministerial order. These are delegated powers, authorized by statute, which allow the cabinet to govern by regulation, authorized by the cabinet but never ratified by Parliament (which authorized the delegated authority in the statute).
Not only is Parliament being effectively bypassed as a result of rule by decree, cabinet is also being shut out of the decision-making process. Observers and former ministers confirm that PMO decisions and plans are distributed at cabinet meetings for perfunctory approval or rubber stamping. In the current Harper government, many minsters are unable to speak to the media or make departmental announcements without first having the communication cleared by the minions inside the Prime Minister’s Office. A minister who cannot hire or fire either his chief of staff or his deputy minister is less a head of a government department than a conduit between the PMO and the department.
So diluted is the role and efficacy of the individual cabinet minister now that the time-honoured convention of ministerial responsibility has all but disappeared. Under responsible government, all ministers are jointly responsible for the decisions of the entire government and each minister is responsible for the performance of his or her individual department.
Accordingly, a minister of the Crown must resign from cabinet if he cannot publically support a decision of the government. The last time this occurred was in 2006, when Michael Chong resigned his cabinet seat over a disagreement with the prime minister about declaring Quebec a nation within Canada. This was proper and honourable, and it is perhaps the last time we will ever see it.
More recently, we have witnessed the senior minister from Quebec, Denis Lebel, publically endorse the then government of Quebec’s position regarding separation — that a bare majority (50 percent + 1) of support is all that is required to allow Quebec to commence proceedings to put Canada asunder.[1] This is in contrast with the official policy of the Government of Canada, which mandates that a “clear majority on a clear question” is a prerequisite for commencing separation proceedings. However, Minister Lebel faced no sanctions or discipline.
Most ministers do not openly challenge the government’s position. However, it has become common practice for ministers who are opposed to its position on a matter to absent themselves from a vote in the House, rather than resign from the cabinet or support the government’s position despite their opposition. This was quite apparent during the vote on C-377, a bill dealing with trade union disclosure (this bill would, ironically, have made trade unions much more transparent than the federal government). Several ministers, who saw either the hypocrisy or the inconsistent application of this proposal, including the then–minister of natural resources and the associate minister of defence, left the Commons just prior to the recorded vote.
Then there are the many ministerial mistakes and misdeeds for which there is no longer any accounting. Historically, a finance minister who attempted to intervene or even speculate on financial markets would find himself in breach of sworn duty. However, the current government’s preoccupation with politicizing everything has allowed the late Jim Flaherty to speculate that interest rates would rise and that the Canadian dollar would decline in value.[2] These comments not only raised confusion and action inside financial markets, they also raised concerns about the independence of the Bank of Canada. However, the government defended these actions. So, we should not be surprised when some former minister lobbies Bay Street bankers not to lower interest rates or allow certain groups to take on more household debt.
Not only are such misdeeds free from repercussions, colossal screw-ups within departments have also not resulted in ministers tendering their resignations. Underestimating the cost of CF-35s by over $30 billion (over 300 percent), gross losses of Canadians’ personal information, and diverting millions of dollars earmarked for security to pay for tourist gazebos in the minister’s own riding should have, but did not, cost the minister responsible his or her job.
And even apparent, overt acts of malfeasance escape the taking of any ministerial responsibility let alone ministerial resignation. When the word “not” is inserted before the word “recommended” on a CIDA funding document, or when a minister uses a military helicopter to pick him up from a private fishing vacation and deliver him to a government funding announcement, the offending minister should have earned an exit from the cabinet. However, nothing happened. I suppose that it is difficult to hold the minister responsible when he or she is merely carrying out the wishes or orders of the Prime Minister’s Office.
It appears that negligent operation of a file, negligent supervision of a department, needless meddling, and even malfeasance no longer have any real consequences for cabinet ministers. Ministerial responsibility has been replaced by rationalization of one’s actions and conduct. Rationalization and spin is all that is required in the eyes of the government … as long as, but only as long as,