Transcript
Welcome to today’s Pearson Center webinar and a discussion on governing Canada. My name is Francesca Yacourto, and I’m a board member with the Pearson Center. I’m also the Senior Director of Public Affairs at the National Airlines Council of Canada. However, before we start, I’d just like to take a moment to recognize that the Pearson Center is headquartered on the traditional lands of the Algonquin Anishinabe peoples. As you may know, the Pearson Center is a leading progressive think tank that addresses the big economic and social challenges of the day. Over the past year, we have held over 60 webinars, which have been attended by some 10,000 people. All webinars are available on YouTube, including today’s webinar, which will be posted by tomorrow. We are proud to say that we are the only think tank that has included representatives from all five federal parties, the top business, labor, and civil society leaders, and many other experts. As we like to say, we bring people and ideas together.
And now, a very special thank you to all the donors and sponsors who make these events possible, and particularly to our sustaining sponsors, which include Canada’s Building Trades Unions, the International Association of Firefighters, and MFSEO, Ontario’s Professional Employees.
And now, very briefly on the format: we will be having a discussion with our special guest for about 30 minutes before we turn the floor over to you, the audience. So, please use the question box that’s on your screen, and we will get to as many questions as we can before we wrap up at 3:45 Eastern Time.
I’m now absolutely delighted to introduce our special guest, who is Michael Wernick, the 23rd Clerk of the Privy Council, who has just written a book entitled Governing Canada: A Guide to the Trade Craft of Politics. He has had a long career in the federal public service, having served three prime ministers, both Liberal and Conservative, and having been a Deputy Minister and Associate Deputy Minister before taking on the role of Clerk in 2016, a position he held until 2019. Michael Wernick appeared at a Pearson webinar last year in a discussion on the role of the public service in dealing with the pandemic. So, in that context, I take this opportunity to welcome him back to the Pearson podium. He will be in conversation with Andrew Cardozo, who, of course, is the President of the Pearson Center.
However, before I turn the floor over to Andrew, I will take this opportunity to ask a question directly to Mr. Wernick, if I may, which is: I’m hoping you can expand on the reasons for writing this particular book as opposed to a memoir-type of book. Could you just provide us a few thoughts on that?
Sure thing. I mean, my glib answer is this one will sell better, but the real answer is, memoirs can be an interesting insight into a particular career or period. But, given the role I was in, I mean, my best stories I’m just never going to tell. That required, you know, the confidentiality of the cabinet room or direct conversation with the minister or prime minister. And, you know, I was in those situations, in those conversations, because people trusted me to keep those conversations confidential. So, to rush and write a tell-all memoir, as common practice in London and Washington, would have breached that, and I just don’t think that was something I wanted to do and wouldn’t be good for my successors. You don’t want ministers and prime ministers worrying if, you know, that guy in the corner is going to be writing a book five or six years from now.
Okay, well, no, that’s a great way to set the table for the conversation that we’re going to have with you for the next, you know, 45 minutes or so. So, on that note, I will turn the floor over to Andrew to continue the dialogue.
Thanks. Thank you, Francesca.
So, Michael, I want to probe on a couple of those things that you talked about and see if we can open the door a little bit to the cabinet room. So you’ve been—and you know, you’re a big boy, you’ll tell us when you can’t answer a question, but I’ll ask them all to say— you’ve been, like, cabinet. When you—and just physically, when you say the guy in the corner, is that where you and other senior officials would normally sit in a cabinet room? How does—what’s the layout of the room?
Yeah, actually, that is a metaphor. The Clerk actually does have a desk in the corner of a rectangular room. All the cabinet rooms tend to be sort of long rectangles with a long oval table. The Prime Minister usually sits at the middle of one side, and there are a variety of people sort of perched around the edge of the room. In the old room on the Centre Block, in one of the corners on the Prime Minister’s side, there’s a little desk, and that’s where the Clerk sits. It’s kind of reminiscent of some of the Tudor movies and TV series that you would see, where, you know, while the King’s Council was meeting, there was some guy with a cap and a feather quill taking notes and was the, you know, the Clerk of the King’s Private Council. So, the role is one that goes back about seven or eight centuries. If they don’t give you a quiver quill and a cap, they said, “No, no,” but the performance management was harsh in those days; execution was sometimes.
So, tell us a little bit more about cabinet meetings without talking about any particular government or Prime Minister. What would one see, and what would we be surprised to see?
