In the past week, we've heard two separate complaints about how Cabinets are chosen once in response to Doug Ford's first Cabinet shuffle in the wake of a sudden resignation, the other as part of Alberta MLA Robyn Luff's expulsion from the province's NDP caucus.  In both cases, you have sitting members of legislatures complaining about how Cabinets are formed, and the amount of control that first ministers have when it comes to who gets to be a minister in any particular government.  The problem with their complaints, however, is that they miss some of the fundamental aspects of how our system works.

In her post-expulsion press release, Luff made a number of very valid points about the way in which Westminster parliaments and legislatures are being run, especially around message discipline and some of the strong-arm tactics that are used to keep elected members in line.  But she also made one particular suggestion that was entirely, for lack of a better term, crazy-pants:

I believe there needs to be a transparent process for hiring cabinet ministers.  Given that I have been told qualifications and skills have nothing to do with being appointed to cabinet, and that a way leaders control MLAs is that they decide who is promoted, if there were an independent panel that interviewed and chose Ministers from the pool of elected MLAs it would serve to both remove power from the Premier and to have the most qualified elected officials serving the people of Alberta.

First of all, the notion of merit in Cabinet appointments should be unpacked, because there is a pervasive notion that someone's pre-political expertise should qualify them for Cabinet in one way or another.  This can be problematic, however, because it can set up some wrong-headed expectations.  For example, the health minister shouldn't necessarily be a doctor, nor should the defence minister be a veteran in part because it can expose ministers to capture by their stakeholders.  It can help, mind you, and we've had successful ministers who have hailed from their professions but we've also had some real duds.  I think in particular of Gordon O'Connor, whose previous military experience was hailed when he was made defence minister, but as a Cold War general responsible for the war in Afghanistan, he made a number of procurement choices that were geared toward the Cold War rather than a counter-insurgency.  That was clearly a problem.  (The exception is that by law, the Attorney General must be a lawyer because they are also responsible for providing legal counsel to Cabinet).

Cabinet, in our system, is very much about managerial competence.  It's about overseeing a department, and deciding on what advice the non-partisan civil service provides that your government will follow, and to oversee implementation.  Above all, it's to be the person responsible for that department to the legislature or Parliament, the face of accountability.  Whether an MP or MLA has the ability to be accountable is as much an important consideration for the job as is one's academic or professional credentials.

We should also not forget that a Cabinet post is also a very political one, and while there is a certain amount of reward that is associated with handing out positions, we have to also remember that in the Canadian contexts, we have internalized a number of factors into how Cabinets are constructed.  While at the federal level, federalism is an important aspect that has been essential to the nation-building character of the ministry since Confederation, there are nevertheless regional dynamics within provinces that demand representation as well.  Diversity, whether linguistic, gender, or ethno-cultural is important for symbolic reasons as well as the fact that diverse management makes better decisions.  This has been proven in the corporate world, and it's true in politics.  We also know that when corporate boards insist that they're hiring on "merit," diversity gets ignored, which is why we have more legislation coming into force around the country that forces boards to increase diversity or explain why they haven't.

Beyond this, we have to also understand that there needs to be a high level of trust involved in the selection of Cabinet ministers because of the demands of Cabinet solidarity and Cabinet confidence.  These are sacrosanct principles in our system of government, and it's extremely important to ensure that you have a Cabinet that can speak with a single voice in public.  Opening up selection to some kind of "open" process would also presume that it becomes difficult to remove ministers as well, which can undermine those same principles of solidarity and confidence, especially if you develop rivals within the system.  Which isn't to suggest, of course, that we've been free of Cabinet rivalries, because Trudeau/Turner/Chrétien/Martin were a dynasty of Cabinet rivalries and successors which has been exacerbated by our bastardized system of leadership selection, but we also have to remember that in the UK and Australia, rivalries within Cabinet have toppled prime ministers.  And while federal politics can impose a certain level of maturity on this process, not every province is as capable of this.

The final point to make here is that a first minister, be it a premier or a prime minister, is responsible for the affairs of government.  The ability to pick and choose Cabinet ministers keeps the accountability centred on him or her, and that is extremely important for our system of government.  If we turn that power over to some independent panel, as Luff suggests, we not only undermine the ability to hold a first minister to account, we're also obliterating our own ability to be self-governing.  It becomes yet another situation where we might as well shrug and say "Well, we gave Responsible Government the college try and it hasn't taken," and then let the Queen pick Cabinet ministers once again.  I'm not sure that anyone wants this, so we need to remind ourselves that there is a purpose as to why first ministers have this power.  Yes, it lets them assert power over their caucus, but it is also incumbent upon backbenchers to exercise their duties rather than sucking up in the hopes of a Cabinet appointment that will never come.  Luff tried to exercise her duties and was punished, but it remains up to voters to judge Rachel Notley for it, as the accountability rests on her shoulders.

