Donald Savoie’s rumpled, rounded, amiable and fatigued figure was ubiquitous in the Ottawa of the 1980s, ’90s and the first half of the present decade. Now a Canada Research Chair at the University of Moncton, he is free to pursue intensive scholarly work after years of quasi-academic positions in federal and provincial government—all pursued while holding a named chair in Moncton.
His latest book is a fast-moving but repetitive meta treatment of power in institutions and organizations, in and around Canada, the United States and Britain, the three effectively handled as a single case. The subject is important, the author says, because the future of representative democracy is at stake.
For the thesis, Savoie’s words best reveal the subject of the book, while also indicating its confusion of the concept of power with that of hierarchy (understood as classic rule-driven bureaucracy):
In this book, I argue that our public organizations are suffering the same fate [decline] as the Roman Catholic Church. They can no longer wield the kind of power they once could. This is the result of power becoming more fluid as attempts are made to ensure a wider participation in the exercise of power through the borrowing of management practices from the private sector and numerous measures to promote general transparency.
The specific goal for his intellectually “risky” volume on power is therefore to make progress “in mapping out where power and responsibility now reside.” In part, Savoie hopes to inspire students to continue his path-breaking work.
Early sections of the book examine different fields bordering government that might in theory yield examples of positive uses of power: globalization; the private sector (not including a needed exploration of the financial institutions of the individual countries); courts of law and statutory “officers” of Parliament; a reprise of Savoie’s earlier book, Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics; mass media and polls; political institutions; bureaucracy; and “new voices” including think tanks, airport bestsellers by “idea merchants” and public consultations by governments. The final three chapters, including a conclusion that lapses into polemic, relate only to Canada.
The chapter on globalization is the first and longest. It starts with the incomprehensibility of hedge funds, and then works through an anecdotal, time shifting and multi-place take on the world economic crisis, loosely up to 2008. It adds little to the gist of the overall anecdotal approach to Savoie’s big concepts. Indeed, the entire middle of the book can be more or less fenced in by the following statement: “An ideological climate has set in that celebrates market liberalization, managerialism, regulations, and processes that are able to operate in isolation from politics.”
Chapters 9 through 11 focus on Canada. Their task, as the “proof” that power has been privatized by individuals, is to show that Canadian federal politics are driven by a metaphorical “court,” centred on the Privy Council Office and the Prime Minister’s Office. This intangible court swarms with shifting scrums of “responsive” deputy ministers, the courtiers and “agents,” ready to do the bidding of the (or a) controlling principal.
The volume’s conclusion is thus about the “personalization” of governmental power in federal Canada. Power is exercised by non-elected persons. But how does the prime minister figure? The PM appears once specifically in regard to the personalization of power, in the statement that everything in government “revolves around the prime minister or the clerk of the privy council.” Savoie, however, later and abruptly, brings in Parliament (here the sense is the House of Commons) as the single and failed principal or legitimate source of power. Savoie says that Parliament/the House has “lost the ability to hold government and bureaucracy to account”—as if the House of Commons per se has been a unitary force since the advent of manhood suffrage and the emergence of the mass political party.
According to Savoie, deputy ministers are easily politicized or, it would seem, even corrupted because they are “rarely” chosen from the ranks of their departments. They are, he says, appointed to head departmental administration from their top positions in the Privy Council Office, where over an indeterminate period they have “become appreciated” by the prime minister’s “court,” at least one step from the prime minister himself. However, at the same time as he maintains that deputy ministers are willing agents of an unidentified source of direction, that is, a principal, Savoie also claims they are actually independent deal makers, full “politicians” in fact if not in name.
Either way, Savoie finds below this court level a “fault line,” which separates it from a vast second organization, a bloated bilge bureaucracy useful only for “managing an elaborate, porous and complex interdepartmental process that generates decisions only when the most powerful individuals desire it.” (Parenthetically, the note attached to this information refers to the public service pension plan.)
But is Savoie claiming that Canada is as corrupted and adrift as Baghdad or Kabul because our institutions, and our understanding of them, have collapsed, personalized by deputy ministers, consultants and lobbyists? And if not that, then what? The reader is left to decide.
Even the concept of power, central to the author’s explanation of the book’s mission, turns out to be unstable, a work in progress. Savoie initially promises to “examine power and its corollary—responsibility” (notice the binary unit)—to locate “where ‘it’ now resides” across his three chosen countries, Canada, the United States and Britain. Next he invokes Caesar’s power: “Those with power can issue a command, make a decision, and expect that they will be obeyed”—this is fairly close to the standard, interpersonal definition of power. A third definition states “power is the ability to make things happen, while influence is the ability to advise those who have power” (emphasis added), a change in sense credited to an editor. The shift omits responsibility.
Only after power has been fixed as the single focal concept will Savoie clearly state that the power he will be searching for has historically resided in institutions: “Power requires two parts to work: someone or some body to give a command and someone or some body with an obligation, a duty, or a desire to obey” (emphasis added). The author’s true project is then definitely to attempt to illustrate that hierarchy no longer functions. Hierarchy is a vast topic, ranging from legal provisions and rules to empirical questions of how best to organize units for work and vice versa. To say that hierarchies can be circumvented or made almost useless by changes of rules is to state the obvious. This is why political leadership of a state is necessary—to reconceptualize political and even economic settlements that have decayed and no longer serve the electorate.
