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The Prime Minister: The Americanization of Canadian Politics

The Canadian and American systems of government are very different. Although both, at least theoretically, are functioning democracies, the framers of the American Constitution rejected the Westminster style of parliamentary democracy in favour of a republic with a formal separation of powers. Whereas no member of the U.S. Congress can serve in the executive (both Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton had to resign their Senate seats in 2008 to serve in the executive branch of government), it is almost unheard of, although constitutionally permissible, for a minister of the Crown not to be a member of the legislative branch.

Responsible government, by practical definition, ensures that the executive cabinet is comprised of, but distinguishable from, elected legislators. This fusion of the roles ensures a very powerful and dominant position in the job of Canadian prime minister.

A prime minister is both the head of the executive government and his party’s chief spokesperson in the legislature. Given his predominant position in both the executive and legislative branches, he has no equal in a congressional system based on a separation of powers.

As noted earlier, eminent constitutional expert Peter Russell has remarked that to be a prime minister in a majority Parliament is like being a U.S. President without a Congress.[1] There are few practical checks on prime ministerial power and certainly none of them are housed in the Parliament Buildings.

A prime minister, supported by a caucus that holds a majority of seats in the House of Commons, is, if he chooses to be, an elected dictator for the duration of that Parliament. His government’s agenda will find no opposition in the House of Commons; private members’ bills and Opposition motions, meanwhile, will pass only if they receive the thumbs up from the PMO.

As we have seen recently, even the unelected Senate is not immune to the PMO’s influence and attempts at control. Realistically, a prime minister who has appointed over half of all sitting senators is unlikely to find any checks and balances in the house of sober second thought either.

A prime minister’s authority is further consolidated by his seemingly unfettered power of appointment. The governor-general-in-council, the constitutional term for the cabinet, appoints all senators, all superior court judges, including those appointed to all appellate courts and the Supreme Court of Canada. The prime minister formally appoints all members of his cabinet and the parliamentary secretaries to approximately half of the ministers. The cabinet then appoints the heads of all Crown corporations, the chairs and members of all government boards and commissions, all deputy ministers, all ambassadors, and all of the officers of Parliament, such as the auditor general, the chief electoral officer, and the privacy and ethics commissioners. Finally, the prime minister appoints or delegates the appointment of all members of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office.

The prime minister may not be the head of state, but the U.S. president, who is head of state and shares responsibility for many of the above appointments, must have many of those appointments ratified by the U.S. Congress. A Canadian prime minister’s power of appointment is subject to no comparable legislative ratification, although officers of Parliament are perfunctorily approved by the assembly.

As a result, the office of the prime minister is all important and dwarfs the importance of all supportive and secondary offices and positions. The late Jim Travers, in an excellent essay, remarked: “It is his clear and credible view that between elections, prime ministers now operate in the omnipotent manner of kings. Surrounded by subservient cabinet barons, fawning unelected courtiers and answerable to no one, they manage the affairs of state more or less as they please.”[2]

This has even been demonstrated in the nomenclature of government communications. The current government is fond of referring to itself as the “Harper Government” in government communications and press releases, as opposed to the more familiar and, I would suggest, appropriate, “Government of Canada.”

This trend has evolved to the point that election campaigns are almost exclusively leader driven. Whereas the media will travel thousands of kilometres covering the respective leaders’ tours, the rest of the candidates will go largely unnoticed unless they fall prey to a gaffe or blunder.

Undoubtedly, the best predictor of the results in any constituency election is the popularity and effectiveness of the campaign of the leader under whose banner the candidate is running. Elections are determined largely on voters’ impressions of national leaders, gleaned from national media sources. Many pundits and strategists believe that over 90 percent of the electorate make their voting decision based on some combination of their impression of the party and the party leader.

It has been suggested, sarcastically, that the candidate is a hood ornament in the election campaign, making a difference perhaps in a close electoral contest. How else do you explain the fact that several NDP candidates were elected in the Jack Layton “Orange Wave” without spending a dollar on the campaign and some not ever having been to their riding?

