They Desire a Better System

The Liberal Party’s official campaign slogan in last year’s federal election, “Canada Strong,” has the virtue of being hard to argue with. With Canada newly exposed to the vicissitudes of an unstable behemoth next door and a destabilized world order, there is an obvious and urgent need to strengthen and reinforce this country. The debate now is not about whether strength is what’s needed but about how exactly to build it.

In the year since the “rupture”— to use Mark Carney’s term from Davos — discussions about increasing our strength have largely focused on constructing new infrastructure and new economies, rearming our military, and forging closer connections with allies and trading partners. All well and good — but more elements of the system must be beefed up or hardened at this precarious moment. We should consider, for instance, how to bolster the political and democratic institutions that guide and define us.

The United States is currently a live-action example of how institutions can fail and what can happen when they do. While Canada’s political institutions are not being attacked in the same way, they are likely to come under greater pressure in the days, weeks, and years ahead. We are at least well prepared to consider how to fortify them, having accumulated years of scholarship about their shortcomings and how they might be addressed.

A New Blueprint for Government is among the latest entries in that field. In it, Kevin G. Lynch and James R. Mitchell lay out a sweeping array of concerns about the state of the country and make suggestions for improvement, from boosting economic productivity and competitiveness to reforming the RCMP. But the recommendations of the two former senior public servants — Lynch was Clerk of the Privy Council, while Mitchell was assistant secretary to the cabinet — start with the highest offices in the land.

“The heart of the problem of governance in Canada today is that we have been steadily and stealthily experiencing a de facto ‘presidentialization’ of Canada’s system of Westminster government. This is exemplified by an increasing concentration of executive activity and power around the head of Government,” Lynch and Mitchell write. “This concentration of power and responsibility at the top is exacerbated by a federal government that has become too big, too complex, too process-driven, and much too centralized in decision-making.”

Lynch and Mitchell suggest that most cabinet ministers are now “placeholders” who take “their direction from the people around the PM.” The federal cabinet has taken on a “largely ceremonial role.” It may have “political and symbolic benefits in satisfying the need for representation on regional, sectoral, ethnic, and gender grounds,” they write, but it fails to “serve the interest of good governance.” Meanwhile, political staff have taken up space that used to belong to the public service, which is itself in dire need of reform.

Beyond the Prime Minister’s Office, members of Parliament no longer play meaningful roles in legislating or holding the government to account. Parliamentary committees have been “weakened by constant pressure from party whips and House leaders to follow narrow partisan agendas.” Lynch and Mitchell believe that “what we have today is an ever-stronger political executive, together with an ever-weaker legislature.”

To refine not only the structure but also the output of government, the authors present several proposals. The cabinet should be kept to twenty-five members, for example, and ministers should be re-empowered, starting with giving them back the ability to hire their own political staff. House committees should be given greater independence and more resources. The roles and responsibilities of political staff should be clarified. The public service should be downsized, streamlined, and reinvigorated. Lynch and Mitchell acknowledge that “ ‘how government works’ is seldom a public preoccupation or a political priority.” But they hold out hope that support for reform can be rallied at a time when good governance is so necessary.

Statecraft, a collection of essays on prime ministers and their cabinets edited by Stephen Azzi and Patrice Dutil, is a useful reminder that some of what critics like to worry about is not entirely new. Representation has always been a concern in selecting ministers — as perhaps it should be. It’s just that, over time, we have concerned ourselves with more and different identities. (Instead of counting the numbers of Catholics and Protestants in cabinet, we now focus on how many women are appointed.) Complaints about prime ministerial power are also hardly novel.

Azzi teaches political management at Carleton University, while Dutil is a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University (and the founder of this magazine). Dutil points to a claim that ministers were “utterly powerless” from January 1868, barely six months after Confederation. An editorial cartoon published in 1878 depicted John A. Macdonald’s cabinet as a troupe of marionettes. Charles Tupper’s resignation as minister of railways and canals in 1884 was later said by one critic to have “left Sir John absolute dictator in his Cabinet.” One of the few things Tupper had time to do during his own sixty-nine days as prime minister in 1896 was to draft the order-in-council “Special Prerogatives of the Prime Minister.” That, writes Ted Glenn of Humber College, codified his exclusive right to call cabinet meetings and make key appointments: ministers, lieutenant governors, senators, members of important committees, deputy ministers, and other important positions. This “major milestone in the centralization of prime ministerial authority in Canada” was copied by five subsequent prime ministers.

A joke made the rounds in Ottawa in the early 1930s, the University of Windsor emeritus professor Larry A. Glassford recounts. A tourist was said to have seen a well-dressed man walking up Wellington Street, talking to himself. The tourist wondered who the man might be, and a local resident responded, “Oh, that’s our new prime minister, holding a cabinet meeting.”

“If ever in Canada there was a cabinet dominated by its prime minister,” Glassford notes, it was the one sworn in under the leadership of R. B. Bennett. A self-made man before coming to politics, Bennett initially served as prime minister, president of the Privy Council, secretary of state for external affairs, and finance minister alike.