You’ll have to read—you have to buy the book and read it to get some of the nuance. But, I think Canadians would be surprised to see how lively and dynamic a lot of the discussions are. There are meetings of the full cabinet under most governments. Some Prime Ministers prefer to use the full group as their main decision-making and sounding board. Other Prime Ministers have used a kind of an inner circle, a Priorities and Planning Committee or something like that, to have a smaller group around some of the core decisions. But, cabinet is also a lot of committees, working groups, task forces around specific themes or issues. A group may come together around something very specific like COVID or Afghanistan or whatever and meet and then disband after the issue kind of dissipates. So, the room is kind of a metaphor for a lot of conversations that take place, including the full, you know, full cabinet. It plays a very big role because it’s the ultimate decision-making body on the executive branch of our government, and that’s where the decisions get made on what laws to put to Parliament. There are a lot of things that, you know, that the executive branch does—appointments of various kinds, regulatory issues, transactional issues, and so on. So, I mean, no two meetings are exactly the same. Some of them are kind of business-like and transactional, and you grind through a lot of items. Some of them are crackling with, you know, high drama and a sense of history, really big decisions being made that’ll change things. Sometimes they’re in a really good, jovial mood because their fortunes are high, and sometimes they’re stressed and cranky because things are not going well for them. Some of the conversations are just a kind of political round table where, you know, something happened—oh, there was a change of government in Ontario yesterday—what does that mean for us? Or there are issues going on in the caucus of MPs that need to be aired out. So, some of it’s just a very fluid political conversation. Sometimes the Prime Minister comes back from an international trip and will give them a little bit of a sense of what happened while, you know, he was off at the, you know, at a summit or a meeting in another capital and so on. So, no two meetings are exactly the same, but they’re all purposeful and important. And I think, you know, just to sort of go back to the beginning, they’re often very lively conversations. Like, there’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of give and take, strongly held positions sometimes, and the outcome is not predetermined. I’ve seen items turned around and rejected; I’ve seen items nudged, you know, towards one direction or another. Sometimes they’re fairly clear options on the table: go this way or go that way. So, you know, they do have an impact on what happens.
So, far to say, in general, cabinet meets once a week, and most of the committees meet once a week. Things have to go through a committee to get to cabinet. That’s the main flow of things. Each Prime Minister will set up the system the way he or she wants it to. That’s one of the prerogatives of the Prime Minister is to set up the flow. I do describe it a little bit in terms of plumbing and hydraulics. You can usually, when there’s enough time, items will come up through a committee system, you know, where they’ll get a form of due diligence, both on the politics and on the policy. They may take one or two cracks at it at a committee before it’s deemed ready to go to the full body, you know, cabinet, and then get ratified. And sometimes, because all that due diligence and homework has been done before, there’s not a lot of discussion at the full cabinet table. But sometimes, you know, stuff happens, and the first opportunity to really talk about it is at the full cabinet.
You’re quite right, and one of the things I try to get across in the book is the time management that’s involved. Cabinet generally meets when the House is sitting, although they, you know, they do make use of retreats and meetings, you know, during the summer and break periods. So, if you met once a week, you’d probably get in about 30 meetings. It gives you maybe 100 hours, you know, to allocate to everything.
Uh, and if you have, you know, five or six committees going, you can maybe add another 100 hours to that before you completely tie down your ministers. So, it’s about somewhere between 100 and 200 hours available to you to take all the decisions that are required, and there may be two or three hundred things come at the government in a given year. So, time management, flow management, actually is part of the art of governing. Yeah, now in your book, you provided advice to ministers a number of different ways. What’s the advice you give to ministers in terms of speaking at cabinet? Because you’ve got currently a cabinet of 39, but, you know, the last couple of decades, cabinets have been generally over 35 people. If everybody speaks at every meeting, they’d never get their work done. So, and I’m sure there’s some people who just like to talk about everything. Do you advise them to talk less or more? Yeah, I mean, I actually talk about fairly clearly, and I’m not the only one who would say this: less is more, and be concise and be to the point. And if you don’t have anything to add, don’t—you know, you don’t need to intervene. Anybody who’s been on a board of directors, you know, or governance of a community organization or an NGO or a university board, or anyone knows that the people that talk too long all the time and never come to the point lose influence. So, over time, some ministers become the ones that are listened to. Like, you can almost hear everybody’s, you know, leaning over to see what that particular person has to say. It may be because of their substantive knowledge; it may be because of their political acumen. But cabinets usually, you know, sort out into the ones that have, you know, some influence and become—I’m using a metaphor from the 2020s—like the influencers in the group. Yeah, yeah. You’ve got a chapter in the book, or a section, that talks about the cabinet-making puzzle. So, that’s the puzzle that the prime minister has every time he or she is putting a cabinet together. And we just saw a cabinet that was formed recently by the new government. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve talked about in the book there.
