The steady centralization and concentration of executive power, specifically in the prime minister and his office, is not exclusive to Canada; it has occurred in Britain, Australia, continental Europe, and elsewhere. In Canada, however, the phenomenon extends to an exceptional degree and the media have contributed to it by focussing more on leaders and less on MPs and cabinet ministers. There is now little pretence in Ottawa of shared, collegial power. Helen Guergis tellingly revealed that during her six years in caucus and cabinet, she only met Stephen Harper face-to-face four times. With the exception of Joe Clark, Harper is the only prime minister since the 1970s to dispense with a deputy prime minister. Muzzled are MPs of the governing party and the cabinet. When the leash loosens slightly, the centre scripts their utterances as if they were infants.
Bullied civil servants are demoralized and demeaned, their every public communication subject to stage management. Press releases by ostensibly neutral departmental media offices increasingly smack of partisan orchestration. Straightforward talk by mandarins and the honestly held opinions of elected MPs have been silenced, sacrificed for governmental “communications strategies,” for massaging the message and programming its messengers.
Harper has learned well how to exercise, maintain, and expand power. He has absorbed the lessons of his prime ministerial predecessors as well as those of the Karl Rove school of campaigning – controlled dispatches combined with a permanent, pervasive attack on the opposition and its leader. A government elected in a campaign that centred on accountability and transparency has taken unaccountability and guile to new lengths. The prime minister sneaks into and out of Parliament, the “people’s house,” by avoiding its front door. Reporters must kowtow to his rules as if he were a pope; excommunication awaits miscreants. Parliamentary committees are informed by diktat what documents they may see and whom they may question. Parliament no longer supervises the government; the government supervises it. Harper has run a minority government as if it were a majority. Rather than build parliamentary alliances, he discredits their legitimacy.
Harper has dashed the expectations of many that the opposition, which now constitutes the majority in Parliament, could check excesses by his government. When Parliament’s independent officers take him on, he tries to starve them (as in the case of Parliament’s Budget Officer), sue them (as in the case of the Chief Electoral Officer and the Commissioner of Elections), or fail to appoint them (as in the case of the Public Appointments Commissioner). When public servants disagree with his government’s policies, he does not reappoint them (as in the cases of the Chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission and the Chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP). He is not above malicious accusations of partisanship (as in the cases of a former deputy minister of Finance, the President of the Nuclear Safety Commission and, earlier, Supreme Court justices). When there was a hint that the Governor General might halt his designs, his minions questioned and challenged her authority.
The prime minister’s office, however powerful, is relatively small, but the bureaucracy it cows is wide and deep. The Privy Council Office at its apex serves as the nexus between the PMO and the civil service. The PCO Clerk has always represented the public service to the prime minister but this prime minister is the most unabashed at slapping around the PCO’s expert, professional, non-partisan advisors.
How and why has this happened? Seventy years ago, the Clerk gained the designation of secretary to the cabinet but now the PCO, directed by the PMO, serves more as a prime ministerial whip over the cabinet. Between 1970 and 2005, PCO personnel grew from fewer than 300 to well over 1,000 and since the late 1970s, the Clerk has handed mandate letters to cabinet ministers when they are sworn into office. The possibility of a cabinet revolt, at all times very unlikely though it did occur in the 1890s and 1960s, is now more unlikely than ever.
Brian Mulroney’s Clerk adopted the title of deputy minister to the prime minister and Jean Chrétien formalized the Clerk’s primary job description as providing advice and support to the prime minister. The jobs of secretary to cabinet and head of the public service have become secondary. Such changes, unappreciated by the media at the time, enlarged the prime minister’s bureaucratic and political reach. Premiers have followed this path of bureaucratic practice by transferring the model from Ottawa to their provincial capitals.
The prospect for change appears bleak. Every prime minister since Pierre Trudeau has built on the centralizing initiatives of his predecessor. If a much bruited coalition government comes to power however, prospects brighten for checking prime ministerial fiat because coalition partners cannot tolerate for long unilateral behaviour or public attacks against one another. If such attacks bubble up, as they did in British Columbia’s Liberal-Conservative coalition government in the 1950s, the coalition will splinter. A prime minister of a coalition government, as in Britain and Germany, will more likely head a collegial and mutually respectful cabinet than a subservient one.
This article by Nelson Wiseman was originally published in The Hill Times.