I understand this concept quite well. In the 2001 Alberta election, I was a replacement candidate. Nominated literally days before the writ was dropped, poorly organized, and not well financed, I was given little chance of successfully carrying the PC colours in 2001. However, in that election, Edmonton, for the first and, to some extent, only time, warmed up to Ralph Klein. His coattails were wide enough to provide me with a five- hundred-vote plurality in Edmonton-Calder.

However, by 2004, Edmonton had again turned on Premier Klein. Many long-time Capital Region MLAs went down to defeat, and despite the fact that many media commentators and constituents rated me as an effective representative, I was defeated in another three-way horse race. Ralph Klein’s coattails carried me into the Alberta Legislature and they carried me out again three and a half years later.

Our elections are so leader-centric that most Canadians believe they directly elect their prime ministers and premiers. Of course, we do not; each of us elect a Member of Parliament and a member of the legislative assembly. It is the support that the respective party leaders enjoy amongst those legislators that will ultimately determine who has the confidence of the House and therefore can serve as first minister.

Meanwhile, MPs, who should understand that the prime minister is chosen based on the support they command in the House, play right into the Americanization of our polity by becoming “invisible.” Compliant and loyal MPs are invisible in the sense that they become indistinguishable from their party and their party leadership. They worship at the altar of their leader in weekly caucus meetings and praise the leader’s successes and downplay his or her failures in between. MPs have transformed themselves into servants of the leader rather than serving as a check on the leader’s authority and a constructive critic of his or her policies.

This eventually becomes a vicious circle: with MPs indistinguishable from their party leadership, it is natural that the electorate will make a voting decision based almost exclusively on their feelings regarding the party leader.

It is perhaps because many Canadians erroneously believe that they directly elect the prime minister that they are so tolerant of the consolidation of near ultimate power inside that office. But in a functional democracy, we would not witness such an increasing concentration of power and control. Nor should we tolerate such limited accountability or lack of transparency.

Power and control are increasingly concentrated, and accountability is practised more often in theory than in reality. Pierre Trudeau once famously referred to Members of Parliament as nobodies and Stephen Harper told the National Post in 1998 that “the average backbench MP is little more than a benchwarmer for his or her political party.”[3] That level of condescension would more appropriately be found in monarchs than in democratic leaders.

In the last half century, successive prime ministers have gradually, but inexorably, consolidated power in the “centre.” They have freed themselves from the restraints that once bound them to the voters, Parliament, cabinet, and even their political parties. All institutional checks on prime ministerial power are compromised, strained, and breaking, if not broken.

This situation is a long way from what was envisioned by the democratic reformers who fought for responsible government in the 1830s and 1840s. They rejected the idea of a Family Compact or ruling aristocratic elite. Similarly, the Fathers of Confederation rejected a presidential system of government. Instead, they opted for a Westminster model, where the prime minister would be accountable to a democratically elected legislature, not the lord over it. The degeneration of that system to one where the prime minister is subject to no effective checks or balances has been a slow process, and it is one that will be difficult to reverse.

It is clearly easy, as many MPs do, to support the status quo and ignore the system’s obvious deficiencies. However, others recognize that our democracy is at a precipice and have taken measures to try to redress the imbalance between the power of the party leaders and their parties, and between appointed prime ministers and elected Parliaments.

An important initiative to rebalance the relationship between a party leader and his or her political party, and by logical extension the relationship between the prime minister and Parliament, was tabled on December 3, 2013. The Reform Act 2013,[4] if adopted, will be a game changer. It will, to some extent, restore an appropriate balance to the Westminster model of Parliament as it exists in Canada. It will promote responsible government by making the prime minister accountable to a parliamentary caucus, not the master over it.

The Reform Act 2013, if passed, will establish three mechanisms common in the British parliamentary system of government, but conspicuously absent from the current Canadian adaptation.

The bill, introduced by Wellington-Halton Hills MP Michael Chong, will amend the Elections Act to take away the much maligned section of the act that mandates that a party leader sign the nomination papers of prospective candidates. This early Trudeau-era amendment to our election laws fundamentally altered the relationship between riding associations and their candidates or representatives, and, more damaging to our democratic institutions, the relationship between a party leader and his or her caucus.