Has Gomery gone far enough?

It is a measure of how much the political culture of this country has changed that a judicial inquiry could propose the most far-reaching reforms to the structure of government in a generation, and the prevailing response is an approving yawn. Indeed, the sharpest criticisms of Judge Gomery’s proposed reforms came from those who felt they did not go far enough.

Was it just three years ago that the Prime Minister was openly defending the practice of government ministers intervening with civil servants to steer contracts and subsidies to friends and family members? As Jean Chretien put it, in one of his more memorable utterances, “why else be a minister?” Even as late as last year, Alfonso Gagliano was testifying before Judge Gomery that the problem revealed by the sponsorship scandal was that ministers did not have enough power to meddle in their departments.

So we are dealing with a profound shift in the culture of Ottawa: not just from a “culture of entitlement” to a “culture of integrity,” in Judge Gomery’s words, but from one characterized by a high degree of ministerial discretion -- and hence, boys being boys, of politicization -- to a more rules-based approach, in which politicians and civil servants are expected to keep their distance from one another.

Judge Gomery’s second report makes a number of recommendations, but in sum they would reduce the powers of cabinet ministers and their staff relative to the civil service, and of both relative to Parliament. Most particularly, they would restrict, at least to some extent, the powers and prerogatives of what has been aptly called the imperial Prime Minister, whose sole discretion in matters large and small is unrivalled in any advanced democracy.

Thus it would no longer be left to the Prime Minister’s divine finger to appoint the heads of all the Crown corporations, or the deputy ministers of every department. Deputy ministers would have better job security and more protection from political interference. In return, they would be held more directly accountable for the administration of their departments.

This is all to the good. Over the years, we have somehow allowed the concept to take hold of ministers as, essentially, functionaries, intimately involved in the details of their departments but with less and less real power beyond that. The governance expert Donald Savoie was only slightly exaggerating when he described cabinet as having become little more than “a focus group for the Prime Minister.”

It is the same managerial lens through which we now view the job of Member of Parliament. Whenever the subject of MPs’ pay comes up, we are informed of the long hours members put in dealing with requests from constituents: writing letters to various departments on their behalf, lobbying for government grants and so on. Well of course they do, their role as Members of Parliament, ie legislators, having been reduced to standing up and sitting down when they’re told.

We have a system in which the whole of the apparatus of government has more or less been subsumed within the executive: cabinet within the Prime Minister’s Office, the civil service within cabinet, and MPs increasingly resembling minor bureaucrats. That this top-heavy arrangement should have given rise to the kinds of widespread abuses witnessed during the Chretien years, of which the sponsorship scandal was only the most melodramatic, is hardly surprising. It may indeed be a case, as some have said, of a few bad apples spoiling the barrel -- but something was clearly wrong with the design of the barrel.

Judge Gomery has certainly put his finger on one part of the problem: that Parliament lacked the powers to hold both ministers and their department to account. And he is right to say that part of that problem lay in the fuzzy lines of responsibility between ministers and deputy ministers, allowing each to say that the fault lay with the other.

But has even he gone far enough to resolve that ambiguity? Under his reforms, deputy ministers would be empowered to object to ministers’ orders, and to register these objections in writing -- but ministers would be entitled to overrule them. Ministers, in other words, would continue to be involved in the hands-on business of managing their departments, albeit within stricter limits. The potential for abuse, while contained, remains.

Perhaps it’s time to look at a different model, based on a different relationship between the minister and his deputy: not hierarchical, but contractual. In New Zealand, ministers agree to a set of broad policy objectives with their department heads, together with a set of benchmarks against which to measure their success. But the departments are separate legal entities from the minister’s office, rather like Crown corporations: the minister has no power to order them to do anything. Rather, he purchases services from them on the public’s behalf.

Perhaps that’s too much to swallow at one gulp. The new Prime Minister has enough, as he says, on his plate already. But it’s something to think about in the longer term.