Does Independence Matter?

The old saw is that if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. For Canada’s federal government, the hammer is partisanship and, of late, the unlucky nails have been a disparate set of independent public agencies, from Elections Canada to the Canadian Military Complaints Commission to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Whether it is the nature of the Conservative Party, the nature of Prime Minister Stephen Harper or the nature of trying to govern in a minority Parliament where an election is always on the horizon, the government seems unable to distinguish between campaigning and governing.

Partisanship in politics, of course, is nothing new, and is the lifeblood of elections and parliamentary politics. What is eroding is a shared sense of boundaries around certain no-go zones that need to be free of partisanship if democracy is to work. The classic example (and the one that usually sucks all the oxygen out of the room) is the...