Canadian prime ministers have more unhindered freedom to rule than presidents of the United States, prime ministers of the United Kingdom, or leaders in almost any other parliamentary democracy. The powers Canadians give to their prime minister are so many, varied, and beyond accountability that it is immediately understandable why political analysts use phrases such as “imperial democracy” and “friendly dictatorship” to describe the reality of the Canadian system.
Canadian prime ministerial powers fall into two main categories. The first is the ability of the prime minister, backed by their staff in the Prime Minister’s Office—the PMO—and the Privy Council Office—the PCO—to direct and control what happens in government and in Parliament. The second is the astonishing unchecked power of patronage Canadians give their prime minister to appoint all the leading figures in the country’s public life, judiciary, and administration.
These powers have become even more potent in recent decades as the culture of celebrity leadership has taken hold. As a result, demands for accountability that should come from Parliament have eroded into dust. A key part of this process is that Canadian prime ministers have become surrounded by a praetorian guard of formidable and often intimidating political agents and civil servants. The PMO is made up of the prime minister’s partisan courtiers whose role is to promote and sustain his political success. It is often their role to be menacing and demanding so that the prime minister doesn’t have to dirty his hands. The job of the PCO, staffed by civil servants, is to ensure that the government ministries and their armies of officials follow and achieve the prime minister’s policy agenda. The PCO is inhabited by the brightest and best from among the members of the civil service and is the place where likely candidates for advancement are placed on temporary secondment to test their mettle. It is a highly competitive organization that is also an exclusive club of the favoured. PCO officials are constantly looking over the shoulders of government ministers and often have more influence about what happens in a department than does the elected member of Parliament assigned as minister.
In describing such a political system, it is a wonder that international organizations monitoring the health of democracies continue to place Canada as high in the rankings as they do. In 2023, the Economist Intelligence Unit placed Canada twelfth in its rankings of world democracies, sandwiched between Uruguay and Luxembourg, in an index where the Nordic nations, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Taiwan cornered the top ten. Other organizations such as the right-wing Freedom House in the US and Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance continue to judge Canada a top-notch democracy.
These organizations, of course, tend to look at what happens in the run-up to and during elections, not what they produce. What Canadian national elections actually produce is a leader with powers that can be compared with those of an eighteenth-century European monarch. One or two Canadian prime ministers have been called “the Sun King” for this very reason.
The prime minister’s patronage power really comes into its own outside Parliament. It starts with the de facto head of state, the governor general. This in itself is extraordinary, bordering on the bizarre. The head of state represents Canadian sovereignty and the soul of the nation well beyond the limits of politics. That this symbol of the nation should be chosen by one politician defies sanity, not least because there are moments in the life of any parliamentary democracy when the head of state has to make profound political choices. This usually happens when no party wins a majority in an election and it falls to the governor general to decide whom to ask to form a government. It is a moment when the country needs to have absolute trust that the governor general’s choice is not a repayment for past favours. And yet, since this appointment devolved to Canada with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, the post of head of state has remained a gift of the prime minister. Prime ministers of both major parties have never shrunk from using this power of appointment to bolster their own views on the nature of Canada, which have sometimes been at odds with the perspective of the country’s mainstream.
In 2012, then prime minister Stephen Harper made a stab at removing the smell of patronage from the process. He established the Advisory Committee on Vice-Regal Appointments, which was given the responsibility of vetting candidates for both the post of governor general and of lieutenant governors for the provinces. Harper was criticized for appointing a “tight circle of monarchists” to be members of the committee. They consulted widely with various groups across the country and produced a list of five candidates for the governor general’s post. He chose David Johnston, an academic who had an association with the Trudeau family but also history with the Conservative Party. Johnston led an inquiry into the Airbus affair in the 1980s in which then prime minister Brian Mulroney was accused of accepting bribes from the European airline manufacturer competing to supply Air Canada.
Harper’s vice-regal selection committee was disbanded by the Liberals when they returned to power under the leadership of Justin Trudeau in 2015. Trudeau’s first choice without the help of a committee was disastrous. He picked former astronaut Julie Payette, who resigned after allegations of a toxic work environment at Rideau Hall. After her resignation in 2021, Trudeau was heavily criticized for not having her properly vetted. He appointed a six-member panel called the Advisory Group on the Selection of the Next Governor General. This ad hoc group came up with a shortlist from which Trudeau chose the Inuit activist and advocate Mary Simon, who became Canada’s first Indigenous governor general.
