Transcript - Canadian Politics 101: Understanding How Parliament Works

26 Feb, 2025

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Table of Contents

• Introduction
• What is Responsible Government?
• Separation of Powers and the US System
• Canadian Parliamentary vs. Presidential Models
• Party Discipline and Executive Power
• The Rise of Prime Ministerial Power
• Criticism of Party Discipline
• Conventions Around Cabinet and Prime Minister Appointments
• Loss of Confidence and Governor General's Role
• Prorogation and Its Political Uses
• The Role of the Opposition
• The Senate and Bicameralism
• Reforming Parliament and Reducing Party Discipline

Introduction

Ian Van Harten (00:01.56) Alright, hello Dr. Tom Bateman, thanks for being back.

Tom Bateman (00:06.472) My pleasure Ian.

Ian Van Harten (00:08.318) Alright, so let's talk about Canada's parliamentary system. And one of the key things about Canada's parliamentary system is this thing called responsible government. And it might be helpful when talking about this idea to include something about the idea of the separation of powers too. Because even though they're not exactly the opposite, but they're kind of the opposite, so it might be helpful just to

have something to compare and contrast to have a better way to understand both. yeah, I'll yield the floor to you. Pick it up from here. What is responsible government? How does it compare with the separation of powers? And why does it matter?

What is Responsible Government?

Tom Bateman (00:54.057) Maybe I'll start with the idea of responsible government itself. It's a technical term. Most people think that responsible government means a government that does not govern irresponsibly, that it looks after itself and it's not crazy and it's not intemperate and so on and so forth. Yeah, I mean, we all like governments that govern responsibly, but the term responsible government is a technical term.

among parliamentary democracies, and it is a particular form of political accountability. And what it means, in a nutshell, is that the government of the day, which is in Canada the Prime Minister and his or her members of cabinet who formed the ministry, or it's also called the government, are accountable to the House of Commons.

for their continuation in office. And operationally, it means that the government must maintain the support of at least 50 % of the members of the House of Commons in order to stay in office and transact the public's business. And there are particular occasions on which this form of accountability is directly exercised.

When there is a debate on the speech from the throne at the beginning of a session of parliament, the vote to accept that speech is a confidence measure. And that means the government must win that vote in order to stay in office. The vote on the budget is a confidence measure. One of the House of Commons most important tasks is to vote.

money, either to raise it or to spend it. And the government's budget is a fundamental statement of public policy. And if the government cannot enjoy the support of the House of Commons on that basic statement of public policy, then it has lost the confidence of the House and it is the obligation of the Prime Minister to visit the Governor-General and offer his or her resignation. And also, members of the opposition can

Tom Bateman (03:17.757) introduce into parliament when they are able explicit votes of confidence and have the House eventually vote on that. if a vote of confidence fails, as it were, that means a majority of the House of Commons voted against confidence in the government. The government is obligated to resign. And when the Prime Minister visits the Governor General to resign,

The governor general has a decision to make and the two big options are to dissolve parliament and call for new elections to reconstitute the house of commons and perhaps allow the leader of another party to have a go at government or the governor general can accept the resignation of the prime minister and look at another leader in the house of commons.

to determine if he or she can form a government that will enjoy the support of the House of Commons. And sometimes this is an easy thing to do, sometimes it's more complicated because maybe the new leader after former government will rely on the support of another party to form a majority to survive confidence measures in the future.

But in any case, this idea of responsible government is the of the outgrowth of a very important institutional feature of parliamentary systems, which is that the operational executive is kind of applied to the House of Commons, which is the premier part of the legislative branch of government. And that's because

The members of the government, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Ministers are members of the House of Commons themselves. They are elected as MPs in writings throughout the country. So they are first MPs, then they have a chance to become members of the government. And that means part of the Executive Branch. Now the Executive Branch is headed by the Crown.

Separation of Powers and the US System

Tom Bateman (05:41.103) And the representative of the Crown in Canada is the Governor General. And executive authority, technically speaking, in our constitution is vested in the Crown. But the Crown will not act except on the advice of ministers duly elected and who sit in the House of Commons. So we have a bit of a shell game in that formally the Crown is the executive branch of government.

Operationally, the Crown acts only on the advice of the elected members of Parliament who have become part of the Ministry. And the Ministry is MPs drawn from the party in the House of Commons that either has the most seats or at least has a number of seats that

enables it to garner the support of other parties to survive confidence measures in his term of government. So this is very interesting because one of the great innovations of modern government has been the idea of the separation of powers. the idea stems from a concern that too much power in one place can lead to its abuse. And this is why

We are very concerned about tyrannies, autocracies, oligarchies, despotisms, dictatorships, whatever you want to call them, because these kinds of regimes concentrate most or all political power into one person or one office. And that person can then rule unaccountably. And great harm can be brought to other people.

to minority groups, to the regime as a whole, and very little can be done about it unless in the extreme desperate measures are taken to dislodge that person from office. So thinkers in Britain, but also in continental Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries began to think about government that is more limited.

Tom Bateman (08:07.807) that is prevented from the abuse of power, government that honours the rights and the status of the people broadly. the way to do it, like the great formula, was to say, we are going to divide power among different hands, different offices, different departments, different units.

This way, no one person, no one group, no one branch, no single unit of government will have power enough to act entirely on its own. It will need the support of other units, other actors, other people, other branches. And this means that, first of all, if one person wants to act,

the opportunity arises for others to block that action. The other obverse is that when one person or office or official wants to act, then that person is going to have to curry the support of people in other branches, other parts of government. And it means that a consensus has to develop. sometimes you're going to have to attract the support of someone

with different interests and who was appointed or elected in a different manner in order to get their support to help you with your project or your initiative. And this is hard, it's difficult, but for people who really support the idea of the separation of powers, this is precisely the genius of it because the possibility

Ian Van Harten (09:45.102) Thank

Tom Bateman (10:07.545) of government with overweening power doing the wrong thing, the harmful thing, is so great a concern that it's actually better for government not to act at all than it is for government to act in a way that may violate people's rights or their welfare or that of the whole political community. Excuse me. So this is the idea behind the separation of powers and what it means.

is that we have separate institutions whose occupants may be appointed or elected in different ways and accountable to different constituencies, but that the powers they have are actually shared. so the separation of powers really means separate institutions, shared powers.

The American constitution is a very fine illustration of the principle in action. And your listeners may really benefit from digging into an extraordinary book that was, well, it's become one of the classics of American political thought. It's called the Federalist Papers. And basically what happened is that,

In meetings in Philadelphia between 1787 and 1789, there was a long extended conference on changes that were to be made to the America's previous constitution called the Articles of Confederation. But that was a, that the Articles of Confederation were an unworkable, incomplete, ineffective document. And so the people charged with amending the Articles of Confederation actually

scrapped it and proposed a brand new constitution. And the Philadelphia Convention was made of delegates from the extant states of the American Union. And they engaged in a long seminar basically on political thought and constitutional architecture. And the idea of the separation of powers was really at the core of their thinking about the design of a new American Republic, which they hoped

Tom Bateman (12:30.803) would be designed in such a way that it could be democratic, but also sustainable and invulnerable to the adverse intentions of bad people who would like to use political power for ends adverse to the public interest. so what they came up with was an extraordinary document

in which you've got the courts, the legislature, Congress, and then the executive at the top of which is the president of the United States. And each is appointed or elected in a different way. initially the president would be elected by the electoral college whose members would be elected by state voters and members of the house of representatives would be elected directly by state voters.

members of the Senate were initially appointed by state legislatures. There was subsequently an amendment which allowed for senators to be elected directly by the voters in the states and so on. the judges would be nominated, the federal judges would be nominated by the president, but ratified.

by the or confirmed was the language confirmed by the Senate. And we see similar kinds of things where the president may propose a budget, but it's actually the Senate, I'm sorry, the both houses of Congress that would approve a budget. We have examples where the Congress will pass bills

but they are signed by the president in order to become law. The president is able to veto legislation coming from Congress, but Congress can turn around and by a two-thirds vote in each of the houses overrule that veto and then pass the legislation. And so what I'm suggesting is on legislation and on treaties and on federal court appointments, you've got separate institutions.

