Last week, prime minister Justin Trudeau finally released the mandate letters for his new ministers, weeks after they were appointed, and they left me with more questions than I had before I read them.  In particular, I am left with a great many questions about how these new ministers are supposed to operate within our Westminster framework of ministerial responsibility that is, being responsible to parliament for the conduct of their departments.  If most of these new ministers don't actually have departments of their own, just who are they responsible for when things go wrong?

What quickly becomes apparent when reading these mandate letters is how much they are cross-disciplinary, and more to the point, most of them don't have line departments that they are necessarily responsible for.  Some of the replacement ministers for line departments such as fisheries, infrastructure, or natural resources all have aspects of their mandate letters that detail which other ministers they should be coordinating with when it comes to implementing certain programs or goals.  To a certain extent, some of this is natural in this era of increasingly complex files and more horizontal governance.

Political scientist Donald Savoie has noted that the increasing horizontalization of power known sometimes as "whole of government" makes locating power increasingly difficult, and given this particular government's abundant use of "whole of government" slogans to many of its programs, it makes what Savoie noted in his book Power: Where Is It? salient to what is happening with this shuffle and the resulting mandate letters:

"Call it what you will horizontality in Canada, joined-up government in Britain, or collaborative government in the United States the objective is the same: to promote an interdepartmental perspective to deal with increasingly complex policy issues."

And we see a lot of that with the letters, but where it's most prevalent are with the new departments created out of this last shuffle, primarily borders security and organized crime reduction, small business and export promotion, and seniors.

Small business and export promotion, led by rookie MP and now minister Mary Ng, tasks her with leading work on export mobilization with the support of the minister of international trade diversification, and to support said minister on trade strategy with small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as working with the ministers of labour and innovation, science and economic development (ISED), finance, Treasury Board, and heritage on various other files.  While it's likely that Ng's own work is largely centred under ISED under the small business office that was located there (with its tourism side now split off and given to Mélanie Joly for her to take on along with official languages and responsibility for La Francophonie).  But how does she answer to parliament on behalf of a department for these aspects of her job that are cross-departmental?  When Public Accounts or another committee wants to call in the department to answer questions about their programming, does she become responsible for more than one line department in how they implement their programs if they're spread over more than one ministry?

Likewise, with the new seniors ministry. Filomena Tassi's first priority is described as "Lead work within Employment and Social Development Canada on seniors programming, including the New Horizons for Seniors Program and benefiting from the work of the National Seniors Council.  You will also support work across the government with Ministers on initiatives that impact seniors."  But she also has to support the ministers of finance, ISED, labour, health, justice, and public safety for various programs that she's being asked to implement.  One presumes that she'll be located within the ESDC department, but her work touches on any other department that has a seniors' component, so where does the accountability lie?

The biggest question remains with Bill Blair, the Minister of Looking Tough on Stuff err, "Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction," which is basically a minister without portfolio.  The mandate letter showed him as not having any responsibility for CBSA, the RCMP, or Immigration and Citizenship.  Instead, he has particular responsibilities and files that he is either leading or supporting for the ministers of public safety, immigration, foreign affairs, transport, health, and justice, and he retains the legal cannabis file along with dealing with the opioid crisis, pre-clearance for travel with the US, gun control, organized crime and gang violence on top of the irregular migrant file that isn't really a crisis, but this government is sure trying to make it look like there is one by assigning Blair to the file.

So who does Blair answer for when he stands up in the House of Commons, or when he is called before committee?  He's not actually responsible for a line department, so what does this mean for the practice of accountability within a Westminster, responsible government framework?  Which ministry does he hold sway over?  And this is where things get tricky, because when you start having more than one minister who has responsibility, then bureaucrats can start playing them off of one another, and that's where I would have some serious concerns.

More than anything, these new marching orders make me wonder where things are headed in Canada, where we went from a ministry of one under Stephen Harper, and increasing centralization under both the Privy Council Office and PMO, to one where Trudeau's cabinet government seems to go in the opposite direction of diffusing power to such an extent that it becomes largely intangible.  The question then becomes whether this diffusion is a certain amount of smoke and mirrors that masks the ongoing centralization of power that simply wears a new guise, or whether this is an exercise in horizontality that has made the location of power and the exercise of accountability to be so nebulous that it is virtually impossible to be meaningful.  And while ultimately, leadership dynamics in our bastardized system will still rest ultimate accountability with Trudeau and his office, the fog in the layers of hierarchy below him make for a troubling new dynamic in how power is distributed and exercised in our system of government.