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The Canadian Prime Ministership in Comparative Perspective

An incomplete paper

Jonathan Malloy

Carleton University, Ottawa

ECPR General Conference

Université de Montréal

August 2015

The Canadian prime ministership is commonly held, especially though not exclusively among

Canadians themselves, to be more dominant over cabinets and Parliament than its Westminster

counterparts, and far more than in most other parliamentary systems. This paper – which is

incomplete – explores the issue, focusing less on prime ministers themselves and more on their

surrounding contexts. As others have argued, concerns about prime ministerial power in Canada

can be more properly understood as concerns about the weakness or absence of countervailing

mechanisms to that power. Similarly, assessments of leadership must take context and

circumstances into account. Unfortunately, the existing literature on the Canadian prime

ministership is weak and tends to follow a predictable pattern of escalation themes that end up

telling us very little new about prime ministerial power.

The Assumption of Excessive Power

Recent developments in Canadian politics have reinforced longstanding debates about the

concentration of power in Canadian politics and particularly in the prime ministership. Stephen

Harper and his Prime Minister’s Office are regularly labelled the most controlling ever in

Canadian history. A December 2008 parliamentary crisis and an unprecedented March 2011

ruling that the government stood in contempt of Parliament are among the high (or low) points in

this critique.

Concern is not limited to the current incumbent; Jean Chretien was famously labeled “the

friendly dictator” (Simpson 2001) and Paul Martin’s refusal to recognize the supposed non-

confidence vote of May 2005 sticks out as a particularly concerning action (Heard 2007).

Having said that, Stephen Harper has been particularly prolific in sparking controversies about

his approach to governing and his use of power. This includes not only the above incidents, but

also the December 2009 prorogation and the 2010 showdown over detainee documents, along

with the increase in message control within his government and labeling all government

communications as “Canada’s New Government” and later “The Harper Government.” Together

(and with other incidents), these give the impression of an all-powerful prime minister with little

respect for the conventions and norms of parliamentary and cabinet government (Russell and

Sossin 2009; Aucoin et al 2011).

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The Prime Minister’s Office, occupied by shadowy figures who shun any public profile1,

is widely seen as a completely politicized operation dedicated to governing through a

“permanent campaign” lens. Policy, governance and institutional rules are seen as subordinate to

“issues management” and tight control of communication. In a very recent example, e-mails and

testimony from former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright’s appearance at the trial of suspended

senator Mike Duffy demonstrate not only the control exerted by PMO staff over all aspects of the

Conservative parliamentary party, but also their assumption that such control was their right. As

one journalist notes: “In three days of testimony by Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel

Wright, it’s clear that aides who worked there not only wielded enormous power and insisted on

near-total control of public institutions, they did it reflexively, glibly committing to ensuring that

Conservative MPs would say only what they’d approved, or redrafting Senate reports.”2

Concern about this concentration of power, and the seeming lack of any boundaries

between political management and governance, is widespread in the scholarly as well as popular

literature on prime ministers. One author writes:

Two distinct themes can be detected in much of the literature on Canadian government

and politics of the last ten years or so. The first theme is that more and more power is

passing into the hands of the Prime Minister of the day…The second theme in recent

Canadian political literature is that those who have held the office of Prime Minister in

recent years have been deficient in the arts of government.

However, those words were written in 1978 by R. M. Punnett in The Prime Minister in Canadian

Government and Politics (Punnett 1978). Critiques of the power of Canadian prime ministers are

hardly new; and of course, Canada is not alone in seeing debates about the power of prime

ministers.

An Understudied Subject

Unfortunately, Canadian discussions about prime ministerial power and particularly the

Harper government have a tendency to drift into nostalgia and idealized versions of history.

Indeed, much of the recent academic literature on prime ministerial power stems from the era of

Harper’s predecessor, Jean Chretien. The Trudeau and Mulroney years, once cause for concern

about the “presidentialization” of the prime minister, are rapidly taking on the appearance of

golden ages of cabinet government. Indeed, the more Mr. Harper continues in office, the more

even Mr. Chretien, once the friendly dictator, seems similarly rehabilitated.