There have been arguments made in the past that the governor general should not be an object of partisan patronage. It has been suggested that the governor general, or at the very least the candidates for that post, should be chosen in private by a parliamentary committee. Perhaps Canada should go the whole hog and have the House of Commons, as the elected representatives of the Canadian people, pick the governor general. A system that might work would be to have a parliamentary committee or, as in Harper’s time, an advisory committee, put forward two vetted candidates. Members of Parliament could then have a free vote by secret ballot. There are many other ways in which the governor general could be chosen that would be more communal than continuing to allow the head of state to be the choice of one person. The task could be given to a reformed Senate, or it could be assigned to the provincial premiers and heads of territorial governments as representatives of Canada’s diversity. Governors general could even be selected by a committee of members of the Order of Canada chosen by lottery.
It is a similar story with the prime minister’s power to appoint the justices of the Supreme Court. There have been efforts, by Harper in particular, to involve parliamentary committees in the selection and vetting of candidates for the Supreme Court. But the committees had no veto power. The selection of Supreme Court judges remains the prerogative of the prime minister. In the same way, the prime minister appoints the head of the Canadian military, the chief of the general staff, and other key senior officials, including the auditor general, the information commissioner, and the ethics counsellor. Also at the prime minister’s patronage are the heads of Crown corporations, of which there are about fifty. These bodies and the leading positions at the prime minister’s bequest include the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Bank of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, Export Development Canada, the National Capital Commission, the Royal Canadian Mint, and Via Rail.
Some of the prime minister’s powers of appointment directly involve the working of Parliament. There is the appointment of cabinet ministers and members of the Senate, of course, but there are also other positions that influence the way Parliament works that in Canada—though not in other democracies—are in the patronage of the prime minister. The most pernicious is the allocation and appointment of the chairs of parliamentary standing committees. An attempt was made to change this in 2002, when the standing orders were changed to require the election of committee chairs. But the party whips have taken control of the process by ensuring that only candidates acceptable to the party leaders get nominated. More than that: as it is not a secret ballot, the whips know who, if anyone, voted against the prime minister’s candidate. MPs know that defying government whips too often blocks their route to advancement. This leaves the impression, and sometimes the reality, that these committees, whose job it is to examine and question government policies and actions, are under the thumb of the prime minister.
The ideal of a parliamentary democracy is that members are elected primarily to represent their constituents and should have the freedom to pursue that duty, even if it clashes with party or government policies. In other parliamentary democracies, it is common for MPs to refuse to accept orders from government or party whips to vote the way leaders want if the issue at hand involves conscience or is beyond partisan politics. One of the reasons the bill to patriate the Canadian Constitution from Britain got held up in the British parliament in 1981 and 1982 was that British MPs still have a high degree of independence. Even a prime minister with the authority of Margaret Thatcher knew that she couldn’t demand unquestioning support for the bill from her Tory backbenchers on a constitutional issue. British MPs consider constitutional matters their domain, where the leader should not try to demand party loyalty.
Then prime minister Pierre Trudeau and the officials in his office were astonished and incredulous when they came up against this very different parliamentary culture forty years ago. MPs in Canada, especially on the government benches, are simple spear carriers in the legions of the prime minister. The reason for this is the celebrity culture that has taken over Canadian politics, especially at the national level but also in many of the provinces.
Political parties are now defined by the public’s perception of their leader. A political party’s brand is not so much the policies it espouses as it is the public image of the leader. This is a very dangerous development born of the age of visual communication. It is a gift for charlatans and demagogues. No better evidence is the election to national leadership of Boris Johnson in Britain and Donald Trump in the US. Both men were swept into power because enough voters thought they were supporting the characters both men played on television. In both cases, the TV characters played by Johnson and Trump bore little or no relationship to reality.
Former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole summed up his view of what has happened to Parliament in a speech in the House of Commons in June 2023. “Performance politics is fuelling polarization,” he said. “Virtue signalling is replacing discussion. And far too often we are just using this chamber to generate clips, not to start national debates.”