Canadian Parliamentary vs. Presidential Models

Tom Bateman (14:57.001) but they have to come together in order to get stuff done. And it makes for awkward, inefficient wrangling. Lots of stuff doesn't get through. In order for legislation to pass, usually you've got to add all kinds of earmarks and little pork barrel goodies for different senators or representatives in order to get them to vote for the thing.

and legislation grows like topsy and then the president may not like it and beat up the whole thing anyway, then it got to go back to square one and it goes around and around in circles and so forth. What we know these days is it's extremely difficult for American government actually to pass a budget that'll last a year. And in some ways, that's kind what you would expect with a government that disperses power in the way that it does. The Canadian parliamentary system operates on a different

sort of conceptual basis. And that is that in a way we do have distinct executive powers and we have distinct legislative powers. But curiously, the people who are the operative part of the executive are also elected members of the House of Commons. And the accountability of the executive is not to the people. It is to the House of Commons. And that

suggests that we have kind of brought executive and legislative powers sort of together because it's the members of the House of Commons and then those members who become members of the cabinet are kind of elected in the same way. And what it means is that it's possible for the members of the government, prime minister and cabinet

to be able to work very effectively to get the House of Commons to support what it's doing. And so the capacity for the House to block the government's initiatives, it can work in principle, but when we add the reality of party politics into modern democratic government, then...

Party Discipline and Executive Power

Tom Bateman (17:18.869) the concept of party discipline now enters into parliamentary politics, as it does into American politics too. And a government that has a majority of members of the same party in the House of Commons can rely on party discipline to make sure that it can enjoy the support of the House of Commons when it seeks to do whatever it wishes to do. And in a way, it leads to a concentration

of power in our executive. And in some ways, if you are like a classical liberal who's interested in limited government, this might be very disconcerting. But it's also true that insofar as parliamentary government and this kind of informal fusion of powers that I've been talking about concentrates power, it also concentrates responsibility. And so

at election time, the voters kind of know who's responsible for the kind of public policies they've been getting in the last four years, because it's the government with the party discipline, producing confidence in the government, vote after vote after vote for three or four years. Yeah, it's them. It's them. They can take credit for the good stuff, but they're responsible for the bad stuff.

Ian Van Harten (18:23.522) Hmm.

Tom Bateman (18:47.509) In American government, you can have like a budget measure or a legislative measure come before the House, then it goes to a committee and it's voted in committee, and it goes back to the House. Then it goes to the Senate. The Senate changes it, which means a new version has to come back to the House for a vote. You can have a member of the House of vote four, five times on a measure.

and sometimes vote for it, sometimes against it, depending on what changes were made. so that representative can go to his or her constituency, say, yeah, I voted against that measure. And then he goes to another meeting and say, yeah, no, I voted for that measure. And so it's really hard to track who's in support of what. Pretty clear in the Canadian system by contrast.

Ian Van Harten (19:33.376) Mm-hmm. And so I guess there's been a bit of a deal made almost in that you were describing earlier how there's this danger of a government that has too much power and maybe it's better if a government isn't able to accomplish anything as opposed to it has so much power and is able to do so much damage. But we've kind of have a system where we've granted the government quite a bit of power.

and ability to carry out its agenda. But the check on that is, like you say, this, we know who did it, and there's gonna be an election in at least five years, and we can kick them out and hopefully undo what they did or at least give someone else a chance if they really screw things up.

Tom Bateman (20:23.797) Yeah, I think that's roughly how it works. Now, one wrinkle in the whole system here is the development of the large administrative state and the big spending state and so forth. And what governments can do to help smooth the waters is control the budget process and spend money in ways

that reinforce its support among Canadian voters. And so it can take responsibility for things, but it can also use its budgetary and spending powers to create support among its electoral coalition. And this is, of course, a very common practice in Canadian politics.

It's it's a very interesting interaction between our institutional architecture and our political culture and the dominant political ideologies that operate in different kinds of regimes. And so when you combine sort of a social democratic or like a liberal left kind of political culture with probably institutions, the fit actually works quite, quite well in the sense that a government with a

kind of a more centrist, left-leaning sort of character can legislate with great effectiveness and determination while sort of expanding the role of the state and the economy and advancing variety of financial interests of the electors at the same time.

This is, you know, I think one of the things that we have seen now for decades in Canadian politics.

Ian Van Harten (22:27.502) Well, so do you think that we have a good balance of power versus checks on power and accountability or, does it lean too far to, maybe they have too much power? How do you see that?

Tom Bateman (22:41.513) Yeah, great question. the Canadian political science literature has for years been dotted with works starting to question the power of prime ministers in Canadian politics and first ministers in general.

The concern is that for a variety of reasons, prime ministers have begun to really kind of...

dominate their cabinets and they can also dominate their caucuses in the House of Commons. It used to be the case that the Prime Minister had an office of secretaries who would basically open mail and

and look after correspondence and so forth. Even up to the 1960s, the prime minister's office would have like a dozen or two people in it. And prime ministers would, as a result, rely for information about public opinion and about public policy ideas on his cabinet ministers. And the cabinet ministers would represent different provinces and regions of the country.

and they'd be like a really important source of intelligence for the prime minister. But what that meant is that the prime minister was actually dependent on them for information about what would work, what doesn't work, what people are thinking and so on and so forth. Well, from both the 1970s onward, the prime minister's office, which is this little secretariat of support, has been growing and growing and growing and growing. Now it has pollsters, it has policy analysis.

The Rise of Prime Ministerial Power

Tom Bateman (24:49.108) analysts, it's got lawyers, it's got communications experts. We're talking 125, 135 people now, very highly professionalized specialists in public policy and political communication and so on and so forth. And now the prime minister has like a support bureaucracy dedicated to him or her. And

Ian Van Harten (24:56.078) Hmm.

Tom Bateman (25:16.457) This makes the prime minister far less dependent for information on members of the cabinet and on the caucus generally. And in the age of TV and electronic media, politics is highly visual and so forth, kind of post-literate in a way. And the beneficiaries of these changes are political leaders, political executives and prime ministers in many...

in the opinion of many people, are becoming sort of quasi-presidential in the way that they can sort of float right over top of government and speak directly to Canadians. And they use all the electronic media available to them now. so in a way, they sort of like float right high above Parliament and communicate directly with Canadians. And now a lot of MPs get elected.

not because they have firm and steady support in their constituencies among voters, but rather because they belong to the same party that that leader does. And that leader is a really great guy. I'm going to vote for the leader. I can't vote for it directly, but I can vote for this local candidate who's part of the same party. And so it's really the voters exposure to and support of the leader that drives the election of the local candidate.

And the local candidates begin to figure out, so it's actually because of the leader that I got elected. That means I better toe the line and be good to the leader. And that reinforces party discipline, but more broadly, it reinforces the power of leaders in particular, prime ministers among them, when they actually wield power. And it sort of sets the whole system a little bit askew.

I guess the important thing about parliamentary systems of government is that the powers are still there for governments, for prime ministers to be pulled in and put in their place and get chopped down a little bit sometimes. But some of the political dynamics as well as the technological dynamics of political communication kind of operate against those mechanisms. now in

Tom Bateman (27:42.27) parliamentary systems, political leaders really become central dominant players. And of course, we are witnessing all of this right before us in the rise and fall of Justin Trudeau, because he took over a party that was a complete train wreck in 2013, got the party to make a bunch of rule changes about how leaders are selected and

And he just took over the whole thing. And it became something like a personality cult and it worked for a while, but the rest of the party began to atrophy and so forth. Mr. Trudeau, think, did not listen to his MPs or others outside of a small coterie of advisors in the PMO. And it's all caught up to him. so there is a kind of a self-corrective

mechanism in parliamentary government, that's good. So leaders can dominate until they can't anymore. And they really can get cut down fairly summarily. nonetheless, it's a tendency that pushes parliamentarism in a certain kind of unhealthy direction.