Furthermore, the Canadian prime ministership appears to have received less scholarly

attention than in comparable Westminster countries. Arguably no scholarly book has ever been

1 “Harper’s enforcer: Meet Jenni Byrne, the most powerful woman in Ottawa” Globe and Mail May 29, 2015

:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/meet-the-woman-driving-harpers-re-election-campaign/article24699535/ 2 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/wrights-testimony-unveils-pmo-where-aides-wield-enormous-

power/article25978046/

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written specifically about either individual prime ministerships or the institution as a whole,

though there are studies of the wider context of cabinet government (White 2005) and

centralization of executive power (Savoie 1999, 2008), and an earlier series of edited collections

and textbooks (Hockin 1971: Pummett 1978, Matheson 1977, Pal and Taras 1988). Historians

have produced scholarly biographies of prime ministers up to John Turner (e.g.. Litt 2012) but

neither political scientists or historians have produced studies of specific prime ministerships as

found not only in Britain but also the comparably-sized country of Australia. While Canada has

contributed to wider studies of the “core executive” (Weller, Bakvis and Rhodes 1997 and

earlier, Campbell 1983), its scholars have spent very little time looking specifically at prime

ministers.

A further deficiency is the limited use of the comparative method. Rhodes et al write that

“although the terminology varies from time to time and place to place, the debate about the

power of the chief minister…is common to all Westminster countries.” (2009:4). Yet this is

barely reflected in domestic Canadian scholarship, and the most notable studies placing

Canadian prime ministers in comparative context are by non-Canadians (Weller 1985, Rhodes et

al 2009, t’Hart, Walter and Strangio 2011). The most prominent Canadian approach, Savoie’s

“court government” thesis (1999) makes some UK comparisons (2008) but no systematic

comparisons, nor is it rooted in the comparative politics or leadership literatures.

Overall then, the study of Canadian prime ministers is weak. As with legislative studies

(Malloy 2002), the field has long mixed empirical and normative questions in a manner that has

ultimately become circular and tautological. While the increase in prime ministerial power is

generally framed primarily as at the expense of cabinet (memorably labeled a ‘focus group” in

Savoie 1999), there is also a symbiotic relationship with the literature on Parliament, inevitably

tending toward narratives of escalation (prime ministers) and decline (parliament).

The result is ever-lively but ultimately shallow debates, as prime ministers inevitably

supply new material and occasional outrages but the literature rarely generates truly new

knowledge or theories. Sparse to begin with, it is wedded primarily to an insular theme of

escalating centralization – that each Canadian prime minister is more controlling than the last. It

offers limited empirical or theoretical guidance and generalizability, and in many ways, has

painted itself into a corner. Most studies cannot resist answering two questions simultaneously –

how prime ministers exercise power, and whether those powers are excessive. This typically

involves weighing the constraints on prime ministers and the mechanism of accountability

available to hold them to account. Each prime minister (or at least long-serving ones) inevitably

appears more powerful than the last, drawing accusations of growing autocracy, lack of

accountability, and unconstitutional tendencies. Accurate or not, the theme of escalation then

tends to undermine previous literature by suggesting that things were not as bad in an earlier era.

The lack of previous intensive studies of Canadian prime ministers leaves a limited base

on which to embark on further empirical studies of the institution and/or assess the particular

qualities of specific prime ministerships like Harper’s. Legislative studies in Canada has been

somewhat revitalized in recent years, particularly through a wave of new quantitative research

that has remained focused on empirical questions and data-driven answers that engage with the

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larger comparative literature on legislatures, rather than lapsing into the normative and insular

analysis so common in Canadian parliamentary literature. The availability of quantitative

legislative data and ease of modern technological tools has made this possible. But there has

been no similar quantitatively-driven empirical revolution in executive studies; there remains

room for more rigorous and deep qualitative studies, assuming researchers can penetrate the

black box of power, something particularly difficult in the disciplined Harper PMO.

