Work and Plans

A colleague once reported “deliberate progress,” a welcome change from other modifiers.

On the go: two distinct projects on ministerial responsibility in Westminster systems. My view is that Canadians, at least in federal Canada, do not quite know how to work the set of rules handed on to us in the British North America Act. The media and many academic commentators seem to believe that “democracy” is built only on transparency, requiring only full disclosure of which ministers influenced what decisions – and the same for public servants, of course. Thus one project is a re-examination of ministerial responsibility starting with my own thoughts from the 1980s, and taking in recent welcome contributions on Canada and other Westminster systems.

The second project is more painstaking and thus even “deliberate” progress is difficult to achieve. I hope soon to turn to some of the outstanding problems in a project begun with my colleague, Christian Rouillard, soon after the Gomery Inquiry was set in motion (Professor Rouillard is Canada Research Chair in Governance and Public Administration, in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa). We anticipated that the testimony political and public service witnesses gave before the Gomery Inquiry could provide insights about their understanding of how intra-executive relations and ministerial responsibility should work and do work. We have summarized our analysis of how the Inquiry attributed responsibility for the crude fraud that characterized the sponsorship events (Rouillard and Sutherland, 2006), plus some other pieces. In the present work we are looking for documented insights on what those in “the system” think is correct and reasonable in the realm of ministerial responsibility.

So far we have produced a content analysis of witnesses’ explanations relevant to ministerial and official responsibility and accountability – extracted from the entire body of testimony generated by the Inquiry in its first year. We have conducted a formal content analysis on key words and phrases. However, this being an Inquiry conducted by a judge who is not a public law specialist, there is less profound questioning and thus fewer careful principled responses than one might have hoped, but still enough to be worthwhile. Our eventual analysis will probably be punctuated with observations from House and Senate discussions of the Federal Accountability Act. These observations depend on reading, for there is no single searchable (machine-readable) file of all the testimony on the Act.

We believe all work on testimony, no matter how small the yield, can make a useful contribution to our knowledge of our own political culture because our leaders tend to remain silent about how things should work and do work. In other countries, Britain leading, former ministers explore their experiences in useful and often-critical books. In Canada, disappointed ministers tend to remain silent on the cabinet system and the prime minister of the day. The lack of a significant continuing public education in the constitution and its conventions – in how our form of government works – leaves the Canadian institutional framework at regime level frighteningly vulnerable. Appointed officers and even happenstance players importing reputation from other fields are seen elected exercising scarcely comprehensible power to obtain various opaque but “doable fixes” in processes as central to politics as supply.

(Miscellany of Photographs © 2007, S. L. Sutherland)