Ian Van Harten (29:00.814) Well, you mentioned party discipline earlier too, which is connected to all this and it's part of what facilitates a predictable government that will know that it has confidence for a term because you can rely on them to vote in unison. But it's also a point of criticism for a lot of people who kind of point out, well, I elect this MP to represent my riding and all they do is

they do what their bosses tell them and they don't really have any independence of their own or they can't think for themselves. They're more or less trained seals. Like that's often a criticism you hear about our system. So can you address this notion of party discipline more in some of these criticisms that it gets?

Criticism of Party Discipline

Tom Bateman (29:50.824) Yep, common criticism. And I understand the frustration that many people have. But I would say that there are a couple of things going on. First of all, parties are, they're not absolutely necessary for parliamentary systems to work. We could have a parliament full of independents and

And once all these independents, know, independently minded, free thinking people who have no partisan attachments, once each of them is elected, then they talk seriously with each other in parliament and decide on the merits of legislation vote by vote. And some things will fail and some things will pass depending on the persuasiveness of the arguments.

and the minds of the MPs who sit in the House of Commons to debate these things. By the way, the word parliament does mean a place for talking. It's a talking place, parle. And so parliament should be about talking. And that means reasoning, debating, deliberating, and then ultimately deciding. But it's actually the voters.

who appreciate parties. Because parties link voters to the institutions of government. Parties give us economical choices about what to support and whom to support. You know, in a term of government, the House of Commons will have to deal with trade questions, tax questions.

energy questions, environmental questions, social policy questions, rights questions, military procurement questions, and foreign policy questions. I mean, this goes on and on and on and on. And if you and I care to exercise our citizenship, maybe properly and prodigiously, well, we better start studying and start learning about

Tom Bateman (32:17.685) each of these policies, what are the options, what are the problems facing the country, what are the best ways to fix them? And not only do have to do it sort of individually, but now we have to think of them collectively together because one government has to decide whether it can spend a lot of money here versus spending a lot of money here and then taxing and so on and so forth. How is it all kind of going to work out? And I would say 98 % of us have neither the time

nor the interest, maybe, nor even the acuity to do all of that. And so parties are the great big idea to help us through this morass. And they organize choices into bundles. And these bundles represent broad political outlooks, political ideologies, if you like. And these bundles have a name.

liberals, conservatives, new democrats, a representative in the constituency of this party, that party will trot out the arguments on behalf of that bundle of ideas, and then the other one on this bundle of ideas, and then it's up to people to choose. And so people may declaim party politics and the suffocating nature of

of party lines and so on and so forth, but they may not be thinking seriously enough about how important parties are to people whose attention to politics is intermittent and how important party policy positions are in giving us sort of intellectual shortcuts for our electoral decision-making. Because some of us are political junkies.

But most of us think about politics, you know, for a few weeks every four years. And that's not enough time to learn the minutiae of all the different policy questions that confront a country. But parties make it easy for us. So I think that's a very important piece of the puzzle. you know, the other problem, of course, is that if our criticism of parties

Tom Bateman (34:41.852) is that our representatives don't listen to the people in the writings. The next problem is that people in the writings are saying different things. And so the people in a constituency do not speak as one. There are people who want a big military. There are people who want no military. There are people who want an end to fossil fuels.

There are other people who want an answer to all the regulations limiting fossil fuels. So what's an MP to do? You know, like how do you choose? Well, a party position helps to figure all this stuff out and you vote for the party. And then if you're on the losing end, you vote for a candidate who lost, then you're just going to have to suck it up and wait for the next time. And, and you can put up your MP and.

try and persuade him or her of your position, it'll may work, it probably won't. But that's the system. Now that's how parties kind of play a role from the ground up. But from the top down, parties are important because they do lubricate the business of parliament. They organize votes in the House of Commons and it makes the train run on time, if you like.

in the business of the House of Commons. And that's not a trivial thing. The incentives for MPs are interesting to talk about just for a second. And I'll just mention one little piece of a larger complex. The British House of Commons has 651 members. And that means that you could have

Ian Van Harten (36:30.296) Thank

Tom Bateman (36:38.612) a majority government there with 380, members. That's a giant caucus. But the cabinet will be 25, 30 people. What this means is that a British MP, just looking at the numbers, who is part of a majority government, has a really small chance of getting into cabinet. And, you know,

People in politics are ambitious people. They want to have influence. That usually means they want to crawl their way up the greasy pole and get to the top of the political opportunity structure. And in the parliamentary systems, a cabinet position is close to the top. You get people to open doors for you. They are very polite to you. They drive you around. So you get all that kind of stuff. You get more money.

And you get, you get influence and, but in see in British politics, a normal MP has a really small chance of, of climbing, to that, to that level. What that means is that if that MP wants to, wants to have a future, that MP better cultivate his or her constituents very, very well become a really good constituency MP and.

Because chances are if that person wants to be in politics, that person is going to be an MP for a long time. That's the top of the opportunity structure. In the Canadian institutional context, we've got a big geography, but we've got a really small demography. a majority government may have 170 or so people. That means the chances

of getting into cabinet are higher. And in fact, in Canada, our federal cabinets tend to be pretty big. So you've got a relatively small House of Commons. The government caucus is not huge. It's big, but it's not huge. And you've got a fairly big cabinet. This means, gee, I got kind of like a mathematically not bad chance of getting into cabinet, all over things being equal. Well, I'll tell you one way to get into cabinet, and that's to be really loyal to the leader of the party. That's how you get into cabinet.

Tom Bateman (39:05.941) Prime ministers, they want smart people, but they want smart people who are really, really loyal and who will really defend them. And I'd say if any of us was a prime minister, yeah, we would really appreciate loyalty too, thank you very much. so that's just the reality of human nature and also the incentive structure in parliamentary systems. And in the provinces, the incentives are even greater.

Ian Van Harten (39:11.48) Hmm.

Tom Bateman (39:34.708) because you might have a province with 40 or 50 members. The government then will have 25 or 30 members in the caucus. You'll have a cabinet of 15 people. And your chances of getting into cabinet are huge. In fact, in places like Nebraska, the question for majority government is like, well, how come you didn't get into cabinet? Like, what's matter with you? so that's...

That kind of math, like the political math basically in small jurisdictions encourages party discipline. That's my point. so the criticisms of the trained seals, those are good criticisms. And we have occasions on which

MPs and cabinet ministers show a breathtaking degree of independence. And that's all to the good. But we're still ambivalent about the independent people because the press say, know, Trudeau government fractured with dissent and rancor and so on and so forth. And so when people actually do demonstrate some independence,

we look at it as a fault of leadership rather than as a virtue of the members who are exercising their independent minds. So it's a weird thing, but I think a deeper look at the structural kinds of incentives in different systems will help to explain why things are as they are.

Conventions Around Cabinet and Prime Minister Appointments

Ian Van Harten (41:25.418) Mm-hmm. And, even, you may have touched on this, already, but another feature of it is, and so I just want to talk a bit about, some of the conventions surrounding cabinet, when it comes to responsible government and all these things. And, but so it's technically the governor general who appoints cabinet ministers on the advice of the prime minister. And it's also the governor general who appoints the prime minister. And, but.

Tom Bateman (41:51.572) That's correct.

Ian Van Harten (41:55.244) That job is made a lot easier, appointing the prime minister because of the party system and you kind of know who's going to get support. So it's already, you know, they, they barely have to do anything. Everyone knows who, who the prime minister is going to be. and, and then there's, you, you've spoken about this too. The cabinet ministers have to be members of the legislature, which is different than in the, did you want to jump in?

Tom Bateman (41:57.876) Okay, you just cut out Ian, so I might hear you.

Tom Bateman (42:19.326) Yeah, I froze, or you froze up for me here, so I think I may have missed part of your preamble.