Well, it is a bit of a puzzle, and it’s a constrained puzzle for all kinds of reasons. When you are the prime minister, it’s one of the most important decisions you make is who to put around that table and who to give particular roles to. Who you want to chair the committees is an undervalued skill, you know, because of all that, you know, and due diligence. Some people are really gifted meeting chairs, you know, and others not so much. So, I mean, the prime minister is going to be sort of juggling so many different variables, from, you know, gender and geography and professional background, and factions in the party, and who supported whom in the last leadership race, and on and on and on. But they tend to approach it, as well, as many organizations would, as, you know, a development over time. The first cabinet you pick is not going to survive very long. There will be people coming, going, leaving, and so it’s part of a larger talent management process that successful PMs have, and their offices, of grooming the next wave of finding people in the back benches and committee chairs and parliamentary secretaries, keeping an eye on best-before dates. When are people likely to leave? How likely are, you know, and so on. So, it’s a roster or a team that a prime minister develops over, you know, over time. And I think the cabinet that I attended the swearing-in of—over half of them were gone by the end of the first mandate, you know. And so I looked up the numbers at some point. I think Prime Minister Harper went through about 60, 63 ministers in nine years, and Prime Minister Trudeau is already up to about 60 ministers in six years. So there’s a lot of turnover of personnel.
Yeah, yeah. I think—I also did the math of the current cabinet and the current government, and I think there were only 11 ministers currently who were in the first cabinet, and actually only one minister, other than the prime minister, who has the same portfolio from day one. And so there’s a lot of churn. One of the issues you talked about, and certainly which is talked about a lot in Ottawa, is control from the center. The center. Tell us a little bit about that. Now, let me just preface it by saying the current prime minister has talked about the fact that there has been an increasing centralization, which started coincidentally in the cabinet of his father, Pierre Trudeau, and has gotten increasingly more centralized. What’s your sense of that?
I deliberately lean against that in the book. I mean, the narrative or the trope of, you know, the all-powerful prime minister and PMO telling everybody what to do, the comparisons to sort of the Star Wars Emperor commanding the drones, or, you know, MPs being described as nobodies or, you know, sheep, it’s not what I saw. I think every MP matters and every minister matters and has the potential to nudge and make a difference, and I go into why in the book. The other thing is, I’m not sure about this sort of trend. I think it’s very hard to see, you know, these things with hindsight. All prime ministers that I’ve read about exerted a pretty firm hand on their governments, going back to, you know, Johnny Macdonald or Mackenzie King. It’s just the continental context is different today. You know, in sort of 21st-century governments, there are more issues coming at you faster. I read a book about Mackenzie King last month, and it’s like a different planet—the amount of time that they had to think about issues, and there were fewer of them. In a modern government, you know, you’ve got hundreds of things coming at you. The pace is faster; the cycle time is faster. When I was sort of in the middle ranks of the public service, you know, you could think about months to get something ready for cabinet. I think a lot of my successors now get weeks, you know. And there’s a reactivity to 24/7 media, to social media, and so on. So, the need for some kind of coherence and coordination, I think, has got greater for any government of any stripe. And if you don’t exert some proactive control over who’s going where and doing what and then what sequence are things coming forward, then you will simply govern one day at a time in a reactive issue management mode, and suddenly your three or four years is up and you haven’t accomplished the things you wanted to do. So, I mean, I think a fairly firm hand in terms of coordination is absolutely necessary to be effective and to get things done as a government. So, you know, what you tend to hear from, you know, in the literature, the commentary, the people that are made unhappy, you know, they didn’t get their way or they, you know, they feel bruised and so on, and they tend to feed this narrative of central control and blind obedience. But, you know, I worked with the idea that Sheila Copps or Jim Prentice or Stéphane Dion, you know, were blindly obedient to the PMO of the day is just laughable. You know, effective ministers find a way to use these mechanisms of coordination, the, you know, the meetings and the processes of coordination, to play back into the so-called center. And I’ve seen—I was there when ministers talked the center into things or talked them out of things because these are two-way channels as well. So, if you know your staff and you have political acumen, a minister can influence the center. It isn’t a one-way flow.
So, but I think what you’re also saying is it’s not a one-shot deal. You’ve got to work at it over a long period of time to get people to—and use a lot of different mechanisms to get things happening.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some people start with a high degree of political capital from leadership campaigns or prior experience, but, you know, generally people can earn it fairly quickly and become very influential. The Harper cabinet was essentially all rookies, other than the, you know, the Ontario troika and Stockwell Day; none had been ministers before. And I got to watch Jim Prentice take to it very quickly and become an incredibly important and effective minister in that cabinet with no prior cabinet experience. So, there is something about, you know, just the talent and, you know, earning the respect, you know, becoming an influencer, becoming somebody who can, you know, speak up at a caucus meeting of MPs or at a cabinet committee and sway colleagues. And so, part of it is also ministers getting MPs on their side. They’re elected as a team, and their survival as a government, you know, depends on the whole team getting re-elected. So, a lot of what happens inside government is this interaction between the 30, 35 people that get to be ministers and the rest of the caucus. That’s part of the puzzle, you know, that we described earlier. The problem with making a cabinet is, you know, 150 goes into 30 once with 120 left over, and you need to, you know, find ways of using their talents, as you know, and to give them input because they are your antenna on, you know, all kinds of things, whether they’re specific issues or interests or the geography of Canada. You know, that, uh, the MP from Saskatchewan is there to bring a perspective, you know, how things are playing or what are of
concern out there. So, the prime minister is actually, you know, they need to spend a lot of time on caucus issues and listening to and engaging MPs. It’s a real time management challenge. They, you know, all the other hats that they wear tend to eat away at their time. And I think I’ve heard with every prime minister, after three or four years, there’s grumbling that they don’t give enough attention to caucus members. I think that’s part of the challenge of being in government.