The accumulation of extraordinary power in the hands of Canadian prime ministers over the past fifty years or so has inevitably led to ethical corruption. Canadian prime ministers no longer feel the need to be accountable to the Canadian public—to accept responsibility for their actions and to resign if they have breached the bounds of what is normally considered ethical behaviour. The contrast with Britain is profound. There, Johnson was ousted by his own backbench Conservative MPs because of his inability to tell the truth about almost anything. He was also hauled before a House of Commons ethics committee to face allegations that he and his staff had breached his own government’s restrictions on social gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than that, Johnson had then lied to the House of Commons about the incidents.
Trump was not brought to heel in the same way, but he was impeached by the House of Representatives twice. He was saved only because, when tried in the Senate, the votes to remove him from office did not reach the required two-thirds majority. He still faces accountability for paying off a porn star with whom he had an affair, a multitude of charges and court cases in various jurisdictions over his attempts to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, and his absconding from the White House with scores of highly classified documents.
That sort of thing doesn’t happen in Canada. Prime ministers are never held to account for ethically questionable actions. Perhaps worst of all, backbenchers in the House of Commons no longer see themselves primarily as representatives of the people who elected them and therefore owing prime loyalty to the interests of their constituents. Canadian MPs see loyalty to their party and its leader as their duty beyond any other. A 2020 study by the Samara Centre for Democracy found that Canadian MPs vote as they are instructed by their party whips 99.6 percent of the time.
The imbalance of power and influence that has grown between the prime minister and both houses of Parliament needs to be reversed. A new relationship needs to be established in which the prime minister is beholden to the House of Commons and which reaffirms the role of MPs as, primarily, the representatives of their constituents and whose voices have political legitimacy.
Let’s remember for a moment what a prime minister is. A prime minister is a member of the House of Commons who can gather and hold enough support from fellow members to be able to form a government. And that person can remain prime minister only so long as they retain the support of the majority of the House of Commons. As well as being a servant of Parliament and of their party’s caucus, prime ministers and opposition party leaders should be servants of their political parties.
Political parties, however, are not what they once were. The increasing sophistication of political polling and marketing strategies—sometimes more imagined than real—has usurped much of the mechanics of political organization and campaigning.
Until relatively recently, the numerical strength of local party membership gave a reasonable thumbnail picture of the strength of the party as a whole. Vibrant constituency associations spoke of local involvement, of ideas and influence bubbling up from the grass roots, an army of workers ready to join the ranks of election campaigns, and, of course, fund raisers willing and able to grease the wheels of the party juggernaut.
Canadians wishing to be personally involved in politics, however, have got the message that, in their political interests, as for some of them at their workplace, they have been made redundant by technology. Canadians have concluded that the party establishments have little interest in hearing directly from citizens with their thoughts and observations. Pollsters and focus groups tell parties what people are thinking. So people are staying away in droves from formal association with political parties. Fewer than 2 percent of Canadians now belong to political parties, and it is this 2 percent who choose party leaders under the existing systems.
What political parties have failed to grasp is that Canadians have disengaged from participating in politics and are increasingly hesitant to vote because they feel themselves unwelcome outsiders in the world of politics and government. Surveys of Canadians show they are not apathetic about politics. Far from it. But they feel that they are excluded from the whole process. More than that, the belief has taken hold among many Canadians that the political system is not working with their concerns or interests in mind.
I have become convinced that the key to unlocking the barriers to repairing our democracy is to dismantle this electoral system that revolves around the celebrity and curb appeal of a handful of individuals. If Ottawa worked as it should—if it worked as a representative system based on discussion and resolution of communal issues—then the other problems with the Canadian polity and federation can be overcome. In a country of immense diversity, no other democratic model will work. Fundamentally, the overriding problem for Canadian democracy is the unaccountable power that has gathered into the hands of the prime minister. Until that problem is addressed and redressed, until a sustainable working relationship between the prime minister and Parliament is restored, no tinkering with the other levels of our institutions will work.
Adapted and excerpted from On Canadian Democracy by Jonathan Manthorpe. Copyright © 2024 Jonathan Manthorpe. Published by Cormorant Books Inc., Toronto. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
