Canada’s democratic institutions are on trial: Savoie
2015/08/15 1 Comment
Donald Savoie on the broader implications of centralization and the ever-growing role of PMO as highlighted in the release of PMO emails during the Duffy trial:
Governing from the centre first took shape under Pierre Trudeau. It has only grown in scope and intensity since. We have reached the point where our national political and bureaucratic institutions have lost their way. We see evidence of this everywhere – voter participation has been drifting down for the past 40 years or so and our national public service suffers from a worrisome morale problem. Why bother voting if what matters is decided by economic and political elites talking to one another or through lobbyists, and why bother generating well-thought and evidence-based policy advice, knowing that there is no political market for it? Why bother trying to manage operations as competently as your private sector counterparts when you are told to avoid all risks in the interest of managing the blame game?
Canadians are paying a high price for this state of affairs. Governing from the centre tosses aside not only Parliament but the voice of the regions as well. Governing Canada as it were a unitary state in a country as geographically and economically diverse as Canada is fraught with danger. Not only are regional ministers now a relic of Canadian political history, provincial premiers are left on the sideline, talking to one another with little influence on national policy.
The state of Canadian democracy and the health of our political institutions require the attention of Canadians and our political leaders. They cannot be relegated to a segment of the leaders debate. Sound public policies and the ability of Canada’s regions to work toward a common purpose are tied to our political institutions.
What the 450+ pages of e-mails reveal is the sorry state of our institutions. An upstairs-downstairs to governing and treating our political institutions as an appendage of the PMO is fraught with danger for democracy, for national unity and sound public policy and for the pursuit of the public interest.
Canada’s democratic institutions are on trial – The Globe and Mail.
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Donald Savoie’s use of “governing from the center” is, for this reader at least, initially confusing. I thought he meant governing from the political center, whereas what he means is the absolute dominance of the Prime Minister and the PMO over all other institutions. Is this uniquely Canadian or is it a general tendency? And did the Charter of Rights contribute to this evolution by making it necessary to scrutinize all bills to make sure they were – are – consistent with the Charter and will not be subject to appeal and declared in conflict with the Charter. Is the concentration of power a result too of short-term thinking in which political considerations dominate over all other considerations, and of the demagogy required to run a spoiled but stressed consumer society where the very ideas of community and ‘collective sacrifice’ have become unmentionable, so that the ‘message’ to the skittish, self-centered, and spoiled pubic has to be continually controlled and ‘massaged’? It is notable, I think, how much of the present electoral campaign avoids in-depth issues (with some exceptions), avoids any idea of sacrifice, on the whole, avoids any mention of the long-term, or of Canada’s responsibility in the world. Slogans and buzz words replace debate and analysis. People are no longer thought of as adults, or as citizens, but only as rather self-centered and infantile consumers in an atomized society, to be blandished and seduced and misled. For such PR programs to work, control from the center, the PMO, is probably necessary. That said, the paranoia, anti-intellectualism, demagogy, evasiveness, and obsession with ‘controlling the message’ of Mr. Harper’s regime is quite exceptional, and I think is a function of his ideology, personality, and small-town parochial Machiavellian approach to politics, and all of this is perhaps a function of an increasingly limited crabbed idea of what the national interest is and of what this nation is and of what it can be, which is why I found Justin Trudeau’s rather lyrical paean to Canada, which was rubbished by the pundits, rather courageous and refreshing. It reflected an idealism and ‘vision’ which has long been lost – and that has been our loss too. So think I.