What one of the issues I think that I find interesting is communications coordination. So, for example, you don’t want all your ministers going out and having press conferences the same day. You want to somehow control—or not control, but coordinate—the message that goes out. And the extreme examples that come to mind, say, on budget day and throne speech day, the rule is nobody else goes out and does a press conference.
That’s sort of the extreme, but on a day-to-day basis, the center, or somebody, has got to control how many people go out and do press conferences. Where does that become too controlling? Where the PMO not only says, “Okay, you can have a press conference on Thursday, and you’ll have one on Friday,” but they want to control what exactly the press release says? Well, it’s a judgment call, and some administrations have done it with a harder, you know, firmer hand than others. The test is probably where, you know, where do you have to pre-clear with somebody, like you actually have to show the speech draft to somebody and get it approved, or the press release, or the materials, or whatever it turns out to be? Or, you know, I need permission to go on the pundit panel show as opposed to a degree of trust and latitude. And then, you know, if you get into trouble, you’ll hear about it. But some PMOs and prime ministers give people more latitude than others. Some ministers earn more latitude than others. You know, they know their sure hands; they’re going to be able to handle media stakeholders, and they don’t need a lot of supervision. But, you know, the hard truth is they’re not always good at it. Some of them are accident-prone or clumsy, particularly good communicators, and they need some help. I guess the other layer to it is that, at the end of the day, the team has core messages and narratives that it wants to proactively, you know, get out there. It wants to hang hundreds of transactional decisions around, you know, three or four core stories about what it’s about and what it’s trying to accomplish and keep repeating those. That’s something all governments strive for: to be proactive and to sort of control, to some extent, you know, the flow of communications. And they never get there. It’s, you know, they’re always dissatisfied because they’re always also just reacting, and they don’t, you know, they don’t control, you know, how things, you know, are sent or received.
I think one of the things that’s changed, if I can just, you know, is that, you know, the days of the 70s and 80s, where the press gallery was an important, you know, mediator between politicians and the public, are long gone now. Politicians now can communicate directly with Canadians on social media platforms and things like we’re doing today. So, they don’t need, you know, the parliamentary press gallery anywhere near as much as they used to.
Can we talk a little bit about political interference? So, you had a section called “avoiding political interference,” where you’re counseling public servants to avoid, well, you know, you’re counseling political staff not to interfere with the governing of the bureaucracy. But I want to ask you about how that works. So, when a government is elected and, say, now we’ve got a new government, they’ve got a platform, a very political platform, which is outlining what the government’s going to do, how do you remain—how does, how do you, how did you as a clerk or deputy ministers or others remain politically neutral when, in fact, your marching orders were from a very political document?
Yeah, well, I mean, in a democracy, politics is not a dirty word, and there is no clean break between some antiseptic world of neutral public policy and, you know, the unseemly world of partisan politics. In a democracy, you know, we choose people to take decisions on our behalf, and they have a mandate, you know, which, as long as they have the confidence of the House of Commons, to keep pushing forward the things that they said they would do, and to make those decisions on our behalf, that’s, you know, the joy of being in a democratic system. One of the things I go through is that public service is not an independent, neutral order body. You know, in our system, it is part of the executive, and its role is to support the elected government of the day and to provide its best advice on how to deliver and move forward the things that, you know, that I put to Canadians. So, it’s not the place, in my view, and I know I get challenged on this, for the public service to say, “That’s a damn fool thing; you shouldn’t do it.” You earn the trust of the government of the day that you’re there to help support, you know, what they want to do and what they have the mandate to do, as long as you stay within the confines, you know, of a very elaborate legal framework.
So, I’m not sure. I mean, political interference is not a terribly useful term for me, and, you know, interfering in what Canada has built up, a whole set of mechanisms to separate partisan politics and favoring, you know, party donors and supporters and members in areas like public service staffing, the awarding of contracts, regulatory decisions about whether to approve a drug or a, you know, a pipeline project, those are insulated from partisan politics. And we have a very, very strong framework in Canada to do that. We have a very independent, you know, justice system; prosecutors and police are very independent from partisan politics, more so than a lot of other democracies, actually. And so, I think what people are going to, what’s in your question—I don’t put words in your mouth—are the advice function, the policy development function, right? But the issue for me that, you know, whether we have a carbon price or not is up to the elected politicians and voters. Whether we legalize cannabis or keep it criminal is up to, you know, elected politicians and voters, and so on and so on.