A final problem with this literature is that it may be self-reinforcing. O’Malley (2007)

surveyed experts in 22 parliamentary democracies and found that Canadian prime ministers were

ranked the most powerful of all. Yet it may be argued (see White 2012) that “expert opinion” in

Canada feeds on itself in a tautological relationship; perhaps Canadian prime ministers are

powerful because they are said to be powerful. Having said that, comparative scholars do seem

to agree the Canadian prime ministership is a very strong one (Rhodes et al 2011). The office

“represents the more extreme example of the concentration of power” (Bakvis 2001: 67) and, for

example, “the concern with prime ministerial power found in Canada is not found to anywhere

near the same degree in Australia” (Sayers and Banfield 2006).

What Makes Canada Different? The Absence of Countervailing Mechanisms

As mentioned, discussions of prime ministerial power in Canada tend to lapse into normative

debates about whether this power is “excessive” power. This paper will try to avoid that, but it

does explore why power does appear to be so concentrated compared to similar systems, and

why this remains a perennial issue in Canada that is never solved and only seems to escalate.

Following the lead of Sayers and Banfield (2006, 2010), it focuses less on trying to pry open and

explore the black box of prime ministers’ offices, and more on the weakness and/or absence of

countervailing mechanisms compared to other similar jurisdictions. In other words, the most

interesting aspects are not necessarily about the prime minister’s formal powers, but rather his

relation to other centres of power. As Rasmussen argues, in a paper on Robert Borden’s

government (1911-1920) “[t]there is really nothing new about the administrative power of the

Prime Minister, but what is missing is a discussion of the accumulation of functions associated

with the “managerial” aspects of the job and which parts of that role are appropriate and which

might be better exercised in other parts of the political system including by parliament, ministers

and public servants themselves (Rasmussen 2009).

Accordingly, in the next part of the paper we will review a number of institutional factors

and their relation to Canadian prime ministerial power. Admittedly speculative at times, it

nevertheless acts as a heuristic device to understand better what makes Canada different from its

Westminister counterparts and its prime ministers apparently more powerful. It also draws

attention to the specific context of Stephen Harper’s prime ministership for each factor.

Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations

It is difficult to overstate the importance of regionalism in Canadian national political life

and the centrality of federalism in policy-making. Indeed, a possible explanation for the

relatively slim academic literature on the Canadian prime ministership is because of the greater

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primacy of studies of intergovernmental relations among Canadian institutional scholars, and the

discipline’s long preoccupation with constitutional questions especially during the “mega-

constitutional” debates of the late 20th

century. While Australia of course also has a federal

system, it poses a different context of constraints on its leaders, as explored below.

Bakvis summarizes a general consensus when he observes that while Canadian prime

ministers do appear comparatively powerful, “Canada, however, does have one significant check

on prime ministerial power that is largely lacking in the other three [Westminster] countries – a

strong federal system…Essentially, while power may be highly centralized in the hands of the

prime minister, the same holds true for provincial premiers” (Bakvis 2001, 68). The Canadian

federation is heavily decentralized with provinces having predominance in many key areas (e.g.,

health, education, social services and natural resources). While many policy sectors host their

own series of ministerial meetings, prime ministers and premiers (collectively known as “first

ministers”) clearly predominate. Much as in foreign affairs, only the first minister can speak as

the authoritative external voice in intergovernmental negotiations. Cabinet and Parliament are

weak checks here; the real check and balance is the prime minister’s counterparts in the

provinces, who act with equal sovereignty in their own spheres. Yet even this ebbs and flows;

Stephen Harper has called almost no full meetings of first ministers throughout his tenure,

preferring to deal bilaterally and avoid collective gang-ups on the federal government.

This concentration of power in first ministers is bolstered by the lack of national party

integration. Unlike Australia, federal and provincial parties in Canada operate almost or entirely

independent of each other (Pruysers 2015) and do not serve as an integrating force (Sayers and

Banfield 2010). Party systems differ considerably across the provinces and first ministers are

less likely to automatically sort themselves into partisan camps compared to Australia (Collins

2015). In this wider picture then, it is then accurate to say that Canadian prime ministers do

dominate their cabinets, MPs and parties, but are held somewhat in check by equally powerful

provincial counterparts.

