AUGUST 2004
by Barry Stagg
Donald Savoie's book on public administration in the Canadian federal government is aptly titled 'Governing From The Centre'. This text, published in 1999, makes profound and serious statements about the present state of parliamentary government in this country. Professor Savoie's conclusions are chilling in their matter of fact way: "Cabinet has now joined Parliament as an institution being bypassed....There is no indication that the one person who holds all the cards, the prime minister, and the central agencies that enable him to bring effective political authority to the centre are about to change things."
'Governing From The Centre' is about the public service and is not a book that focuses on the political science of Canada. But, by doing so, the book establishes that the supposed science of governing in federal Canada is little more than a contemporary variation on the art of holding power articulated by one Niccolo Machiavelli a few centuries ago.
The most telling declaration in the book is made in one of the early chapters: "Members of Parliament in our system are not elected to govern. Rather, they are elected to hold those who govern accountable for their policies and decisions". This bald statement of legislative impotence and absurdity colours the present view of twenty-first century Canadian politics.
So there it is, a casual but learned dismissal of centuries of hard fought democracy: Parliament is reduced to the role of a civic audit committee. Small wonder that the media and the cognoscenti hold forth with so much similarly dismissive scorn on the subject of the uselessness of elected Members of Parliament. Trudeau's "nobodies" seem increasingly to be an adjunct to the autocracy of a prime ministerial politburo.
What indeed of the accusation that Canada has a de facto prime ministerial politburo. Professor Savoie is direct in his indictment of the state of affairs in Ottawa: "The power of appointment in government, much like the expenditure budget, steals the stage. In the federal government, the power of appointment is firmly in the hands of the prime minister and the clerk of the Privy Council...This gives the centre enormous power and influence. In most western countries, this power is shared."
Professor Savoie is pointing out an absurdity that operates in ruinous practice. Emasculating parliament furthers the collectivist governance of the prime minister, his cabinet and the civil service. If this endures then Canada has a de facto autocracy along socialist lines.
Consider this premise: The more internal government management emulates socialism in practice, the more the nominally democratic society at large tends to socialism through statism and an immovable governing cabal.
Robert Conquest in his book 'Reflections On A Ravaged Century' had this to say about statist overemployment: "Any increase in the number on the government payroll beyond a certain point is parasitical on society." He also provided a damning summation of much of the governmental busywork which Professor Savoie conveniently lays out for public viewing: "Activity for the sake of activity, or for the public appearance of activity, is to be found throughout British and American politics".
Savoie's exquisitely neutral observations and Conquest's brilliant cautionary interpretations of Western society are succinctly measured in this comment, derived from the Polish poet Adam Wazyk , put to powerful use by Professor Conquest: "A thousand imbeciles, a thousand bureaucrats and propagandists and sophists, do not become possessed of some mystic collective wisdom simply by being formed into a political organization".
The obvious is sometimes ignored and it seems that the apparent over-government of Canada is being ignored by two very important groups. The first group consist of the governors themselves who persist in perpetuating dense variations on statism. The second group are voters. But, let's call them citizens instead. Citizens are accepting governance that feeds itself first. That Canadian failing is akin to ratifying a so called civil society that uses the dubious chivalry of 'women and children last'.
'Governing From The Centre' provides the Canadian prism through which is seen the same wasteful, self-serving bureaucratic nonsense that Conquest skewers in the larger context. It is as if the government of this country has been given over to a suffocating strain of the New Corporatists named by Conquest. His definition of the New Corporatists is "a varied caste of bureaucracy, large scale capitalists and government". A more profane description is that of a nefarious methane-powered monstrosity, fuelled by the gas generated from its own excrement.
Back to the 2004 Index
Boswarlos Review
Learned Links
Barry Stagg Law
Firm