So, the public service takes those platform commitments, some of which are usually pretty general, and then works on the problem of how to deliver them. I remember one of the more urgent ones in 2015 was a campaign commitment that we would take in 25,000 refugees from Syria as fast as possible. So, the problem public service was not to say, “You shouldn’t do that, sir,” it was how are we going to deal with it? How, you know, are we going to set up the screening processes and keep the confidence of Canadians in terms of security and health and other issues and be effective and deliver that, which we, you know, which we were able to do? When they, you know, when they said, “We’re going to legalize cannabis,” and they said, “We want it done by 2018,” then that creates a whole set of issues for the public service, you know, in terms of making it happen and so on.
So, is there room for you as senior public servants to say, “You’ve made this, you know, promise X, but we really counsel you against doing that”?
Yeah, and I’ve had those conversations. And that’s part of the trust relationship, is that, you know, the trust that ministers will have in their deputies or the prime ministers will have in their clerks and the senior public service is not that they will tell them what they want to hear and make them happy all the time. It is that they will tell them what they need to hear, or they will get a solid analysis or due diligence or view. It could be about costing, it could be about implementation issues, it could be like, “We can’t do it that fast,” or, “If we do this, the IT systems will break,” or, “You’re forgetting about, you know, this potential impact,” legal, you know, “You’re gonna lose in court on a charter challenge,” this is, you know, “This is gonna, you know, annoy the Americans.” There are lots of things that the public service can bring to bear, but at the end of the day, it’s up to the decision-makers to take that advice or not.
Uh, I mean, one of the things that I would say that doesn’t make everybody happy either is, uh, you know, the public service advice is not always right. Uh, sometimes it’s full of, you know, assumptions and biases; it can be timid, it can be incrementalist, and it can be politically foolish. So, you know, a smart prime minister or minister gets public service advice and trusts that they will get a point of view and analysis, especially about, you know, implementation issues and workability and feasibility issues, but they’ll also get political advice. And, you know, they blend them together and ultimately make those decisions on our behalf.
Yeah, I want to remind you of the audience that we will be taking questions in a couple of minutes, so please send in your questions on the question box on your screen. Um, and before we do that, uh, one more question. Michael, is, in terms of Indigenous governance, um, since the Charter—well, since Confederation, but certainly since the Charter and various court decisions in the last few years—we’re coming to terms with the idea of nation-to-nation governance and all that. Is that, I mean, do we need to be rethinking? Are we learning how Canada is governed? And is there a fourth level of governance? Of government? That’s a huge topic, and I’ll try to respect the time. I think of it as a work in progress, and you’re quite right to flag, you know, the introduction of the Charter. One of the things I do in the opening part of the book is try to set the Canadian context—what’s unique about Canada. Because we watch too many TV series, you know, set in Washington or London or Canberra. Canada is a unique, you know, place, and one of the things that they don’t worry about in London or Canberra is a Charter of Rights. They don’t worry much about Indigenous rights either. And, you know, so, um, it is a work in progress. I’ve been over 30, I think, Supreme Court decisions, uh, shaping doctrines like honor of the crown and duty to consult and so on, and they have a big impact on the crown, the executive party, government. But it’s continuing to evolve, and, you know, these are unsettled matters of law and policy that will continue to be shaped. How much they affect legislatures and Parliament is a matter of some, you know, some discussion. And there’s a whole bunch of issues that, you know, we’ll have to wrestle with as a country, uh, respectfully and involving Indigenous people in, you know, one thing we’ve certainly learned is nothing, you know, nothing about it, nothing about us without us—that Indigenous peoples have to be involved in shaping laws, policies, and decisions. That’s a big challenge, and, you know, we have to get beyond sort of wearing orange T-shirts and goodwill and tackle some really tough policy and governance issues. Uh, you know, one of the things that I think is going to be a real challenge going forward is about half of the Indigenous people in Canada live in our cities and towns. You know, so what are the, you know, rights holder issues for an Indigenous person living in downtown Vancouver or Winnipeg? Uh, you know, let alone the issues on reserves and land bases and so on. Um, there are, you know, the Indigenous governance itself is a big issue, and that’s largely gonna have to be shaped by Indigenous peoples themselves. But they’re not immune to the laws of economics and spatial geography and economies of scale and, you know, principles of good governance and so on. So, I think we’ll see a lot in the 2020s around governance of Indigenous communities and peoples.