Ian Van Harten (42:26.94) okay. well, so just talking, generally about conventions as a, as they relate to a cabinet and how it works and how the governor general technically is the one who appoints cabinet ministers and the one who appoints the prime minister and, and that the cabinet ministers, you know, they have to be members of, the legislature first, which is different than in the U S for example, where the president can choose from anyone.

they want. And also this

Tom Bateman (42:58.932) In fact, member of cabinet in the states cannot be a member of Congress.

Ian Van Harten (43:05.376) Okay. Yeah, there you go. so there's that difference. And, so, so I'm wondering if you can just talk a bit more about some of these conventions. And so we talked about the idea of conventions back in episode one of these sort of unwritten rules that are still make up how government works, but can you talk about, some of these conventions and how they form, how cabinet works and how, yeah, how it works.

Tom Bateman (43:30.706) Yeah, it's cabinet is kind of like a team. And the team has a captain, that's the prime minister. And the prime minister will seek to appoint from the ranks of the House of Commons caucus in his party, members who have a variety of

of characteristics and they need to represent different regions of the country. There's like a socio-demographic representational dynamic that has been very important in the last 40, 50 years. you know, Justin Trudeau famously made sure that his cabinet was half female starting in 2015 and

He held to that and cabinet ministers, are first of all, they're MPs. Secondly, they are members of the political party of the government. And they're also in almost every case, the heads

of a particular department of government. So, of Finance, Minister of Health, Minister of Defense, Foreign Affairs, Global Affairs, as it's called at the moment, so on and so forth. So, a minister will be the head of a department of government and will be in charge of the policy direction of that department and so forth. And that person is kind of responsible to...

to cabinet and then through cabinet to the House of Commons for the affairs within that department. And then finally, the minister is a member of cabinet. And so these are four hats that every minister wears. some of the hats fit a lot better than others. And furthermore,

Tom Bateman (45:56.692) Different cabinet positions are more important and or prestigious than others. So right near the top of the heap would be Minister of Finance. That's probably second actually to the role of Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, Attorney General, very important portfolio. Down near the bottom would be something like Minister of Fitness and Amateur Sport or

or something like that, which is like, okay, sports great, it's not like the make or break sort of portfolio in a government and it doesn't require a lot of money and so on and so forth. there's a real variety of portfolios and there's a real difference in importance and gravity of the portfolios. And what that means among other things,

is that the Prime Minister will guggle the team occasionally to reward people in the junior positions who are doing very, very well, and also to demote people in the higher cabinet portfolios that are not doing that well, or have made gaps or mistakes or whatever it happens to be. Or sometimes they might get enmeshed in some kind of scandal or whatever. And so occasionally there's a shuffle and

and people go up and down and sometimes are removed from cabinet, others will come in, so on and so forth. The representational concerns are still obtained and so that's how goes. The other thing is that decision making in cabinet is you would think by a vote, but no, it's actually not a vote. They're like in the sort of semi-ideal sense.

A matter would come before cabinet for discussion and decision. There'd be some exchanges around the table. And then the prime minister, after hearing the debate around the cabinet table, will declare the consensus. And that's not a vote. And in fact, in a way, it's not a vote because all the members around the cabinet table are not equals. Some have...

Tom Bateman (48:14.933) an extremely important role in government, like the Minister of Finance or Attorney General, and others like the fitness and amateur sport types are extremely junior players. so voting implies equality, but they're not equals. And so we have the Prime Ministerial Declaration of Consensus instead as a way to articulate what cabinet has decided. So that's how that goes.

The fourth hat that a minister wears, as I said, is as member of the cabinet team. And this is the Convention of Collective Responsibility. And what it means is that in confidential cabinet meetings, ministers can speak freely and candidly and honestly about matters before

before the government. But when a decision is made, the government speaks with one voice. And it's for clarity and for decisiveness. And that means that every cabinet minister, whatever her or his opinion inside cabinet, once a decision is made, defends that decision publicly. And it really means that

an Academy Minister must support the government as a whole. And I think it's necessary because sometimes you're just going to have different positions on an issue and it's like all the talking in the world is not going to resolve them. And so it's just going to have to be resolved by taking a position one way or the other. And that's life. But it's also politics.

And so this idea of collective responsibility of cabinet kind of is the solution to this. If a cabinet minister cannot publicly defend a decision made by cabinet, then the obligation of that minister is to resign his or her cabinet position. And it happens occasionally. We saw a spectacular example, I think, with the

Tom Bateman (50:39.764) with Krista Freeland on the 16th of December of 2024. And it happened with Bill Morneau earlier in 2022, I think it was, maybe it was 2020. And with Paul Martin, with respect to Jean Chrétien back in 2001 or two, same thing. So it happens occasionally and it's a big deal when it does.

but it's a way for governments to remain intact and for the government's position to be clear and decisive on the public side. So these are some of the conventions that operate with Cabinet and it by and large works, I would say, fairly well.

Loss of Confidence and Governor General's Role

Ian Van Harten (51:36.11) Can we go back and talk a bit about what happens when a government loses confidence of the house? Because it's not always a straightforward matter of, they lose confidence and you call it like a call in an election. There have been instances, somewhat infamous instances for political nerds probably of where the government lost confidence.

And the governor general just said, okay, I'm going to let the other guy form a government instead of going straight to an election. so there's some rare, cases where that discretion is used. but yeah, can you, can you just talk a little bit more about how, what exactly happens when, when a government loses confidence?

Tom Bateman (52:24.499) Right. So what we have is a political executive which is different from the constitutional executive, if you like. And as I said earlier, the constitution says that the executive is the king and his representatives.

In Canada, the representative of the king is the governor general at the federal level and then lieutenant governors at the provincial level. over the course of centuries in British politics, real monarchical power has slowly transformed into parliamentary democracy. One of the big

big moments was in 1215 on the fields of Runnamede in England when King John was cornered by a group of barons and said and was told, have a proposal for you and that is that you sign this document which limits your powers to tax us without our consent and it limits your ability to imprison people without their consent and also to tax people without their consent.

We think you should sign this because if you don't, tomorrow we're going to kill you. And King John thought about it and signed it. And frankly, that was like one of the primordial beginnings of parliamentary government because the king sort of committed to meetings in an assembly of barons to get their consent for

actions that he would like to take. so just can't rule alone anymore. And Parliament, there were fits and starts. He reneged on some of these things in what was called the Magna Carta, the Great Charter of 1215. But the idea was there and it took greater hold over time and it evolved into the

Tom Bateman (54:49.828) robust parliamentary democracies that we see now. But what it meant to see is that Britain was and remains a monarchy, but now since the late 17th century, it has been a constitutional monarchy. And more and more power basically has moved from the monarch and then

now down into the House of Commons and into the elected members of the House of Commons who form the ministry that formally advises the Crown on what to do, but the Crown always does and affirms what the political elected advisors say. And so we have effective power in the Assembly, like largely ceremonial power.

but a residue of real prerogative powers still residing in the Crown or the Crown's representative. In Canada, what this means is that the Government General does enjoy a small number of real political prerogatives that are rarely used, but are available kind of as a safety valve when necessary.

One of these safety valve powers, royal prerogative powers, is the power to appoint ministries and to dissolve parliament and to prorogue parliament. so there are occasions when the political environment makes a certain decision

not obvious. And this is when people sort of perk up and figure out, so who is the governor general? yeah, right, it's Mary Simon. Okay, and they think, what powers does she have actually available to her? Then we think, yeah, right, she actually can do this or can do this. And so then we become like quick studies in parliamentary convention and so forth. And we think about the prerogative powers of the crown and...

