Mitch Heimpel: If Canada is broken, this is part of how we broke it
Mitch Heimpel: If Canada is broken, this is part of how we broke it
PMs aren't presidents. But we've imported American concepts into our government, and the graft and the host simply aren't compatible.
By: Mitch Heimpel
Every parliamentary system evolves just a little differently.
They all have the same basic ingredients but differences, including regional political cultures, the local media environment, immigration, relative levels of urbanization and education cause different evolutions and practices to develop.
A couple of recent news stories, first about the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff appearing (again) before a parliamentary committee, and the second about the level of decay of the official residence at 24 Sussex, have led me to realize how thoroughly we have presidentialised Canadian politics, and how thoroughly it has been to our detriment.
Parliamentary systems are not supposed to operate as presidential systems. They are intended to be far more managerial and transitory. They are intended to handle the affairs of state, without embodying the state. That distance is supposed to allow us all to access to a degree of patriotism without allowing partisanship to evolve into some kind of invasive cyst. This is why the weird, presidential appendages that have evolved in our own system over the years have proven so awkward and, ultimately, unwelcome. And unhealthy.
Let's start with the easier target, 24 Sussex Drive, and get this out of the way off the top. The prime minister of a G7 nation should not live in squalor. Rat infestations, like the ones that recently contributed to the full closure of the prime minister’s ostensible home, are not acceptable. Official residences in various states of disrepair are a poor reflection on the nation, if for no other reason than it shows that we can't even get basic carpentry and maintenance correct.
But the official residences of prime ministers are not supposed to be grand palaces either. They are supposed to emphasize the temporary nature of the occupant. The change of a prime minister, even without an election, should be a regular occurrence — and not just in Australia. Something that functions as a secure and defensible site with pleasant family home while also including the ability to host cabinet meetings or small events and maybe some staff as a working residence seems more than adequate.
It should not be the White House. It should not be the Elysée Palace. Nor should it attempt to compete with them. That's not the job, or at least it's not supposed to be. It should never be the subject of all this controversy and scrutiny, because it shouldn’t symbolize anything. It should be a secure place where the head of government and their family sleep until replaced by the next head of government and family.
Our fixation on it, and the fear every PM has of being seen spending a penny on its upkeep and repair, is a small but telling sign of how we’ve invested too much importance and symbolism in one person.
It’s a small example, I admit, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about as I ponder the state of things in Canada today. As is often the case, you can see a lot of the origins if you look a bit to the south. In the United States, the progression of backroom staff, particularly in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), into more prominent roles has been steadily increasing over the 60 years since the Kennedy administration, with few signs that it'll change any time soon. Through Watergate, Iran-Contra, and basically the entire mythology around the Obama administration, we have seen the elevation of unelected staffers close to the centre of power, who take on extraordinary and largely unaccountable roles that we typically associate with elected officials.
That has certainly had its echoes north of border, starting with Dalton Camp and Jim Coutts and continuing through the present day. Thanks to the recent appointment of David Johnston as a “special rapporteur” on foreign interference, we may even have to soon consider a point at which these courtiers graduate to the realm of “eminent Canadians” — heaven help us.
We did originally have a place for them: the Senate. In a fine tradition that goes back to Sir John A's appointment of Alexander Campbell, the Senate has traditionally been where prime ministers stow their political fixers. There, at least, they are a part of the legitimate democratic framework, even if the Senate itself struggles with democratic legitimacy. It's a tradition that prime ministers held for decades, so that the people with the ear of the boss, right up to Keith Davey and Lowell Murray, had to, at the very least, have some kind of accountability to quasi-democratic process of scrutiny, debate and public questioning. But Justin Trudeau changed that. We will likely come to wish he hadn’t.
And this, by the way, is why it is entirely in bounds to demand that chiefs of staff submit to questioning by elected officials. Some measure of democratic accountability has to exist for unelected people who are properly wielding the power and authority that we intended to be reserved only for the elected. Our “conventions,” such as they are in this regard, are a product of a time when political staff were schedulers and personal aides and correspondence writers.
But as we have Americanized our institutions and presidentialised the prime minister, we have done away with these things. We have made backbenchers part of the government, which undermines the confidence convention and make Parliaments look more like “fixed term” administrations. When even that wasn't enough, we actually established fixed-term election dates (one of the more ridiculous things ever grafted on to the parliamentary system), and its chief accomplishment has been to help drive polarization and partisanship to new heights.
We've destroyed ministerial accountability, both internally to government by centralizing decision-making on major files in the PMO, but also by having the PMO appoint all ministerial chiefs of staff. We've destroyed it externally, by making ministerial resignations for malfeasance, negligence or blinding incompetence more rare than solar eclipses. All of this solely serves the purpose of emphasizing the belief that the state is itself reflected in the personage of the prime minister.
That was never supposed to be the job. Prime ministers are not supposed to have this much power. The house they live in is not supposed to be a matter of importance and debate. This isn’t how our system was supposed to work, and that’s a big reason why, today, it’s not working.
For some of this, it is right to blame the United States. We have a political and media culture that glorifies American news and politics. Partly as information. Certainly as entertainment.
We don't consider how our systems are different. How they were meant to function differently. We import their problems and their excesses right along with their inspirations and their benefits.
As a result, we have a bad case of Graft-Versus-Host disease in Canadian politics.
Maybe this was inevitable. I fear a reversal is effectively impossible. But every time you think something is broken in our politics, there's a reasonable chance that somewhere along the way we changed a process, removed an accountability measure, or simply disregarded the way it was supposed to work in the first place.
Mitch Heimpel has served Conservative cabinet ministers and party leaders at the provincial and federal levels, and is currently the director of campaigns and government relations at Enterprise Canada.
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com