Friday, December 22, 2006
The Gomery Recommendations: Harper Nails It
I'm impressed.
When I'm opposed to recommendations designed to empower the legislative branch, that's a pretty good indicator that those recommendations are badly flawed. Deputy Ministers are already quite politicized enough - the last thing we need is to increase this politicization by requiring them to account to the Public Accounts Committee, which is properly concerned with political accountability - you know, like the accountability of Ministers to Parliament. The sort of accountability that is enforced, in part, by having Ministers account to the Public Accounts Committee.
Beyond that, there's already going to be huge inertia in an organization the size of the federal government. Making Deputy Ministers accountable to anybody but their political masters would only increase this inertia. If there's a tradeoff here to be made between good governance and empowerment of elected officials - and I'm not at all convinced that there is - we need to err on the side of empowerment of elected officials, or democracy ceases to have any meaning (this sounds like histrionics, but it's no exagerration).
The one area where I'm somewhat undecided is on the question of division of the role of the Clerk of the Privy Council. There's no question the current structure of the civil service, where Deputy Ministers report both to their Ministers (who report to the Prime Minister) and to the Clerk (who reports to the Prime Minister) is a little odd. Gomery hadn't proposed making it any less odd, however - he just proposed dividing their reporting structure between their Ministers and some unspecified member of the Civil Service who wouldn't be the de facto Deputy Minister to the PM (as distinct, confusingly, from Deputy PM), but would still report to the PM.
Frankly, this episode is increasing my conviction that the Conservatives are the strongest party on governance issues, Senate reform notwithstanding. Now if only they weren't such an egregiously bad match for my economic (and, to a lesser extent, social) views...
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I'm impressed.
When I'm opposed to recommendations designed to empower the legislative branch, that's a pretty good indicator that those recommendations are badly flawed. Deputy Ministers are already quite politicized enough - the last thing we need is to increase this politicization by requiring them to account to the Public Accounts Committee, which is properly concerned with political accountability - you know, like the accountability of Ministers to Parliament. The sort of accountability that is enforced, in part, by having Ministers account to the Public Accounts Committee.
Beyond that, there's already going to be huge inertia in an organization the size of the federal government. Making Deputy Ministers accountable to anybody but their political masters would only increase this inertia. If there's a tradeoff here to be made between good governance and empowerment of elected officials - and I'm not at all convinced that there is - we need to err on the side of empowerment of elected officials, or democracy ceases to have any meaning (this sounds like histrionics, but it's no exagerration).
The one area where I'm somewhat undecided is on the question of division of the role of the Clerk of the Privy Council. There's no question the current structure of the civil service, where Deputy Ministers report both to their Ministers (who report to the Prime Minister) and to the Clerk (who reports to the Prime Minister) is a little odd. Gomery hadn't proposed making it any less odd, however - he just proposed dividing their reporting structure between their Ministers and some unspecified member of the Civil Service who wouldn't be the de facto Deputy Minister to the PM (as distinct, confusingly, from Deputy PM), but would still report to the PM.
Frankly, this episode is increasing my conviction that the Conservatives are the strongest party on governance issues, Senate reform notwithstanding. Now if only they weren't such an egregiously bad match for my economic (and, to a lesser extent, social) views...