Tom Bateman (57:16.526) And then we realized, okay, I see, get it now. so we've been in this position a few times in Canadian history. King Bing Affair was interesting in 25, 26. We had something very interesting in Canada in December of 2008. And we had some speculation just in the last week or so. Here we're talking on January the 6th, 2025, about whether the governor general would grant certain requests made.

to her by Prime Minister Trudeau. so let's say that the government of the day loses a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. The constitutional convention, which is a very stable, important rule operating in Canadian political life, that's what a convention is, requires the

Prime Minister then to visit the Governor General and resign because he or she has failed to maintain the confidence of the Assembly. This is like democratic accountability working in a very real way. And the Governor General has a couple of options. And one of them is to accept the resignation and appoint the leader of another party.

in the House of Commons to form a government if the Governor General thinks that the leader of another party can enjoy the confidence of the House. And that will depend on the Governor General having a look at the political environment, seeing what the parties are in the House, what the numbers are, and how the parties, other parties get along, and whether they can work together to

transform working majorities to transact the public business. the main job of the Governor General is to make sure there is a government in place that can do the public's work. The question is how that can be achieved and maintained. Sometimes it can be done without an election and just the Governor General saying, okay, thank you, Mr. Prime Minister.

Tom Bateman (59:43.506) You're done. Have a nice day. I'm going to appoint somebody else and we're going to see how that goes. And, but there's an alternative and that is that the prime minister may come in and say, I will not offer my resignation, but I will recommend a dissolution of the house of commons. And this means an end of the parliament.

and the requirement for new elections to reconstitute parliament whereupon a new government may be appointed. Now, it may be that the Prime Minister who lost a confidence vote will remain the leader of that party, will remain Prime Minister, in fact. There'll be new elections and maybe that Prime Minister's party will come back with more seats than last time.

and maybe have like a renewed sort of mandate from the electorate and enthusiastic MPs and now really can command the confidence of the assembly. But maybe new elections will produce a defeat for the incumbent government. And then after the elections are over, Parliament is constituted, the government that went into the

the elections now has a really small number of seats, then the Prime Minister will say, right, I think I see the writing on the wall, Your Excellency, I will resign and it'll be up to you to appoint a new government. And the government, the Governor General will look at the new parliament and say, well, clearly that leader over there has a majority of seats in the House of Commons. That's the obvious person whom I will appoint to form a new government. So...

So that's sort how it goes. And it works very, very well almost every single time. And in fact, 99 % of the time, the governor general's role is purely a formality because the political math is there for everybody to see. you know, we're taping this on January the 6th, just today.

Tom Bateman (01:02:06.388) the US House of Representatives certified the Electoral College vote to make official the results of the 2024 presidential and congressional elections, the presidential election. And of course, this day reminds us of four years ago, exactly, 2021, when

Ian Van Harten (01:02:20.003) Mm-hmm.

Tom Bateman (01:02:35.669) The US teetered on like a kind of lawless, violent blocking of the transfer of power. And, you know, this is an extraordinary thing for a developed constitutional democracy, not to have a peaceful transfer of power. Now the Americans pulled it out of the bag in 2020 and in 2024 and 25.

It was a very peaceful transfer of power. The parliamentary systems are pretty good too. They are quite good on achieving peaceful transfers of power. That's actually one of the litmus tests of any democracy, it seems to me. You lose an election and you say, I lost, that's too bad, but I'm going to congratulate the winner anyway and I'm going to go home and sulk for a while, but maybe I'll be back at a later date.

So that's an important thing and a fairly firm knowledge of the constitutional conventions of parliamentary government, the powers of the governor general, what options are available to political leaders when they lose confidence votes in the House. All that is part of a big insurance policy that electoral defeat.

does nothing to injure the solidity of the whole system. So, so, problematical systems are pretty good on that front.

Prorogation and Its Political Uses

Ian Van Harten (01:04:13.422) Well, let's hone in more on these 1 % of cases where the Governor General isn't just a formality. And I'm talking specifically about the issue of prorogation, which has happened somewhat rarely, but it still happens. And like you mentioned, it's happening now as we're recording, I guess technically parliament is prorogued.

But this, there's a lot of controversy around this move and anytime it's invoked, I think, because it's sort of, it seems that it's, it's invoked when the government is sort of a tacit admission. We're in trouble and we want to call a timeout and, gather ourselves together and just delay. But, you know, right now there's a lot going on arguably that

we need government to be around for. so it's curious to wonder how, these things will be received, but it, and yeah, so anyway, let me pass it to you. How do you see prorogation and how public responds to it and why governments choose to do it?

Tom Bateman (01:05:35.828) Prorogation is a, first of all, it's a really hard word to pronounce. And it's by no means a common term in normal conversation. In fact, I recall when we went through the prorogation crisis of December 2008, a lot of people just gave up and called it prorgies or something like that. anyway, prorogation is a term

to refer to the ending of a session within a parliament. So a parliament is a term of government between two elections. And a session is a period within a parliament. And within a session, you can have adjournments. And so you can have an adjournment between sittings within a session. And then you can have a parliament that has

like one session, or you can have a parliament with two or three or four sessions. Each session ends with a prorogation. And what that means, among other things, is that almost all the business of parliament dies. The legislation that is being debated but not passed dies on the order paper. Any scheduled votes when there's a prorogation?

die. Nothing happens. And so after a prorogation, you have the beginning of a new session. And that means everything starts over. There's a speech from the throne, read by the governor general in the House of Commons. That speech is written by the government of the day. There's a formal debate on that, blah, blah, blah. And then the government will introduce new legislation. Opposition parties have now a chance to

introduce their motions. Often they may try again with stuff that they tried last time in the last session but didn't get there because the prorogation cancelled everything and so on and so forth. It turns out prorogations happen quite a bit. There are often two or three sessions within a parliament. Most parliaments last four or so years unless we have minority

Tom Bateman (01:08:04.68) Minority governments tend to last fewer than four years. But in any case, you can have more than one session per parliament and that's actually quite normal. And many, many prorogations actually happen without much notice because governments just want to take a break and then they use a time when parliament is not sitting to develop a new policy.

a set of initiatives and, because there might be some important international event that requires government to really rethink a bunch of things. And by the way, something like the election of Donald Trump in the United States and his immediate announcement that he's going to impose 25 % tariffs on Canadian imports. Yeah, that's actually a very, very big deal. And that would be an occasion for the use of a prorogation for government.

to, okay, rethink everything to do with Canada-US relations and with trying to secure the Canadian economy against this big threat and so on and so forth. So prorogations can be used for a lot of reasons. Some of them quite normal and unacceptable and not terribly controversial. But sometimes governments will use prorogation, as you suggested earlier, for more self-interested or nefarious purposes, to escape.

problems that they would like to avoid. so maybe I'll just talk for a minute or two about the prorogation scandal, or sometimes it's called a crisis of 2008. And this one was really, really something. This is one for the ages, it seems to me.

This was a minority government of Stephen Harper. There was an October 2008 election. The Harper government was re-elected, but still with a minority. So the three other parties in the House of Commons had more votes in the House than the Harper government did. So this is the Vla Quebecois, the Liberals and the NDP.

Ian Van Harten (01:10:08.47) Eh.

Tom Bateman (01:10:30.453) Stephane Dien was the leader of the Liberals and the Liberals did very poorly in 2008. And Stephane Dien, I think, was considered to have underperformed. And after that election, he said that when a new leader is selected, he will resign as leader of Liberal Party. So he was a bit of a lame duck.

Six weeks later in November, the federal government was scheduled to deliver a fall economic statement. And so the Minister of Finance stands up and gives effectively a mini budget. That's sort of what it is. this itself becomes voted upon in House of Commons. That's actually a confidence measure.