Regionalism provides additional general complexities. Canadian prime ministers must

always pay close attention to regional distribution of cabinet seats and other appointments, and

generally to the regional implications of policies and programs. However, regional relationships

may bypass the Cabinet and Parliament entirely, and be directly with provincial premiers

(sometimes even of different parties) or other regional political barons. Again, the result is that

prime ministers exercise considerable power but are constrained by a wider picture that is not

always easy to capture or compare with other jurisdictions.

Charter and Judiciary

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides another Canadian difference, albeit only

since 1982 and no longer unique among Westminster systems. Nevertheless, like federalism, the

Charter and the courts in general provide checks and balances on government power and prime

ministerial prerogative, not to mention a new scholarly industry in its own right. However, the

details are subtle and easily interpretable in different directions. After lively debates in the 1980s

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and 1990s about judicial power through the Charter, current scholarly consensus is that the

courts and governments engage in a more or less balanced dialogue.

Nevertheless, the Harper government has had noticeable recent run-ins with the Supreme

Court of Canada over some legislative acts but particularly the Court’s rejection of an appointee

to its ranks as ineligible on technical grounds (though he was also widely seen as

underqualified). This touches on the prime ministerial prerogative over appointment of Supreme

Court justices (and also appointments to most other courts). An experiment with weak

parliamentary consultations has been discarded and the Harper government has returned to the

longstanding practice of unilateral appointments. Consequently, we have both a potentially

assertive court that can curb and tame prime ministers. But the power of prime ministerial

appointment looms large as well, and governments have shown little interest in more arms-length

procedures and consultations.

Party

One of the most powerful sources of Canadian prime ministerial power is through their

party. As explored elsewhere (Cross and Blais 2013; Malloy 2013), leadership selection in

Canadian political parties is highly decentralized – much more than in most other Westminster

systems historically and in many cases currently. For much of the 20th

century, Canadian

leadership selection was in massive delegate conventions; it is now through mass voting by all

party members, many signed up solely for that purpose. Crucially, parties have almost no

mechanisms to challenge or remove leaders except by the same mass methods. Party leaders are

thus almost impossible to remove. Canadian prime ministers must certainly pay attention to their

parties, but internal challenges and threats are rare for prime ministers (or even opposition

leaders). The Chretien/Martin struggle of the 1990s and early 2000s was exceptional and

abnormal in this regard. The historic weakness of Canadian political parties as “brokerage” and

“franchise” parties (Carty 2002) is a further contributing factor. Rarely constrained by ideology

and tradition, Canadian prime ministers can be exceptionally opportunistic and range as they see

fit; as long as this yields electoral victory, MPs and party members are typically acquiescent.

A unique aspect of the Stephen Harper prime ministership is that he is the first and only

leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), formed in 2003 by merging the Progressive

Conservative Party with the Canadian Alliance. Harper was widely seen as the obvious first

leader and won the party leadership comfortably in early 2004. The CPC thus claims a historic

dual lineage – but as a legal and administrative entity is brand new and was largely developed by

Harper and his team (Flanagan 2007). His grip on the party remains total – not only because of

his leading the political right out of the electoral wilderness to successive victories, but also

because the organization has largely formed around him. The CPC is a streamlined, centralized

and highly responsive structure compared to the other historic parties, giving the leader multiple

advantages in controlling internal party affairs. This inevitably contributes to the narrative of

prime ministerial power, though it is better understood as party leader power. Still, Canadian

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prime ministers have long dominated their parties and Harper’s power is best understood as a

difference in degree, not kind.

The lack of clear mechanisms to challenge prime ministers may well be the single most

important explanatory variable explaining the comparative dominance of Canadian prime

ministers. A recent reform effort by backbench Conservative Michael Chong focused on

rewriting election regulations to allow for automatic challenge mechanisms in Canadian political

parties. This mechanism is convoluted and ultimately optional, but demonstrates the concern

about leader dominance in Canadian political parties. Nevertheless, leaders in other countries

also throw around their weight despite being much more vulnerable to internal challenges, and so

it is difficult to pinpoint the exact effect of Canadian practices.