Yeah, and if you combine the Charter, the Supreme Court decisions, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, I think—and, and the right of a duty to have free, prior, and informed consent—that really changes how new governance quite fundamentally, doesn’t it? Yeah, it constrains the choices that those people around the cabinet table have. It constrains the choices, uh, that any specific, you know, minister or department or agency have. Uh, and that, you know, it’s going to continue to evolve, but it’s something that we’ve had to learn a lot about, uh, within government. When I started the DynaC in 2006, it was sort of, “Oh, well, there’s an Indigenous issue called INAC, they’ll deal with it.” Um, and one thing that’s happened over, you know, the last 15 years is it’s become something that all parts of government and all ministers and, you know, think about and have to, have to bring into their, you know, their decision-making calculations.
Yeah, okay, we’ve got a couple of questions, uh, coming in. And I, I just want to hold this up—make sure that people see this book we’re flogging a book here today. So make sure this, this is the book you want to buy. I will mention that it’s pretty much almost impossible to buy off the shelf these days; the first run is sold out, which means you want to get a copy. A couple of ways to do it is go to ubcpress.ca or onpointpress.ca, and, and you can probably buy a book through there. Otherwise, call your local bookstores, and they’ll happily reserve you a copy. Um, so I got, I think, probably the second-last copy recently in Ottawa. Um, but for all of you who want to give a Christmas present this book, you’ve got to get moving fast.
Um, okay, a couple of questions here. The one is on, um, cabinet documents. So, to what extent do memoranda to cabinet remain a key working document for decision-making? At the end of the day, they matter because, um, you— they represent the best advice of a minister or group of ministers on a course of action. They crystallize it; they, you know, they bring it to—otherwise you could just talk and talk and talk in an endless spin cycle. So at some point, you know, this, this reflects close enough, and, and I guess it gives me a chance to say it’ll always be imperfect information and an imperfect estimate of consequences. And governing is often saying, “Okay, like, you know, we wish we had more information, we wish you had more time; this is our best sense of the options we have and the considerations.” And it crystallizes it. So, you know, it’s kind of the journey more than the end product. It is getting to a clear, concise memorandum to cabinet or presentation forces people to think through what they want to do and how they want to explain that. So, you know, and the process of a memorandum to cabinet forces people to consult colleagues, to go get the legal advice, the financial costing, and so on. So it’s really about the journey to get there. Some ministers are diligent readers of every single page, and others will skim the summaries that we make sure, you know, are available. Um, but, you know, they, they are important in crystallizing, you know, what it is that people want to bring forward. And sometimes they’re, you know, they’re the product of a single minister; more often than not, they’re kind of a cluster, uh, you know, all the important issues of our day—climate change, Indigenous reconciliation, what to do about China—you know, these are multi-minister things. And, and it is getting two or three or four ministers aligned that is often the really hard work within government.
And is that getting better for things like climate change, the ability of several ministers and departments to work together? I think so, but I’m not, I’m not sure I’m the right person to, you know, to assess that. It is a trend, for sure, that almost every issue is multi-minister, and so we should kind of relax about cabinet shuffles and who’s got what title, because at the end of the day, they’re going to have to get together in groups and clusters anyway. You know, cannabis legalization, you’d need the Foreign Minister to deal with the Americans, you have the Public Safety Minister dealing with border issues, you have the Health Minister dealing with health screening and safety of the product, and so on. You know, the Justice Minister, obviously, on the criminal law and pardons and so on. So, you know, that’s a relatively simple example compared to climate change. I, you know, my sense is compared to the, you know, when I was a PCO in the ’80s or even my second or third time that we have become more skillful at, you know, juggling multi-minister clusters, bringing groups together around a working group and a task force, working a problem, bringing it to the group, and then disbanding the group. So a more shape-shifty, fluid kind of model of government I think has emerged.
Um, without naming names, have there been periods when, when there have been ministers who should be working together but can’t work together because there are personal problems between them? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And who deals with that? Is it you or the PM? Well, I think a little bit of both. Um, they’re human beings with different temperaments, personalities, backgrounds. There’s no guarantee that they’ll like each other. Sometimes they disagree about policy; sometimes they’re rivals to be the top dog in their region of the country. Some of them have leadership aspirations, and, you know, and on and on and on. There is a team solidarity, and one of the things the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister’s Office try to do is, you know, uh, cultivate a kind of team solidarity. Being under siege from the opposition really
helps deepen solidarity. Uh, you know, having a big sprawling majority with a lot of idle hands is probably not good for it, as you know, as we’ve seen in some parts of history. But there’s no, there’s no guarantee that ministers have to like each other, uh, or, you know, or MPs for that matter. But they, you know, they need to get to—they need to work together and find ways of working together. It’s relatively rare that it, the friction becomes a point of dysfunction, and they become newsworthy eventually. I mean, uh, you know, in town. So one of the jobs of the Clerk and one of the jobs of the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff is to keep an eye out for these and have the antenna and the listening to pick them up early. And I did a fair bit of what you would probably call mediation, you know, of talking to people and trying to smooth things out and trying to find ways where, you know, they could find a compromise or a path forward and so on. It usually works, but I mean, that is actually part of the role of the center that we were talking about earlier.