So that's what happened in November of 2008. David Flaherty, I think it was, stood up and he said a bunch of things that sort of emanated from the previous election campaign. But he said something that shocked the opposition parties. He said that the government would pass legislation, amendments to the Political Financing Act,

which would remove a public subsidy to political parties that was instituted in 2003 or 2004, which gave approximately one dollar to every party each year for every vote it garnered in the previous election. Now, that per vote public subsidy to political parties was to replace

provisions that allowed for Canadians to donate big money to political parties. Also, unions and corporations used to be able to give money to political parties. And unions and corporations really did bankroll parties, especially the Liberals and especially the NDP. Oddly enough, the Conservatives historically, and even in 2008 and up to right now,

Tom Bateman (01:12:58.021) will always get a big piece of their revenue from small individual donors. Anyway, the Harper government wanted to remove this per vote annual subsidy to political parties. Turns out the Liberals and the NDP and the Bloc Québécois were highly dependent on those subsidies. And the Conservatives

much less so, because they would get lots and lots of small board donations within the limits set by legislation. So they were sort of okay. And we're only talking about a $27 million annual charge on the Consolidated Revenue Fund. This was not big money, but it was a really targeted stab at the other political parties. Anyway, the three political parties flipped right out when they heard that. Mr. Dionne could barely talk. He was so mad.

And they immediately formed sort of a coalition. And they also immediately said at the earliest opportunity, which is about a week away from that fall economic statement, they had an opposition day, they're going to consider a vote of confidence and they're going to defeat the government. And I don't think the government actually was ready for this. And the government was able to use a procedural trick.

to delay the opposition vote for a period of time, like about another week or so. So the Harper government had about a week and change to figure out what to do. And basically the Harper government tried two things. Okay, first of all, we are going to go on a quick blitz of the country and we're gonna try to flood every channel of media and we're going to...

show Canadians how damaging and ridiculous is this opposition coalition. It's unworkable and it's illegitimate because this coalition would involve the Bloc Québécois. This is the separatist party that wants to break the country up and they're going to be part of the government? They're going to support the government? furthermore, Stephane Dien, he'd already announced he's resigning. Now he wants to be prime minister. Like what's going on here?

Tom Bateman (01:15:24.4) Okay, and it turns out, by the way, that Mr. Harper and the members of his cabinet, they fanned out all over the country and they were actually very effective. The polling around that time showed very tepid political support for the coalition that had formed to oppose the Harper government. Okay, so that was kind of working. But the second thing the Harper government did was

to arrange a meeting with the Governor General of the day, Béjel Jean, and ask her to prorogue Parliament. And this was transparently to end a session of Parliament and then make a vote of confidence in the House of Commons impossible because the Commons was not meeting. Votes of confidence have to be undertaken in Parliament while it is sitting. If you prorogue Parliament,

Parliament can't sit, you can't have a confidence vote, you can't defeat the government, the government stays in office. And so the big question for the Governor General was, the Prime Minister asks for a prorogation, shall I grant it? Now, 99 % of the time, the Governor General acts on the advice of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is the one

who is there because of the electors. So there's democratic kind of logic behind the governor general exceeding to the request of the prime minister. The governor general was appointed, not elected herself. On the other hand, the governor general is kind of the protector of the constitution. And at the core of

parliamentary democracy is the concept of responsible government, which is that the government must maintain the confidence of the assembly. And if that's the principle, you also need access to the exercise of that principle, which means a parliament that sits and does entertain motions of non-confidence.

Tom Bateman (01:17:48.762) on which the government may fail or succeed. And it looked like here the government was asking for a prorogation precisely to escape the principle of responsible government. So does the governor general act as a guardian of constitutional democracy by refusing the request to prorogue or

does the governor general do what she almost always, always, always does, which is act on the advice of the prime minister who is the representative of the elected branch of government. Okay. This is a Rubik's cube. This is very, very difficult. And the academic commentators of the day said, either decision has its merits.

And it would be extraordinary if the governor general did refuse the prorogation. It may not be wrong, but it would be extraordinary. And at the end of the day, after about a two or so hour meeting, the governor general did grant the request to prorogue. Now, a couple of details here.

The first is that I have it on pretty good information that in an ante room off to the side of the main room in the Governor General's residence where the Governor General met with the Prime Minister, in the ante room were two constitutional experts, Peter Hogg and Peter Russell. And just a coincidence that they were both Peters, but one was a venerable

Professor of Constitutional Law at York University. The other one of Canada's great political scientists who is a constitutional expert. Co-editor of a book I've published in the past, by the way, really, really wonderful man, died about a year and half ago. And I tried to get Peter Russell to tell me actually what happened, but he was sworn to secrecy. He couldn't tell me anything. But I do know that the government general had recourse to these two experts.

Tom Bateman (01:20:13.204) on a couple of like a couple of times even during the meeting with Harper to figure out, okay, so like what he says this, what do I mean? And so it's fascinating. But the other thing that's important here is that Mr. said a couple of things. First, I do commit to reconvening parliament in late January of 2009. And furthermore, there will be a new economic statement.

but it will not include the end to the party subsidy that was announced in November. That will leave to another day after another election. So he made like a couple of important concessions. Now the other thing, which is a little bit more speculative, but I think very important and almost certainly was part of the governor general's decision-making is that she had to look

at what would be the alternative to denial of the request for prorogation. The alternative would be to appoint Mr. Dien as the prime minister of the country. Now, what he did in doing a deal with Gilles Doucet of the Bloc Québécois was, to say the least, received with

mixed reviews in the Liberal caucus. Some were like really against it. And he got them all to sign it, but it took a little while to sign a letter saying that the Liberal caucus is in favour of this whole coalition with the other two guys. But it was hard. And in fact, the last person to sign the expressing support for the idea among the Liberals was Michael Ignatieff, who

actually becomes the interim leader of the liberals soon thereafter. So the question for the governor general is how stable is this alternative? And the evidence was not great, which means that if she denied prorogation, the government would then be Stefan de Jansz to negotiate. Hard to say how long it would last. Public opinion in favour of that government was not very good at all.

Tom Bateman (01:22:41.646) And it may fail on a confidence vote very soon, in which case we'd be into a new election. And that means then there'd be a new campaign. Now here's another thing that almost certainly occurred to her. I've picked this up in a few places. It makes an awful lot of sense to me, but it's not sort of not widely known. And that is that...

there's a chance that in a new election campaign that would take place after the defeat of the new Liberal-Indepenid Black Coalition, Stephen Harper would not only campaign against the other parties,

But he could possibly campaign against the governor general. And he could cast her as a chrétien appointee. Appointed by a liberal prime minister was Nicole Jean. And now she makes a decision against the government, but in favor of a liberal prime minister.

Ian Van Harten (01:23:38.232) Hmm.

Tom Bateman (01:24:00.02) Okay, now I understand how Ottawa works, Mr. Harper might say. And this is like dirty pool because it would sort of politicize the governor general's office. And he had a precedent for this because back in 2025, 26, William Lyon Mackenzie King in the King being affair was, his request for a dissolution of parliament was denied.

by Lord Bing, the governor general of the day. And instead Bing said, no, I'm not going to dissolve parliament. I'm going to appoint Arthur Meehan, the leader of conservatives, as the prime minister. And you're going to have to resign, Mr. King. And Meehan's government lasted about a year or less. And there was a new election. And during that election, William Lion McKenzie King said some

sort of untoward things about the British appointed governor general of Canada saying, yeah, this person's out of touch. This person really doesn't know the nature of Canadian, the Canadian political environment and so forth. Yeah, we need changes to this office. He wins the election. I would say a little bit on the strength of his criticism of the governor general. So back in 2008, I think there is reason to think that the governor general

Ian Van Harten (01:25:22.766) Hmm.

Tom Bateman (01:25:27.454) thought of a variety of consequences of a denial of the request for prorogation, ultimately went with the request that Harper put to her, and, you know, in a way was vindicated because by January 2009, the coalition basically collapsed. Stefan Dion did resign, and Michael Ignatiev did take over the Liberals.

And he was the one who was the least enthusiastic about the coalition idea in December of 08. So in that sense, she probably made the right decision, but you can see the kind of political calculation, as well as constitutional calculation, that was involved in the matter back in 2008.