Political Staff

Canada was an early adopter of explicitly partisan, political staff contingents both in the

prime minister and individual minister’s offices. This has created a powerful and distinct

political class that inevitably serves to buttress prime ministerial power, though it is reasonable

to ask whether this is a cause or simply a symptom of prime ministerial power.

The Canadian PMO arose as a distinct and explicitly political organization under Pierre

Trudeau in 1968, at the same time as an extensive new cabinet committee system in an age of

“collegial” governance (Aucoin 1994) and also the modern House of Commons standing

committee system. In other words, it can be seen as part of a general modernization of

governing institutions, rather than solely a move to increase prime ministerial power. This was

also the time when political staff began to appear in large numbers in ministerial offices. This

could arguably be seen as a countervailing trend, enhancing the power and independence of

individual ministers surrounded by their own loyalists. In short, the story of political staff in

Canada is complex, and not necessarily a straightforward narrative.

However, over time there is little doubt this has ultimately contributed further to

Canadian prime ministerial power. The PMO has clearly become the single most dominant force

in Canadian government, though this has ebbed and flowed at times. Liberal governments have

generally allowed a greater blending between PMO and the Privy Council Office (PCO),

arguably contributing more to the politicization of the public service while Conservatives have

generally kept the lines more distinct. Notably, under the Harper government, all ministerial

staff are appointed directly by the PMO, with varying input from ministers themselves, and

careers are generally determined and managed by the political centre to an unprecedented degree.

Consequently, ministerial staff are beholden not primarily to their own ministers, but to the

prime minister’s advisors. This again contributes to an impression that there is something

qualitatively different about the Harper prime ministership. But the evidence remains

impressionistic and there is considerable countervailing evidence from previous governments

that prime ministerial advisors have always held great sway over government (Goldenberg

2006).

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The Electoral System

One institution sometimes ventured as a cause of excessive prime ministerial power in

Canada is the single-member-plurality electoral system and its tendency to reward governments

with inflated majorities. Russell (2008) for example argues that a change in electoral systems

(any change, it seems) would curb excessive prime ministerial power in Canada and especially

what he calls “false majorities” in which governments win a majority of seats with only a

plurality of votes. He would prefer a more fractured parliament requiring regular negotiations

between parties, similar to the recent New Zealand experience, presumably meaning less

discretion for unilateral action by prime ministers.

However, Canada has had considerable experience of fractured parliaments already. The

SMP system has not prevented a complex party system with at least three to five competitive

parties competing for power and/or influence. While not continual or as multifaceted and

complex as the New Zealand coalitions, minority governments are a regular occurrence in

Canada and prime ministers have managed to govern unilaterally without a legislative majority.

No true coalition has ever emerged at the federal level, though agreements with other parties are

common and have often been at the expense of the junior partner (similar to the Liberal

Democrat experience in the 2010 UK coalition). Indeed, much of the narrative of Stephen

Harper’s controlling ways emerged during his two minorities from 2006-2011. Accordingly, it is

hard to attribute much impact by electoral systems, though they can certainly assist in reinforcing

prime ministerial power in majority situations.

The Infantilized Parliament

Perhaps the most important institutional factor of all is what Sayers and Banfield labeled

in 2006 “the infantilized Parliament.” They argue that when it comes to Canadian executive

power:

Those restraints that do exist are intergovernmental and judicial in character. For its part,

parliament is an institutional infant, unable to compete with the much more powerful

actors, such as the prime minister, cabinet and provinces, which shape public policy in

Canada. This comparison suggests that the growth in prime ministerial power in Canada

has a good deal to do with the inability of the parliament to oversee executive behaviour

and the extra-parliamentary nature of the checks that do exist.