Yeah, and you talked in the book about the triangle between the minister, the deputy minister, and the Chief of Staff. So I guess the staff sometimes might be a good stand-in for the two. Chiefs of Staff may be easier for them to meet their ministers if there are rivalries or whatever. Yeah, I mean, it depends how serious it is.
I mean, they really don’t have to like each other. I mean, I was reading about, you know, the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown wars, and they govern for something like four mandates. I mean, it’s really a question of whether it becomes dysfunctional and stops the government from moving forward. PMO does a fair bit of this through the network of chiefs of staff, and so, you know, if a particular minister is being, you know, an issue because of being competitive or feuding or whatever, they will usually start by talking to the chief of staff and saying, “Look, this is a problem for the team; we have to do something about it. Try to find a solution.”
It does—what I got involved in more when I was clerk, you know, in some cases it was about a couple of cases where ministers were having trouble working together. There are a couple of cases where ministers just couldn’t see how they were going to get forward, and I was doing a bit of coaching in a sense of, you know, “Here’s a way that might, you know, might be more persuasive to your colleagues,” and so on. What I kept an eye on was the relationship between ministers and deputies, which can break down. You know, if the minister loses confidence in the deputy, I know that competent or providing good advice, then that can be terminal for the deputy, you know, and then they have to be moved, you know, out into another job ideally or out altogether.
So, if there’s serious friction between a minister and a deputy, it’s never the minister that’s moved; it’s always a deputy. Okay, we’ve got a number of questions; we’re almost out of time. We’ll go a couple of minutes if you don’t mind. You know, I hesitate to say, “Can you be brief?” because everything you’re saying is really quite interesting—very interesting. And you use your words sparingly, and they all have meaning, so I want to cut you short.
Your analysis of cabinets suggests that the quality gets better over time. So, do you have a better cabinet after, say, three to five years? I’m summarizing questions here. I think that probably depends on, you know, the length of your mandate and by-elections. Thinking back, you’ll note that most prime ministers use by-elections to bring in some fresh blood. You know, when you pick your first cabinet, you have no guarantee who the performers are going to be. Some are going to grow into the job, and some are going to decline over time. It takes a year or two sometimes to figure that out, and prime ministers are advised to be kind of ruthless about culling and renewing. You know, I guess there’s some metaphor in there, both, you know, sports teams and other walks of life as well. So, they have the opportunity to, you know, raise the overall quality and deal with performance issues and behavior issues.
But if you’re in a minority government situation where, you know, you’re turning every two or three years into an election cycle, you know, you may lose some of your best people or you may—you may lose some of your problem people. I mean, it works both ways.
A question about government relations firms. The questioner is of two minds. I think, both on the one hand, says they’re nervous about the power and the influence they have, but also that they do an excellent job with what they set out to do. What are your thoughts about the importance of, let’s say, government relations firms as well as advocacy groups?
Well, I mean, one of the proof points that ministers matter and MPs matter is there’s an entire industry that tries to get to them and, you know, bring them information and analysis and arguments and advocacy, either to go in a particular direction or just please pay attention to this particular issue or community. And I, you know, most of that is entirely healthy. You know, it’s part of a democratic process. Where it becomes unhealthy is if, you know, particular interests have special access, and that’s, you know, where we’ve got into issues in the past. But as long as the processes of government are open and relatively, you know, level playing field for people to, you know, to participate, the lobbying act is a strong discipline that those caught—you can’t just take somebody for lunch at highs. You know, now you’ve got to record contacts, and we know who’s talking to ministers and about what subjects and so on. So, I think that’s been very healthy.
I think, you know, I’d call it advocacy is fine. I think some of some firms are a bit naive; they think if they, you know, if they just get a meeting with the minister, everything’s settled, and it doesn’t work that way. And maybe my book will help, you know, convey—you may have talked to a, you know, a minister that, into the, you know, the rightness of your cause, but they still have to work the system, convince colleagues, you know, work with caucus. You know, all of the financial roads lead to the minister of finance and the budget process and so on, which I didn’t really spend enough time on in the book, I realized.
So, but I’ve also seen where, you know, you get to a particular MP and you raise an issue with them, and you give them good solid information on the kind of arguments that they would need, and they, you know, they pass a note to the minister at the Wednesday morning caucus, and then, you know, I used to have ministers come back from caucus meetings and say, “Here, what do you think of this?” You know, and often it was like, “Oh, I had no idea that was going on. We better do something about it.” So, it can be very helpful, the government, you know, to have that kind of input.