Photo Credit: The Atlantic

Something peculiar happened on Monday from the Alberta legislature, where a backbench MLA on the government side decided that she's had enough, and sent out a press release stating that she will be boycotting the legislature because of a culture of "fear and intimidation" within the provincial NDP caucus.  It's a bold move, and one we've never actually seen before.  Usually, MPs or MLAs who get fed up usually wind up crossing the floor, either to another party where they feel they will be better appreciated, or to exile themselves to the nosebleeds as an independent, where they can make the odd grandstanding exhibition now that they have been freed from the shackles of party discipline.  The move to stay within the party but to stage a protest like this is unusual, and has me wondering if this will start any conversations within political caucuses anywhere else in the country.

The MLA in question, Robyn Luff, made a litany of complaints in her release, which include the fact that all votes must be at the direction of the leader, that questions from government backbenchers to ministers are written by the ministries and given to them to be asked, that any members' statements deemed "inappropriate" result in those MLAs losing the ability to make future statements, and that all decisions about who can speak to bills in debates are made by the party's leadership.  More to the point, statements and questions for committees are scripted ahead of time, and any MLA who goes against these orders face loss of privileges, being removed from committees, losing their speaking times in the chamber, and eventually being warned that their nomination papers won't be signed.  Luff further went on to note that she had private members' bills edited to change their original intent, and that she was told by a Cabinet minister that her career had been sidelined because she didn't jump when a chief of staff told her to.

On the one hand, part of me wants to shrug and note that this is pretty much par for the course these days, whether in Parliament or at any number of provincial legislatures.  We are very much in an era of message discipline, and this kind of message lockdown is often used to avoid embarrassment from their own side, which parties have used to varying degrees of success.  What I find to be particularly heavy-handed here, however, is the revelation that private members' bills were redrafted by the party leadership as opposed to whichever law clerk mechanism that the provincial legislature uses, which seems to be a fair amount of overkill amidst all of the other ways in which a backbencher is being put on lockdown.

As much as this may be business as usual, I would also note that the level of discipline here does seem to be indicative of the internal culture of the NDP, particularly given that a lot of the senior staff in the Notley government did come from Ottawa after their years of experience while in the Official Opposition.  If you recall some of the revelations in the Samara Canada study of MP exit interviews, there was talk about the culture of solidarity within the party that demands that all members act in lockstep, and as one former MP stated, "if you're not 100 per cent a team player, you're evil."  That a Cabinet minister told Luff that she had been sidelined for not being sufficiently responsive to staffers looks to confirm that this culture extends to the provincial NDP as well as the federal party.  As well, a former member of the provincial party, Karen McPherson, who left caucus to sit as an independent before joining the centrist Alberta Party, confirmed the bullying culture as one of the reasons why she left as well.

On Tuesday morning it was announced that the NDP decided to indeed expel her from caucus, and this will no doubt give Jason Kenney and his United Conservative Party fodder to make political hay of this, in order to portray his party as so much more open and accepting of a diversity of opinion than the NDP.  By expelling her, the NDP essentially proved her point that they would not allow her to represent her own constituents, which again could blow up in their faces if she can generate enough public sympathy for her attempts to do the right thing as an MLA.

I will add that while she is making the point about representing her constituents, the more unspoken aspect of this is that Luff's inability to ask her own questions to the government in Question Period is directly interfering with her ability to do her constitutional duty as a backbencher of holding the government to account.  "I have had to fight for months for the ability to ask my own question in QP, and have been questionably removed from a committee," Luff wrote, which is fairly damning because this goes to the heart of what she was elected to do.

Given that the NDP decided to make an example of her, it should be a blow to the party, deservedly, for undermining the very purpose of the legislature.  But one also has to wonder if Luff's bout of defiance will spread to other parties, legislatures, or even levels of government.  The kinds of control she cited are common elsewhere, and we've seen examples of MPs or MLAs being expelled for being wilful Steven Fletcher being one particular example in Manitoba.  It would be great if we had more MPs and MLAs embrace their constitutional roles and resisted total party control, but they need better education, and to have each other's backs when they do go up against their party leaders.  Let's hope Luff starts some needed conversations among our elected representatives, for all of our sakes.

Photo Credit: 660 News