One immediate and obvious aspect of parliamentary weakness is the ambiguity of the Canadian

upper house – neither powerful nor powerless. The Canadian Senate is not elected like the

Australian Senate and was patterned after the House of Lords. The latter has been recently

overhauled and in some ways more closely resembles Canada than ever with its smaller group of

lifetime appointments. However, and in part because of its overhaul, the Lords is more secure in

its role than the Canadian Senate. Historically the Senate has been a worthy chamber of scrutiny,

review and sober second thought, but posing little or no challenge to prime ministers, who

controlled its appointment and filled it with party loyalists. (It was also occasionally seen as a

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chamber of regional representation, though its actual performance in this regard is almost

negligible.) This relatively quiet existence shifted in the 1980s and 1990s as the upper chamber,

filled with lifetime appointees from the Trudeau Liberal era, challenged key bills of the

Mulroney Conservatives. The latter ultimately prevailed but this set the tone of a more openly

partisan chamber that operated with dubious legitimacy against elected governments. There

were also flashes of individual senatorial independence in the latter Mulroney years and again in

the latter Chretien years, when the government’s own appointees filled the chambers and some

challenged government prerogatives, though never on major items.

Most recently, the senators appointed by Stephen Harper show little inclination to act

independently of the government, and at times there is a noticeable distinction between the

dwindling earlier group of Conservative senators and the Harper appointees. Instead, the

chamber has largely acted as an extension of the House of Commons’ partisan struggles and

certainly shows no inclination to challenge the prime ministerial and government will.

Furthermore, the long-term future of the chamber is in serious doubt, given recent spending

scandals and the failure of a modest (and controversial) set of reforms to bring term limits and

allow for electing senators. In the current federal election, Harper has announced he will not

appoint any more senators and the NDP has long called for abolition of the Senate (though both

ideas must surmount major constitutional obstacles); only the Liberals have suggested a

reformed role for the chamber. Overall then, the Canadian Senate has been largely unable to act

as a check on prime ministerial power, and it is unlikely to do so in the future.

The more potentially powerful chamber is of course the House of Commons. Yet the

Canadian Commons has been consistently unable to pose a serious challenge to Canadian prime

ministerial power, and indeed has long wrestled with understanding its own role and function.

Franks suggests (1987) that the Canadian parliament struggles with three competing conceptions

of its role – an executive-centred role that emphasizes concentrated power and accountability; a

legislative-centred role that emphasizes the primacy of individual representatives acting as

lawmakers; and a collectivist orientation that emphasizes competing ideologies and struggles for

party power. Franks suggests a serious disjuncture between parliamentary structures and

parliamentary rhetoric – that while the institution operates along executive-centred lines,

parliamentarians overemphasize the legislative-centred ideal of backbencher independence – and

yet often fail to act accordingly.

In particular, Canadian MPs place a low value on functions of scrutiny and

accountability, preferring to involve themselves in policy-making itself despite the unlikelihood

of success (Docherty 1999). This is particularly found in the continually weak committee

system, which finds itself in a “dilemma” (Franks 1971) of balancing a desire for high-impact

inquiries with the reality that this can only be done along strict party lines and control. But when

Canadian MPs set their measure of success as direct policy and law-making, they set themselves

up for continual disappointment (Malloy 1996). Similarly, party discipline in general is often

lamented as excessive, and yet parliamentarians rarely test its limits or otherwise challenge

leaders publicly, with even small backbench revolts against government bills extraordinarily

rare. The consequence is a body of amateurs dissatisfied with their lots and yet mostly unable to

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build a serious culture of Parliament – again, an institutional infant, in Sayers and Banfield’s

words.

Explanations for why this is most acute in Canada include proximity to the American

political system and its (historically) elastic party lines and much greater individual legislator

power; and the weak, leader-centred nature of Canadian parties, requiring artificial discipline in

the absence of natural cohesion (Malloy 2003). Another common explanation, applied in

Canada-UK comparisons, is the smaller Canadian House along with more electoral volatility and

less “safe seats.” This may mitigate against a large class of experienced backbenchers who can

rely on reelection but also know they have no statistical hope of ministerial office, and hence can

act more assertively. However, this is of less use in comparisons with Australia or New Zealand.

Another theory blames past reforms, especially the end of parliamentary power over supply in

1968, the introduction of television in 1977, and the adoption of party control over all

parliamentary speaking and question opportunities in the early 1980s as leading to current

Canadian problems. But while reforms often do create new problems, there is no reason to see

this as an exclusively Canadian phenomenon.