And you also need to be, from an advocacy perspective, you’ve also got to be talking to the public servants. Yeah, I mean, I think recognizing that their role is ultimately they’re going to worry about costs and legal issues and implementation, and, you know, they have work. They have a role to play. They often, you know, I think people—people that deal with the public service, you know, want a quicker answer and a quicker yes, but the public service’s role is to do the due diligence and, you know, provide the minister, you know, with the kind of analysis and information they need. So, you know, whether you’re a community group or an industry association or whatever, I think you need to work both sides. You know, provide your—but you’re not going to be very persuasive with the public service making partisan political arguments, and, you know, you have to—you have to have a solid case on public policy or implementation or whatever.
And then, you know, but then you also have to, at the end of the day, convince a group of politicians that this is in their political interest, and particularly here’s the messaging and the narrative and the story that you can tell about this initiative or this issue.
Okay, that’s about winding down. I think this is a good question: Does any government have an overarching strategy for what they’re doing, or do they lose their way? I think they try to, and they have core—I think it’s more they have core values or a sense of the country, the role of government and society and the economy, the role of the federal government of the federation, and those tend to be the anchor points with which they see various issues. Some people want bigger government; some people want smaller government. Some people want a very strong federal government; some people want strong provinces. And that’s the way they, you know, they approach issues fairly consistently.
They always start with the political platform, the legacy of whatever was left over from before the election, and then events and shocks. And most governments have a shock within a year or two. The Chrétien government had a global financial crisis, you know, in the peso crisis and junk bond status and blah, blah, blah. So, they had—they had to make fiscal, you know, situation a top priority. The Harper government in 2008 walked into the global financial crisis. The Trudeau government, you know, walked into a global health pandemic. You know, like shocks and surprises are a big part of what government responds to.
So, you know, the art in governing is being good at being responsive to those kinds of things but keeping some traction on the core things. You know, these are the core things we put to Canadians in the last election or we want to get, you know, we want to put to them in the next election. So, there’s a lot of multitasking. Governments are about being really excellent at that responsiveness but also keeping moving forward all those other issues. And it’s an enormous—it feels like constant multitasking with imperfect information under a lot of time pressure.
So, last question: What’s your pitch to young people who may be considering the public service? Is it something—is it a career to embark on going forward? Well, I think we’ve been very fortunate in Canada that generation after generation of, you know, talented people want to go and make a difference. They want a career with meaning that impacts their communities and their country. There are many ways to do that, you know, and going into elected politics is one of them. And, you know, there are plenty of ways to make a contribution.
I think Canada’s public service offers that ability to make a difference and support your community and make a better country. A lot of it’s very impactful. You know, we’re a successful country. We, you know, there’s a lot of things that we’ve got right and we continue to do well because we have strong institutions and governance processes and a robust democracy and so on, and go on and on about that. And the competent, non-partisan public service that’s good at, you know, advice and due diligence and implementation is a big part of that. If you’re a lawyer, a scientist, a geologist, an accountant, you know, whatever, an economist, some of the most interesting work you could do in your field is done by people inside the federal government. And it’s a big enough place that you can start in one area and move to another. So, you know, it offers hundreds and hundreds of different career paths and an opportunity to get to know the country. I’ve been to every province and every territory more than once, you know, and got to know this wonderful country and to travel to other countries on its behalf. And so, and lots of public servants get to do that.
So, it can be; it can be very… it can be frustrating; it can be bureaucratic. It can, you know, it’s not on—it’s not by many. You know, there are plenty of issues in the public service that we’ve talked about before, but, uh, you know, I would commend it as a career path. The other thing, just very quickly, is you don’t have to think of it as a 35-year commitment either. I think we’re going to have a more fluid public service where people come in for a while, leave, go and do something else, and, you know, in another part of the, you know, different, uh, area and maybe come back, right? So, I think, you know, the core permanent public service may become more open, softer, and people coming in to work on a particular issue for, you know, for a period of time. Okay, well, thanks very much. There are more questions coming in which we didn’t get to, but I want to thank you for your time. Uh, um, but more importantly, thank you for your service to Canada, and thank you for writing this book. Governing Canada is available in bookstores or online; get it soon, so you have it by Christmas or the end of the year. I just want to tell our listeners, we’ve got a few more sessions coming up in the next while. On November 17th, we’ve got a session on systemic racism, which will be in French, and on the 19th, we’ve got a session on overcoming racism. They’re both part of our ongoing series on the dialogue on diversity. And from December 6th to the 8th, we’ve got a fall conference looking at Agenda 22, the new parliament in government. So, please join us for all of those webinars that will be happening. Again, Michael, thank you very much, and thank you for writing the book. I hope you get a chance to talk to more people as you’re promoting it. I understand you’re not traveling; you’re able to do it all from right there.
I’ve done about 15 events, and I’ve got another 10 on the schedule, and I haven’t left this desk or this camera. It’s amazing because it’s 2021.
That’s right, because it’s 2021. Okay, well, thanks very much, and I’ve got to get that in the shop there. Okay, thanks so much, Michael. Thank you to the audience, and have a safe day. Cheers. Cheers, bye.