An NDPer is launching a Quixotic bid to rein in prime ministerial power, but he certainly has a point
By this point in his tenure, Trudeau has picked the majority of the justices on the Supreme Court. He has picked the majority of representatives in the Senate. He’s even picked his ostensible boss, the Governor General.
Not one of these appointments was subjected to oversight by the House of Commons. When Michelle O’Bonsawin was picked for the Supreme Court last August, she didn’t have to face a single official question about her extremely limited judicial experience.
Similarly, there was no public vetting process for Trudeau’s appointment of Governor General Julie Payette. If there had been one, they probably would have uncovered evidence that Payette had a history of not getting along well with staff.
Unfettered executive control over the civil service
We’re not quite done with the sweeping appointment powers of the prime minister, because they also get unchecked control to decide who heads up the more than two hundred agencies and Crown corporations under the federal umbrella.
The Canadian civil service is ostensibly different from the U.S. civil service in that it isn’t headed up by openly partisan operators. A U.S. president will openly install political appointees to head up everything from the National Science Foundation to the Environmental Protection Agency, often treating the appointments as patronage no different than an ambassadorial post.
The Prime Minister’s Office doesn’t do this on paper, but that’s often the effect after enough positions have come up for renewal. For example, Isabelle Hudon was an advisor to Trudeau before he appointed her as head of the Business Development Bank of Canada (where she quickly ran up a bunch of questionable expenses on a plan to remake the insititution “from scratch”). And when the Harper government felt like shaking up the Canadian Museum of Civilization, they found a CEO who would do it for them.
Control over when Parliament convenes
When Joe Clark won a minority victory in the 1979 federal election, he waited four months after his appointment as prime minister before convening the House of Commons. Thus, for one third of 1979, Canada was effectively under the command of a man whose party had only won 35.46 per cent of the popular vote – and hadn’t even bothered to convene Parliament to hear from the representatives of some of the other 64.54 per cent of the country.
But Clark didn’t really have any obligation to convene the 31st Parliament if he didn’t want to: He could have kept unilaterally exercising the substantial executive powers of his office until the country ran out of money or bureaucrats stopped showing up to work, whichever happened first.
No prime minister has ever gone quite that rogue, but there are multiple examples from history of prime ministers proroguing a parliament that wasn’t acting to their satisfaction. In 2008, Harper prorogued Parliament to head off a planned no-confidence vote by the Opposition parties. More recently, Trudeau prorogued Parliament in 2020, instantly dissolving a probe into the WE Charity scandal.
In much of the rest of the democratic world, this kind of behaviour would be abhorrent to the point of inspiring riots. In Germany, the Bundestag tells the Chancellor when they’re meeting, not the other way around. The National Congress of Brazil convenes at the same time each year, regardless of what the president has to say about it.
This is a power that is arguably more advantageous even than the ability to prorogue Parliament at will. Whenever a prime minister feels like it, they can dissolve the entire government and plunge everyone into an election campaign for as long as they feel. The Canada Elections Act prescribes minimum election lengths (36 days), but there’s no maximum length other than the fact that the Constitution Act now requires Parliament to convene every 12 months. Stephen Harper called an unprecedented 78-day election for 2015 in an apparent bid to burn out the opposition in time for election day, but there’s really nothing stopping a prime minister from calling a marathon 365-day election (during which, naturally, they’d continue to exercise executive power).
From the beginning, prime ministers have been pretty shameless at using snap elections to acquire political power: Wait until your poll numbers are good and the opposition is in shambles, and then try and lock in a five-year mandate. That’s what Trudeau tried to do with his snap 2021 election, which did indeed coincide with a temporary peak in Liberal poll numbers paired with a disorganized and ill-funded opposition – but the gamble ultimately didn’t work.
IN OTHER NEWS
The Canadian health-care debate often devolves into a simple discussion over whether it’s better than the U.S. alternative (while ignoring the vast realm of non-U.S. countries with socialized health systems that are exponentially more efficient than Canada’s). Well, the U.S. system got a pretty glaring point in its favour this week when the Government of B.C. announced that wait times for radiation treatment had gotten so bad that patients would now be sent to cancer centres in Washington State at public expense. The irony of the program, of course, is that it remains illegal for British Columbians to buy health insurance that would allow them to obtain radiation treatment in private hospitals outside the public system. However, that same public system is now sending British Columbians to seek treatment in private hospitals outside the public system – provided they first cross an international border.
Last week, the National Post’s Adam Zivo broke the story of how Canada’s plan to provide addicts with “safe supply” was instead making the overdose crisis worse in almost every way. Almost every addict receiving safe supply was reselling it to obtain harder illicit drugs, with the result that the black market was being flooded with dirt-cheap opioids provided free by Canadian taxpayers. Global News sent a reporter onto the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to see if Zivo was right, and within 30 minutes that reporter was easily able to score a baggie of hydromorphone (an incredibly potent opioid) still in its government packaging.
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