In recent years and especially under Stephen Harper as mentioned at the beginning of this

paper, a new concern has arisen over the bending of unwritten conventions regarding confidence

votes, prorogation and parliamentary access to documents, leading to widespread calls for

adoption of more written guidelines as generally found in other Westminster countries (Aucoin

et al 2011; Russell and Sossin 2009). This can be seen as an extension of longstanding

parliamentary weakness and particularly the inability of the institution to assert itself apart from

party leaders and interests. Regardless, it further illustrates the weakness of countervailing

mechanisms to prime ministerial executive power in Canada.

The Reality of Canadian Prime Ministerial Power

The above section focused on the institutional context surrounding Canadian prime ministers,

and especially the lack of countervailing mechanisms. The next section is only in preliminary

form, but will focus more directly on individual prime ministers and ask what effect this

institutional context actually has.

Dowding (2013) among others notes the crucial distinction between “power over” others

and “power to” actually accomplish things. Similarly, Rhodes and Bevin (2006) argue there is a

“Westminster smokescreen” that prevents full consideration of the constraints and complexities

of prime ministerial power. Focusing on the immediate and overwhelming preeminence of

prime ministers within the Westminster model, they argue, disguises the considerable

“implementation gap” between prime ministerial fiat and reality. While not dismissing entirely

the idea of growing and possibly unaccountable prime ministerial power, they also emphasize the

fragmentation of modern governance and the multilayered networks and “patterns of

dependence” at work. The result is a “governance paradox”, they say. “Even as people tell tales

of a Blair presidency,” they write, “they recount also stories of British governance that portray it

as fragmented and unipolar” (671).

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It is plausible to suggest a Canadian parallel. By focusing on the “court government” of

Canadian prime ministers, has a similar governance paradox been downplayed? Savoie, author

of the “court government” thesis, has recently expanded his own focus to ask how power is

simultanously centralized and fragmented by globalization and other forces (Savoie 2010) and

indeed what the function of government is (Savoie 2015). Rhodes and Bevin argue that “[t]ales

of the Blair presidency can be retold as tales of the unfulfilled prime minister” (686). In the

same vein, the Harper prime ministership can be seen either as a steady stream of constitutional

rule-bending, or an often middling government that sticks close to the centre on many issues and

remains, on the whole, constrained by party consensus and public opinion. A similar varying set

of perspectives can be applied to earlier supposedly omnipotent leaders Jean Chretien, Brian

Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau – all with considerable validity. Clearly power “over” is not

always the same as power “to.” Interestingly, rankings of Canadian prime ministerial success

(Azzi and Hillmer 2011) always favour early and mid-20th

century leaders, the most recent

acclaimed success being Lester Pearson. The most recent major leaders and the ones most

accused of excessive power – Trudeau, Mulroney, Chretien and Harper – are all evaluated as

middling. While leaders do tend to grow in estimation over time, the fact remains that supposed

power does not always equal policy and national impact.

It is also useful to look at leaders in temporal and comparative context. How do they

compare with other prime ministers of the same era? How did they deal with similar crises and

issues – economic stagnation, war, financial crises (Walter 2013), terrorism, etc.? What is the

effect of unique challenges like Quebec separatism and Canada’s “mega-constitutional” era?

How have changes in communication technology, such as cellphones or social media, shaped

prime minister’s management styles? Indeed, the most recent studies of prime ministerial

performance rely less on the weighing of institutional factors and much more on the context and

circumstances of leadership. The Leadership Capital Index (LCI) (Bennister, Worthy and t’Hart)

emphasizes the relationships and standing prime ministers bring to their position. Walter (2013)

lays out a threefold frame of personal style, institutional setting and historical opportunity to

assess prime ministerial performance.

The future full draft of this paper will look at the four prime ministerships of Trudeau,

Mulroney, Chretien and Harper in some detail and comparative context, allowing us to assess the

gaps between their power “over” and power “to.” In doing so, we hope to bring a new

perspective to the study of the Canadian prime ministership, a field that seems to have painted

itself into a corner by pursuing the constant theme of escalating power, to ever-diminishing

returns.

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