Final thoughts on the shuffle

With my post yesterday on Rona Ambrose’s prorogation mountain climbing I did touch somewhat on this week’s shuffle of Stephen Harper’s cabinet, but I did want to comment a bit more broadly on the topic before moving on.

I don’t think it was really much of a shuffle of note. Most of the major jobs stayed the same. Sure, Lisa Raitt was down (but not out, what do you need to do to get booted by Harper?) and Rona Ambrose was up. Whatev.

Much attention seems to be focusing around Stockwell Day’s move to Treasury Board, which is being taken as a sign that the government is about to get serious about cutting spending. I need to take a contrarian view on that one for three reasons.

First, this government was the highest spending government in Canadian history BEFORE the downturn and stimulus, so if they did suddenly decide to be fiscally prudent it would be quite a turnaround for them.

Second, even if they did want to go on spending cut bonanza, what is it about Stock Day that makes him the ideal poster child for probity? I don’t recall his term as Alberta Treasurer being marked by spending restraint. All I do recall is the government having to pay for him to defend against lawsuits and pay for settlements.

Third, there seems to be some fundamental confusion about the role of the president of the Treasury Board. To quote the Winnipeg Sun:

The president of the Treasury Board’s job is to monitor that spending after a fiscal blueprint has been approved by Parliament. If the budget itself — expected in March — does not contain the kind of frugality required to start reversing this orgy of government spending we’ve seen in recent years, Harper could appoint Ebenezer Scrooge to head the Treasury Board and it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.

If the government wanted to launch a rationalization and efficiency kick, asking departments to give back existing budget, then TB head would be the guy to lead it. I recall Reg Alcock leading a program review under Paul Martin. I wouldn’t count on big savings though. Every government comes into power promising to cut waste, and always finds there’s far less waste then they thought. Or are willing to cut.

No, if you want to cut spending it’s not done by Treasury Board. It’s done by Finance during the budget process. And last I checked, that department is still headed by the highest spending finance minister in Canadian history, the same guy who left Ontarioins with a massive hidden deficit. With Jim Flaherty still in his job, I’ll believe this new probity when I see it.

No cabinet personalities

The overarching thought I had when considering this shuffle is how bland and interchangeable most of the Harper ministers are. And it really speaks to the differences in governing philosophy and the role of government between Liberals and Conservatives.

It seemed to me that the Liberals always many activist ministers, who pushed and fought for programs and initiatives that they believed in and were important to them. John Manley and later Brian Tobin on wireless broadband. Lloyd Axworthy on land mines. David Anderson on a range of environmental files. And many others. They had things they wanted to get done, and they lobbied hard to do so. They had personalities.

In contrast, the Conservative ministers seem more simple managers. They get their marching orders from the PMO and they work quietly and diligently on the file, managing the day to day. But I get no sense of a vision, of any minister being truly engaged in their portfolios, bringing drive and a personal interest to move files forward. Perhaps the one exception is Jason Kenney who, while I often disagree with him on policy, is very much personally engaged in his portfolio and seems to have a vision driving him. The rest of them, I sense you could have everyone trade with the minister to their left at the cabinet table and it wouldn’t change a thing.

Of course, both Conservatives and Liberals would say that their approach is the right one. And it wouldn’t (just) be partisanship. Liberals believe in activist government as a force for good in society, Conservatives want government to manage its narrow responsibilities well and otherwise stay out of the way.

It’s an interesting contrast, though. In the end, there’s only one minister that matters, and that’s the one in the Langevin Block. The other pieces are entirely interchangeable.

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We had to prorogue so Rona Ambrose could take a vacation

We have heard many reasons from Stephen Harper's Conservatives to explain why they had to prorogue parliament. They had to recalibrate, they said. They had to stop the instability of parliament so they could focus on putting the next phase of their economic action plan in place to ensure the economic recovery won't be thrown off track.

What prorogation wasn't about, Harper insisted, was a two-month vacation for government MPs. No sir, they'd all be working hard in their constituencies, and ministers would be hard at work on the economic action plan.

One would think the labour minister might have some work to do around that. After all, the labour market has been taking a beating in the downturn. Unemployment is up substantially, and always lags a recovery. Strategies for dealing with unemployment will be key to the success of any budget and recovery plan the Conservatives launch in March.