Ian Van Harten (01:26:19.84) Mm-hmm. Yeah, so interesting to get that insider's view on all the things that were going on because it's so I think it's so easy to just be cynical and look at it from the outside and say she just did what Stephen Harper wanted her to do and this isn't a democracy or you know, you can Say all kinds of things to criticize what she did but to see all the nuances and complexities and the history going on and making up the context of that it's

super interesting and, and let's you appreciate, you know, why that decision was made. I kind of wanted to circle back to something you had said a bit earlier, just kind of related to the current situation. And again, the, just happened. This re this recording will come out. this will be old news, but, you had mentioned that, prorogation is legitimate to, for a government to kind of press pause.

when something big is going on so they can kind of, look at it again and figure out how to pivot. And so my understanding, you know, and I wonder if we're going to see criticisms about this. think we probably already are that, the government is proroguing and all this stuff is going on. And, know, now we're just doing nothing and they're going to kind of take advantage. But is that not the case then? this like, can, you know, Trump is going to come in and

put these tariffs on us and Since the government is prorogued. We're not gonna be able to respond or how is that gonna work?

Tom Bateman (01:27:54.952) Yeah, we are sort of early into the process of sort of unpacking what happened today. But it seems to me that the governor general did the easy thing and the safe thing from the point of view of her office.

And it's the kind of thing that a very important convention would dictate, which is, um, uh, exceed to the request, um, given her by the, uh, the, by the prime minister. He requested the prorogation, uh, and I'm sure he had a conversation with her about the reasons for it. And, uh, uh, we will never know that conversation and the reasons that he offered.

but I expect that he said a couple of things. One of them is that we have the inauguration of the president coming on the 20th of January and the government needs to tool up to meet the extraordinary challenge that this will pose to the country. And this means planning maybe a

like a new budget and some new foreign policy priorities, looking at a cross-department response to border measures that the Americans might be contemplating, so on and so forth. And he probably also put to her that the Canadian government needs

solid leadership and that the Liberal Party internal process for selecting a permanent leader is the best process for producing the leadership we need to confront the bilateral challenge posed by the new American government. And so the Liberal Party constitution has a three or four month process in place for selecting a leader.

Tom Bateman (01:30:22.068) And possibly Mr. Trudeau suggested to her that this process, takes a bit of time, but it's necessary and it's comprehensive and it'll gather the kind of exposure and support for the new leader of the party and who will instantly become the new prime minister of the country. And that's what we can use to deal with...

with events coming from south of the border. obviously she was persuaded by that, or she simply said, okay, well, whatever, but I just don't think that the reasons for denying your request for prorogation are strong enough. And that one of the big conventions of the constitution is that I simply do what I am asked by the prime minister.

And I think this is an occasion to do just that. And so she sort of stays out of the fray in this respect. But the criticisms were in place before this decision took place, and they're going to be restated in the next days. I think to the effect that to grant a long prorogation to facilitate

an internal political process and to allow a lame duck like almost dead prime minister to stay in office for three months really is an abuse of the power of prorogation and that she would have been quite within her right to refuse that request. In which case parliament would convene on January 27th and

Mr. Trudeau would have to face the music sooner or later, there'd be a confidence vote, and the House of Commons would exercise the principle of responsible government, and the government would probably fall, and we'd be into an election, and that's what would clear the air. That's what would produce a new parliament with the relationship to the United States fully on the table. And so we're going to...

Tom Bateman (01:32:45.108) I think we're going to hear more of that kind of criticism of the Governor General's decision and of the awkward place in which the Prime Minister put her, actually.

The Role of the Opposition

Ian Van Harten (01:33:01.218) Hmm. All right, let's pivot a bit to, I'm wondering if we can talk more about the role of the opposition. And this kind of raises another criticism that people often make about government, and that is that they are always fighting each other. And, and why can't they work together? I don't know if maybe you've heard this too. And

So I'm wondering, I think because parliament is adversarial by design, as far as I understand. But so what do you think about this? Maybe is it too adversarial or how do you respond to those kinds of comments?

Tom Bateman (01:33:51.762) Yeah, think the idea behind a loyal opposition is that opposition is good, sort of, but it's contained and it's domesticated.

And it's sort of defanged because there will always be opposition in government. There is opposition in marriages. There's opposition in families. There's opposition among neighbors. And so I think we just have to like swallow hard and understand the reality of human nature here. but of course, the constitutional trick is to

is to kind of harness opposition and take the venom out of it, keep it within institutional bounds, and if possible, direct it to salutary ends. And the parliamentary model says, right, we're going to embrace opposition and subject it to

rules and customs and forms of decorum. And we're going to bring it right into the high chamber of parliament and make it useful. And the whole idea of an opposition is that it's a government in waiting. That when these guys have a problem,

And maybe they lose their minds, they get mired in scandals and so on and so forth. And they make some grievous mistakes. It's okay because there's another bunch of guys here ready to take over. And they're ready to take over because they spend their time learning about what the government is doing and criticizing it. And they're thinking constantly about, at least in principle, a better way to do.

Tom Bateman (01:36:17.108) what the other guys in government are doing. And so they're on their toes all the time and they're ready. Like they're ready to pounce. They're ready to move in when that government has voted out. so on the one hand, we do find the droning, disagreements and complaining a little bit taxing and tiresome and so forth. I get it. But

If you look at it from a larger institutional point of view, it's kind of a genius really, because it actually sort of embraces opposition and defangs it and then directs it to actually to a constructive end, which is to direct oppositions.

into a state of readiness to become government if the government falls on a confidence measure or something. So I think it's good. there might be a larger sort of point about how we arrive at good decisions. And generally, it's good to have someone criticize you when you were thinking of making a decision. Someone to say, well, have you thought about this?

And have you thought about this? And you know what you said a moment ago about X? Actually, X has been tried by a lot of people and it worked miserably for them. How about if you think about why for a change? And... Well, that's like opposition in a way. We also call it criticism. And in fact, what you have on the front bench of the opposition side of the house are seats for critics. And that is a member of the opposition caucus who has a particular responsibility.

to criticize a particular minister and his or her portfolio on the other side. So there'd be a justice critic, there would be a health critic, there would be a defense critic. And it's kind of like their little specialty to really study the Department of Defense, what the government minister is doing there and how it can be done better or differently. And so that's a critic, criticism. And so I think that that might be the broader

Tom Bateman (01:38:40.219) and maybe more sympathetic way to look at oppositions. But let me mention something else here that looked like it was a really great thing at the time, but it may not be. And that is that in the mid 1970s, some brainiac had the idea of putting television cameras in the House of Commons. And it would be all about opening up the people's house and transparency and democracy and knowledge and information and so on and so forth.

Ian Van Harten (01:39:02.94) Ahem.

Tom Bateman (01:39:10.29) Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way. First of all, politics has always been a team sport. And you know how it is when people go to their kids' hockey games, they start to go crazy. They become wild, emotional, irrational partisans who think the ref is paid by the other team and cannot make a decision at all in favor of the team that their kid is on. Like it's all insane, but it's like so utterly predictable.

And so politics is a team sport in ways like that. so, so MPs, just like everybody else will act like parents of young hockey players sometimes. But the other thing of course, is that with TV, now MPs want to play to the people back home. And they want to make sure that their constituents see them and that they're being effective and that they're committed and serious and

and the guys opposite are just awful, blah, blah, blah. And there's anecdotal evidence anyway that with TVs in the House of Commons, debate has been more histrionic and more combative and more concerned with landing shots.

than in actual deliberation. so it may actually have done something contrary to the original objectives. so opposition skills can be exercised well or poorly. But

I would say that the idea still is pretty good and the way that parliamentaryism sort of institutionalizes opposition is really good, especially compared to many of alternatives.

Ian Van Harten (01:41:32.446) are you still, can you see me? And hear me?

Tom Bateman (01:41:35.732) Yes. Yes.

The Senate and Bicameralism

Ian Van Harten (01:41:39.544) Okay, I think there was some breaking up there, but, that's okay. So I didn't get everything that you said, but the recording should.

okay, so let's, let's jump to the next, subject here. So, we haven't talked a lot about the Senate yet. So most of, so we're talking about parliament and, mostly we've been talking about the house of comments, but there's also something called the Senate, which is, yeah, they're unelected. think that's one of the main distinguishing things, but they're, they're also, they're,

They are an important part of Parliament. So can you talk a bit about what is the role of the Senate in Parliament?

