This past weekend, CBC Radio's The House had an interview with political science professor Donald Savoie about his latest book, Democracy in Canada: The Disintegration of our Institutions. While I haven't yet read this work, I have read several of Savoie's other books, which are largely centred around the same theme of centralized power within the PMO (to the point where he is largely accused of re-writing the same book over and over again). The notion that our country is a mess where essentially nothing works is, frankly, beyond hyperbolic, but there were a number of points in the interview that I wanted to dispute because I think we need to have a robust dialogue about the state of our democracy and institutions, and I'm not sure that Savoie's prescriptions necessarily fit the problem.
One of the things that struck me early on in the interview was the way in which Savoie used Energy East as an example of why federalism doesn't work in this country that somehow, this pipeline was "blocked" because it wasn't seen to benefit Ontario and Quebec (as his supposition is that federalism only benefits Central Canada). This is, of course, utter bollocks, and frankly, Savoie credulously believed a bunch of spin from the premier of his home province of New Brunswick without actually bothering to look into the reality of the pipeline. The truth is, of course, that the proponent withdrew the proposal when a more viable pipeline Keystone XL, which they also own was back on the table after delays by the previous American administration, but it also needs to be stated that the economics of the pipeline were not what many of its boosters claimed it would be it was never going to provide energy security and western Canadian oil for eastern Canadian markets because the price differential was simply too great, even if there were refineries capable of handling its heavy crude in the east (which there are not). No province blocked the pipeline, and it has nothing to do with the state of federalism. For Savoie not to understand that is actually fairly alarming.
Savoie's interest in federalism is certainly laudable for a scholar of Canadian politics, but he seems to fall into more narrative traps, particularly where the Senate is concerned. Savoie seems to think that if the Senate were organized into regional caucuses that it would somehow "give voice to regional circumstances" as though it can't currently. He also uses the bogus example of the National Energy Program in 1980 as an example where the Senate would allegedly have blocked it, which is simply untrue. Even if there had been a US or Australian-style Senate in place, it was unlikely that the Alberta and Saskatchewan senators would have the votes to block it as the energy-consuming regions had dwarfed them. Former Senator Lowell Murray addresses this very issue in an essay he contributed to the book Protecting Canadian Democracy: The Senate You Never Knew (edited by Senator Serge Joyal) Murray was in the Senate for the NEP vote, and it was not opposed by senators from Alberta or Saskatchewan. The notion that a US or Australian-style Senate (or the mythical "Triple-E" notion) is no panacea for the perceived lack of regional influence in the Senate as it exists a lack I would argue does not actually exist, or at least did not exist until the Liberals banished their senators from national caucus, because it robbed the caucus room of those regional voices.
Savoie also has a great deal of nostalgia for governments that named regional ministers, and seems to think that prime minister Justin Trudeau is somehow delinquent for not doing so. The supposition that the lack of named regional ministers ignores the fact that Canadian cabinets are federal by their very nature, which is why they have been constructed in such a way since 1867, and also ignores that the imposition of those regional ministers was largely about party politics particularly in having channels for dispensing patronage, which is a consideration that we have largely done away with in modern governance.
The centralization of power has been a big theme in Savoie's scholarship and his books, and he did touch on that again in this interview, but as he mentioned a need for members of caucus to have a greater hand in the selection of party leaders mouthing praise for Michael Chong's garbage Reform Act he ignores, and has consistently ignored over his past several books, that the way in which party leaders are chosen is a big driver of the centralization of that power, especially at the caucus level. So long as party leaders believe they have a "democratic legitimacy" to bigfoot the elected members of their caucus, that power will continue to accumulate in ways that defy how the accountability mechanisms inherent in our system are supposed to operate, and it seems to be a major blind spot on Savoie's part not to recognize it.
I was also struck by Savoie's belief that proportional representation will somehow help the situation in the country, without actually articulating how it would solve any particular problem. It was merely a recitation of faith, that it would merely be better.
This having been said, for all of his talk of doom and disintegration, Savoie does note that Canada's culture of tolerance and deep respect for the rule of law has given us a better democracy than most of our comparators in particular, the United States. Our permanent, non-partisan civil service has also helped, in spite of Savoie's insistence that it too is also in a dire state (though one imagines that we have differing reasons as to why things may be going wrong within that particular institution). But for as much as Savoie hopes to improve the situation in this country's institutions, it would seem to me that a better articulation of what is actually wrong needs to happen, and based on this interview, I'm not sure that there is a clear enough vision as to what the real problems are, making a solution that much harder to grasp.
Photo Credit: University Of Ottawa
