Show of force

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/07/2022 (1513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Donald Savoie, who holds the Research Chair in Public Administration at the University of Moncton, has produced another high-quality work in the form of Government: Have Presidents and Prime Ministers Misdiagnosed the Patient? Savoie studies the heads of government in four countries: the presidents of the United States and France and the prime ministers of Canada and the United Kingdom.

Savoie makes a strong case that what ails all four countries is that power is now concentrated in their heads of state. Surrounding them are what Savoie calls “courtiers,” a term used for those who served in the courts of kings and queens in earlier times. These are influential and powerful advisors who are neither elected nor hired from within the civil service.

These presidents and prime ministers, with support from their courtiers, are rarely challenged due to their many powers. These include making senior appointments, deciding who sits in cabinet, choosing policy priorities, shaping national budgets and launching new programs. In the meantime, the media fixates on these leaders to the exclusion of others in the political system.

Among Savoie’s previous works relating to this theme about “power at the centre” are his Governing from the Centre, which received much attention when it appeared in 1999, and Democracy in Canada which was published in 2019.

Together these earlier works show that commencing with Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, followed by others — including Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau — the Prime Minister’s Office’s budget and personnel have continually expanded, by-passing the need for prime ministers to confer with elected members of parliament or cabinet to get things done. According to Savoie, what was once termed “cabinet government” has ministers now reduced to serving as a “focus group” to test the PM’s ideas and decisions.

Savoie’s new work Government shows that this Canadian problem is also found in the U.S., Great Britain and France. And when things don’t get done, the bureaucracy is blamed. New measures to increase efficiencies have made matters only worse. This is what the author calls the “misdiagnosis.” That is, as power shifts from cabinet ministers to prime ministers and presidents, the civil service is set adrift. Those who once oversaw civil servants in their departments now must bend to presidents and prime ministers, their courtiers and central agencies.

As the civil service becomes increasingly ineffective, an erroneous solution is civil service reform and privatization. The rush in the 1980s to use the private sector as a model for improving the public sector was espoused by then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan and U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In Canada, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney privatized Petro-Canada and other Crown holdings. Furthermore, program reviews are now increasingly used to find efficiencies and cost savings, managers are set loose to find solutions in their own departments with little oversight and powerful central agencies regulate many areas of the public service, by-passing ministerial oversight over their own departments.

Decades ago there were many prominent cabinet ministers who oversaw powerful departments. Savoie writes how Canadian prime ministers such as Louis St-Laurent relied on C.D. Howe during the 1950s, and many will remember how Jean Chrétien relied on Paul Martin as his influential finance minister in the 1990s. He claims there are no such individuals in Justin Trudeau’s circle.

This might be an oversimplification. While government power is now focused on Trudeau, he is not without his vulnerabilities. It is doubtful that he would be able to ignore finance minister/deputy PM Chrystia Freeland if their views differed. Another case in point is that of prominent B.C. MP, lawyer and Indigenous leader Jody Wilson-Raybould, and her departure from cabinet which was triggered by differences with Trudeau over the SNC-Lavalin case. The political fallout was apparent in the 2019 federal election, with a drop in B.C. voters for the Liberals going from 35 per cent in 2015 to 26 per cent in 2019. Trudeau’s image was also tarnished among Indigenous and women voters.

Regardless, Savoie ably shows the consequences in all four countries of what happens when power is overly centralized. Morale is low among civil servants, with many skilled and experienced individuals no longer seeking careers in the public sector.

In the meantime, according to public opinion polls, trust in government institutions has been declining. This is certainly a different scenario compared to the 1950s and 1960s, when citizens looked to their governments to develop innovative solutions to complicated national problems.

Christopher Adams is an adjunct professor in political studies at the University of Manitoba and rector of St. Paul’s College.