The great failure of Bennett’s government during the Great Depression did not change the ultimate course of prime ministerial power. Jean Chrétien, who took office almost sixty years later, was ultimately likened to a dictator (albeit a friendly one). Stephen Harper, who was also compared to a dictator (a less friendly one), was reported to have explained to his ministers at their first cabinet meeting in 2006 that while they were politically expendable, he was sacrosanct.

But prime ministerial tyranny is perhaps not all it’s cracked up to be. As Azzi and Dutil note in their concluding chapter, no prime minister can do everything. They identify eight prime ministers who, in their view, suffered from having weak cabinets. Yet even a weak cabinet still requires skill to manage, and there have always been ministers of influence and importance. (Lynch and Mitchell concede that there have been recent heavyweights, though fewer than in the past.)

Chrétien was ultimately pushed aside by his former finance minister, Paul Martin. Jim Flaherty, Harper’s long-serving finance minister, could argue with the prime minister vociferously and “won his share of policy debates,” recalls R. Paul Wilson, who was Harper’s policy director for two years. When Harper nearly blew up his own government in the fall of 2008, it was three members of his cabinet who convinced him to fight on.

Justin Trudeau’s premiership was permanently marked by the dramatic resignations of two ministers: Jody Wilson-Raybould in 2019 and Chrystia Freeland in 2024. The latter exit effectively ended Trudeau’s time in power. If members of cabinet are mere placeholders, why do such departures cause so much damage? “Prime ministers in Canada are very powerful indeed — until they are not,” Azzi and Dutil conclude.

The first big wobble in Mark Carney’s government was Steven Guilbeault’s resignation over differences on climate policy. Although it was not enough to send Carney packing, the departure of the celebrated environmentalist has the potential to become an important marker for critics of his government.

A prime minister’s power may be codified or enforced by a system that surrounds him or her with numerous advisers and assistants, but it ultimately rests or falls on his or her ability to deliver victory for the party. That, more than anything, is what holds partisans together and tends to keep them in line. “Every day,” Azzi and Dutil write, “is a plebiscite among caucus members and cabinet colleagues on whether the prime minister can win.”

The generally accepted wisdom is that the centralization of power began to accelerate under Pierre Trudeau, who took office after the chaotic (but accomplished) government of Lester B. Pearson. Lynch and Mitchell contend that this centralization deepened under Harper and Justin Trudeau. Proving that thesis would require a very detailed study of how recent governments have functioned, but one does not need to completely accept it to believe that the status quo could be improved upon. One can quibble with the popular perception of prime ministerial power — or with some of Lynch and Mitchell’s other arguments — and still think that reform of Canada’s federal political institutions could be useful.

Generally speaking, there are two broad goals for such reform: first, to make government more effective at doing what it is asked to do and more responsive to the public; and second, to strengthen our democratic process and guard against abuse. Setting aside the large question of public service reform — a potentially vital need that is hard to fully grasp from the outside — would empowering cabinet and parliamentary committees advance either goal?

If the centralization of power in the PMO is hindering policy outcomes or simply limiting what Ottawa can get done, then giving more authority and responsibility to ministers might lead to better results. “If you want to manage a complex system well,” Lynch and Mitchell argue, “you can’t do it through a highly centralized command and control structure.” If the members of parliamentary committees were allowed to act as something more than partisan foot soldiers, their work might be taken more seriously, the political dialogue might be enriched, and the government might be more effectively held to account. “We would see a greater diversity of views expressed and more meaningful dialogue among [MPs] and with [committee] witnesses,” Lynch and Mitchell write, hopefully. “Parliament would have a relevance to Canadians that it just doesn’t have today.”

Perhaps a system with a few more empowered figures of decent public stature would also be that much more likely to resist a prime minister or a government or a party that seeks to trample on democratic norms or rights. But if politics suffers from overbearing centralization and stifling partisanship, those tendencies have not developed by accident or chance. Politicians are (for the most part) human. And they respond to incentives. Control and discipline are prioritized because they seem to contribute to victory at the polls by minimizing the mistakes, gaffes, mixed messages, or errant words that can make it harder to win.

Strategists have probably gone too far in wanting to control the message — and in wanting to exploit every possible opportunity to generate a clip that can be pumped out to algorithms and followers. They may well be overestimating how much control is necessary or even productive.

Journalists, pundits, scholars, and voters can call for and encourage change. They can try to reward and salute the sort of behaviour they’d like to see from prime ministers, cabinet ministers, and MPs. They can be accepting of some of the messiness that might come from more politicians acting with a bit more independence. But, ultimately, changing cabinet and Parliament will require the efforts and commitments of the people who occupy those places. So as much as it’s necessary for Canadians to look at their institutions and ask what could be done to strengthen them, it is on political leaders to look inside themselves and ask how they can make things better.