Tom Bateman (01:42:29.62) Yeah, the first point is that our parliament is bicameral. So two legislative houses, that means a bill considered by the House has to pass the House. And then it also has to be voted by a majority of support in the Senate before it can go to the governor general for royal assent. And so the Senate is kind like a filter. It's like an additional sort of analysis.

that a bill has to undergo before it can become a law. And the idea is that the more filters a bill has to go through, the better it has to be to survive this process of review in two different chambers. And the Senate is appointed in a different way than is the House of Commons. And huge debate about this when...

confederation was being debated between 1864 and 1867. But ultimately the founders came up with a plan for an appointed Senate, members appointed by the governor general on the advice of the prime minister. There was a representation formula and it's in the constitution act 1867. And that is that certain provinces will have a certain number of senators.

representing each province. In fact, the original formula was a regional formula. There were four provinces at confederation, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. And there was a plan for what is called sectional equality. And Ontario would be a section. It gets 24 senators. Quebec is a section. It'll get 24 senators. And then the Maritimes would be a section.

24 senators, which means 12 each for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. And then eventually it took a long time, but the West became a section, four provinces. So they get six each. We added Prince Edward Island in 1870. They joined the Maritimes. So that means so the PDI got four Senate seats. That means two each had to come from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. So that means

Tom Bateman (01:44:54.388) 10, 10 for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, four for PDI, 24 Quebec, 24 Ontario, six Manitoba, six Saskatchewan, six Alberta, six BC. Newfoundland comes into confederation in 1949 and we said, so what should we do there? Okay, give them six. And then, and eventually we said, yeah, we'll give the territories one each. So we have 105 senators now and it's a.

It's kind of a bizarre kind of provincial representation formula. It sort of made sense at a certain time, but doesn't really make a ton of sense right now. So it's unequal by province in any case. And then we also said that a Senator appointed from a province or a section needs to have a certain amount of wealth and to own a certain amount of real property in the province, which he or she will represent.

And so it's a very interesting thing. We, we, we had a constitutional provision which prevented the awarding of titles, like aristocratic titles in Canada, but we did have a property qualification for membership in the Senate. And, that I think was to make sure that, senators actually had some kind of permanence, in the province they represented, and that they would have kind of like a stake.

in the province they represented. But in addition, the language in the debates at the founding were also such that you'd have kind of like a better sort of class of person sitting in the Senate, the upper house, which would be the chamber of sober second thoughts. A chamber

not to block the House of Commons because the Commons is the elected chamber and the government, according to the principle of responsible government, should be responsible to the elected chamber, not to the unelected chamber. And what that means then is that the Senate should not stand ultimately in the way of the House of Commons, but that it should be a chamber of review and that it should look at legislation

Tom Bateman (01:47:19.206) suggest changes, try to improve legislation, but not ultimately block it. And so a very strong constitutional convention is that the Senate can review legislation and suggest changes, but when the House insists on its way, then the Senate shall yield. so it's been...

slightly corrupted over the years in that it has become a bit of a patronage dunk for parties in power. But even so, it has done good work in the review of legislation and sometimes in the initiation of studies of public policy problems like mental health and so on and so forth. And senators have more time than MPs and they can

They can have long committee studies. can have witnesses testify before them. And sometimes they can write really interesting and important reports that may see some policy light sometime down the road. But the pressure to democratize the Senate has been around for a long time. And mainly from Western Canada, starting in the 1980s, there has been a movement to elect senators.

It has never really worked and it probably won't work. nonetheless, there are some of those democratic forces, sometimes inspired by the US experience, that have operated. And we came close to something in the Charlotown Accord of 1992, but that failed along with everything else in that very large and unwieldy document.

Reforming Parliament and Reducing Party Discipline

Ian Van Harten (01:49:12.174) Well, that, that the idea of reform kind of leads me, mean, and maybe we can finish up with this, this question here. you know, we've, we've gone over a few different, pieces of parliament and highlighted some, popular criticisms of how it works and maybe how we could improve it. And then the Senate has lots and lots of different ideas, but there are others related to, parliament as well. I, I'm just wondering if you can.

comment on how you think about some of these ideas for reform. and are there some out there that you think maybe, maybe that would be a good idea or maybe do you think just having a better understanding of how the system is meant to work, allows us to appreciate, maybe it's working as it should, but so how do you see this?

Tom Bateman (01:50:09.97) Yeah, I certainly think that the system as it operates in Canada could do with less party discipline.

But I don't think that any particular legislative measure is what is appropriate to do this. All it takes is a change in the culture of the House of Commons. And that culture is changed by some insistent action by MPs. And when MPs decide that

No, on this thing, it's very appropriate to depart from the direction of the party whip, and then they vote against it. And if a number of people do it, suddenly the emperor actually has no clothes. It's actually as simple as that.

the relaxation of party discipline, I think would probably be a good thing. And it's entirely in the hands of MPs to achieve that. We don't need any like royal commission. We don't need new legislation. We don't need another study. What we need are MPs who say, yeah, I'm not going to vote for this. That's it. And we have MPs who vote against

their whips occasionally. But they are relatively isolated instances, relatively few in number. They don't attract attention. And the person who sticks his neck out to vote against his or her party, sort of doesn't get recognized for it and will often be criticized for it, especially from colleagues within the party.

Tom Bateman (01:52:25.096) And so when that kind of reaction changes, then the problem of overweening, trained seal-type party discipline will start to relax. Now here's another thing that we might consider. And in fact, we have, and there's been resistance to it. But I mentioned earlier in our discussion the

the presidentialization of prime ministerial power. I think there's a very good argument to suggest that prime ministers are more powerful than they really sort of are designed to be in a parliamentary system. In the old days, up until 1919 in Canada, leaders of parties were selected by the caucuses. So it was a parliamentary decision to select a party leader. Accordingly, it was a

parliamentary decision to select the leader who would become prime minister. And what that meant is that if this prime minister made mistakes, got too arrogant, too cocky, enjoyed power way too much, then the caucus could remove that prime minister. And this is not some whack job kind of idea. It happens all the time in Australia and the UK.

In fact, anyone who's paid any attention to British politics will know that sitting prime ministers get tossed out by their caucuses. Like it's extraordinary, but it's happened like a bunch of times just in the last five or eight years. yeah, a prime minister knows like, okay, I better, you know, take care of the people who support me in the House of Commons because they can yank me at any time.

And in Canada, that's not true. What we've got is a system where party members are the ones who can ultimately pull a prime minister because it's the party members who select the leader of the party in an extra parliamentary so-called democratic membership-based process. But all that does is create more distance between the leader of the party

Tom Bateman (01:54:51.878) and his or her caucus. And because the membership doesn't have like an institutional presence in the daily operation of parliament. And whereas the caucus is right there at all time. we, I think we've seen like a halting sort of influence of the liberal caucus in finally getting the prime minister to announce his resignation because we had

the Ontario caucus of the Liberals, the Quebec caucus of the Liberals, and the Maritime caucus of Liberals kind of vote in some way to suggest to the prime minister that actually he doesn't need to resign. But they're kind of embarrassed and it wasn't like hard yank of the chain. was just like, please, could you consider getting out of here because we're all dead now, so on and so forth. Well, if there was actual...

power in the caucus to appoint and remove the leader of party. I think the shape of parliamentary politics would change a bit and the overweening power of prime ministers would get clipped.

Ian Van Harten (01:56:04.43) Yeah, super interesting. But yeah, I think that's a good place to leave it for now. But yeah, thank you again, Dr. Bateman for doing this. Yes, so interesting to talk to you about all things Canadian government. So thanks again for doing this.

Tom Bateman (01:56:23.848) My pleasure.

#transcript