The only phrase I can come up with to describe the author’s method of investigation in this volume is “negative induction.” Savoie looks for instances of power in the main institutions of three nations, consulting public and confidential sources, and he comes up empty. That is it. However, on matters smaller than the daily sunrise, induction is not believed to provide an analytical headlock on that which is, let alone that which is not. A single counter-example is all that is required to overturn a claimed universal negative.
Even Savoie’s claims about examples of institutional opaqueness are questionable. The heading “No One Understands It,” for instance, appears only two pages into the book’s first chapter, on the global financial crisis. But in fact, those of us who read a little on the subject do understand what happened on Wall Street and how contagion followed. Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, also of 2010, explains how “people on Wall Street and mortgage brokers” created financial products that added to “the sum total of risk in the financial world,” as Jeff Madrick put it in the New York Review of Books, and redistributed risk to the people least able to bear it. Lewis further identifies four named individuals who understood the new markets well enough strategically to “bet against” the riskiest financial instruments devised or promoted by Wall Street and win. Other admirable explanations of this designer disaster, starting with Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe, now abound.
Throughout, Power: Where Is It? is slapdash when making fact-like statements. Here is an ad hoc selection: “Britain has [now] no constitution, only precedents”; “Today, a majority of cabinet documents in the Government of Canada are [sic] produced by consultants”; “Cabinet is a focus group for the prime minister”; and “we [Canadians] have abandoned Parliament to professional politicians … [who have] no reference point from past experience other than partisan politics.” The first quotation in the list misapplies by several centuries a historian’s characterization of the state of play during Edward III’s reign in 14th-century England (Jeffrey Goldsworthy, The Sovereignty of Parliament, Oxford, 1999). The other claims are empirical. The second and third two would be hard to investigate, while the last can be checked on Parliament’s website.
In reviewing Savoie’s Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom, the meticulous British institutionalist George Jones spots at least five false attributions in a fulsome paragraph. In that text, Savoie attributes inflammatory and detailed remarks about the Blair government’s use of political advisors to the members of the Transport Select Committee, normally more circumspect. One allegation uses the term “apparatchik.” So it is not a total shock that the source of the content, as Jones carefully tracks each error, emerges as not the House select committee, but a paper from the website of a British Trotskyite organization—also cited by Savoie.
Perhaps even more important to Savoie’s research is his steady and unapologetic dependence on confidential elite interviews. Normal scholarship involves arraying evidence and sources for assessment by one’s peers, and also for their future use. Scholarly publishing is not real-time public interest journalism, where the journalist protects sources whose information will soon lead to revelations of demonstrable facts that may endanger the source. Given a tip, a scholar locates the documents it leads to, as a precaution and to provide a public source. Why, otherwise, should anyone believe what is said?
Savoie offers the same defence in each publication: his books would not be possible without his network of anonymous informants. Sometimes he will give a number, as in Governing from the Centre, which claims 88 anonymous interviews and uses them 250 times. In Breaking the Bargain: Public Servants, Ministers and Parliament, 45 anonymous interviews are described as “unstructured … tailored to the … respondent,” and without “common questions.” The author does not explain how he manages his great stock of qualitative material.
In the present volume, dependence on confidential sources contradicts Savoie’s professed goal of providing a seminal work to develop a field of study. Writing about Hugh Heclo and Aaron Wildavsky’s The Private Government of Public Money, a 1974 book on the then-clubbish British Treasury that helped glamorize and encourage the use of protected sources in executive studies, Richard Parry has concluded that all such use of confidential sources is outmoded in our own times. There is a flow of memoirs by former ministers in Britain, starting with the Crossman diaries in 1975. Judicial inquiries and access to information legislation have overridden prior time limits on disclosure of government documents (although Parry would surely agree that terms of reference for public inquiries are still less than adequate). Retired senior officials are not averse to speaking to scholars and serious journalists on the record. In Parry’s experience, civil servants, given a chance, also do tell parliamentary committees what they tell academics. Conditions in Canada have similarly shifted toward transparency, as Savoie himself states above, making his networking with confidential sources superfluous to the pursuit of evidence.
Power: Where Is It? begins with a promise to the reader to “map” the use of raw power. The promise is then pursued by wandering around in institutions. But nothing could so completely concede Savoie’s failure to write the book he promised than his final paragraph on the final page of his manuscript. It is a metaphor developed from a remark made about the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. The result is that the somewhat astonished reader ends up holding an imaginary canvas:
To locate power today one should visualize an abstract painting on which unrelated spots represent powerful individuals who are able to bypass or, conversely, manipulate institutions, organizations and formal processes, depending on the purpose at hand … Political and economic elites know one another … [or] lobbyists are able to establish the necessary network … What matters above all else is the individual, not institutions, nor organizations, and not formal policy-making and decision-making processes.
Therefore, will this book give you a fact-based understanding of how the world, or even just Canadian politics, works (or does not)? Could you model a thesis on its procedures? Well, imagine that Freud mixes up all of his notes on Anna O., Wolf Man and Rat Man into one sick bunny and, further, Rat Man, annotating anonymously, taken at his own word, is accepted in these notes as an absolute authority on Wolf Man and Anna O.—and vice versa all around. You decide.
S.L. Sutherland is a long-time university professor and student of representative institutions (including ministerial responsibility), public administration and social science methodology. She is now at the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. More information about her can be found at www.slsutherland.com.
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