If our leaders were corrupt, would we know it?

Canadian prime ministers have virtually no checks on their power.

Andrew Coyne, Comment, The National Post:

The following was adapted from a speech given by Andrew Coyne on Tuesday night at History Wars at the ROM, the first in a series of three debates on Canadian history, held at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

In other countries executive power is subject to various checks and balances. Who or what prevents a prime minister of Canada from doing as he pleases? The governor general? But he is his appointee. The Senate? He appoints all the senators. The courts? He appoints every member of the Supreme Court, and all the federal court judges, too. The bureaucracy? He appoints the clerk of the privy council, every deputy minister, the heads of all the major Crown corporations, even the ambassadors. The police? He appoints the chief of the RCMP. And so on, hundreds and hundreds of posts, great and small, and nearly all without any independent oversight.

Ah, but the prime minister, as we all know, must command the confidence of the House of Commons. Surely that is the ultimate check on his power. Really? He appoints all the committee chairs (or those in which the government has a majority). He appoints not only the cabinet ministers, but the parliamentary secretaries and the whips. So members of the governing caucus have every incentive to seek his favour, and to fear his wrath. For that matter, he effectively appoints the caucus, since without his signature on their nomination papers, they cannot run. Yet they have no similar power over him: Since 1919, party leaders in Canada have been elected, not by the caucus, as in the classical Westminster model, but by the party at large.

In consequence, Parliament has become a kind of electoral college, its sole purpose to translate the votes of perhaps 40% of the electorate into a majority. A prime minister in possession of such a “mandate” decides what will be debated, and, for how long. He decides when Parliament shall be convened, when it should be prorogued, and when dissolved. And if he has to, he has the nuclear option: the power to declare any vote a matter of confidence, and to insist on fresh elections if MPs are so foolish as to defeat him.

Have these powers been abused? Yes. All of them, with increasing frequency. The powers of appointment are a particular example. The Senate is notorious as a repository for party bagmen. Mulroney appointed his wife’s hairdresser to the Federal Business Development Bank. Chrétien made his press secretary governor general. Cabinet itself has become so bloated in size as to be little more than a ceremonial body.

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