It seems though that the presence of the labour minister isn't really necessary for formulting labour policy, as the former minister, who got what' s being called a big promotion in yesterday's cabinet shuffle, was spending her prorogation many miles away from her ministry:

The only drama behind this week's Cabinet shuffle was the call MP Rona Ambrose received on her satellite phone just hours after cresting the summit of Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro. The Prime Minister's Office wanted his labour minister back in Ottawa for reassignment. Immediately.

Actually, if you think about it, Ambrose's prorogation vacation only makes a mockery of the Harper government's rationale for padlocking parliament if you consider the labour minister to be someone that has anything to do with, well, labour policy. If you accept Harper ministers as mere figureheads, then it doesn't really matter how his cabinet spends its time.

Indeed, Ambrose's career-path since being turfed from the Environment portfolio in 2007 bares this out. Having learned her lessons about having visibility and actually doing things (misguided though those things were), she took the message and spent her terms in Intergovermental Affairs and Labour doing as little as possible. Allowing the apointees in the PMO to set policy for her department she kept a very low profile, advancing no agenda, making few announcements.

So it's emblematic that, when she got the call for promotion, she wasn't hard at work at her cabinet office helping craft labour policy to help see the workforce through the downturn, but was instead on vacation on another continent.

Be quiet, follow orders, don't do anything or say anything. It seems that's the surest way to advance in the Harper cabinet.


UPDATE: I'm informed that climbs of Kilimanjaro need to be scheduled well in advance, so Ambrose's trip likely wasn't taken to take advantage of prorogation, but was probably planned for some time so she could be back for the previously scheduled return of Parliament on January 25th.

However, even if her trip wasn't scheduled to take advantage of prorogation, the wider point stands. If the situation is really as dire as Harper puts it, if he really does need to prorogue and have all hands on deck to manage this crisis, why did his labour minister still go mountain climbing?

Maybe she didn't buy prorogation insurance, but if the situation is serious enough for Harper to shut down Parliament, surely it's serious enough for his labour minister to come to the office?

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Harper’s Quebec constitutional foray, and where’s Rona?

I find it interesting that this…

The Harper government is telling Quebec that if the Conservatives win a majority in the next election, they will look to reopen the Constitution and give more meaning to their recognition of Quebeckers as a nation.

Emphasizing the Conservative receptiveness to “Quebec's historical demands,” Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn raised the possibility of winning 30 to 40 seats in the province, up from the current 11.

“The recognition of the Quebec nation within Canada allows us to think that we can put some meat around it, and that a majority government is more able to do a number of things, while being respectful of all of the provinces,” Mr. Blackburn said in an interview.

…comes just a few days after this:

Mr. Dion also appointed Gerard Kennedy, who will run in a Toronto riding in the next election, as intergovernmental affairs critic. It is a potentially contentious move because Mr. Kennedy, who threw his delegate support behind Mr. Dion in the December, 2006, leadership contest, had not backed the idea of the Québécois as a nation within Canada.

I suppose the timing could be coincidental, but I suspect it’s not. It will be interesting to hear Gerard’s first public comments on this. And speaking of intergovernmental affairs, interesting that the Conservative minister, Rona Ambrose, is no where to be heard from in this story. Instead it’s a senior Quebec minister, Jean-Pierre Blackburn, making the comments.

I wonder if Blackburn gave Ambrose a courtesy phone call? Hopefully Rona keeps her mouth shut; we all remember what happened to her predecessor when Harper first brought-up this Quebec as nation nonsense:

The federal Parliament formally recognized Quebecers as a "nation united within Canada" Monday night, but it came with a high cost for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who suffered his first resignation from cabinet over the divisive move.

Michael Chong, the minister of intergovernmental affairs and sport, prefaced his resignation by telling reporters he continued to have faith in the government, the Conservative party and the prime minister. But he charged Harper's recognition of Quebecers as a "nation united within Canada" smacked of what he called "ethnic nationalism."

"The reason why I got involved in politics is my belief in this nation we call Canada. I believe in this great country of ours and I believe in one nation, undivided," he said. "This is a fundamental principle for me, not something on which I can or will compromise. Not now, not ever."

While Michael made a move of principle, opting to resign when he was cut-out of a matter squarely within his ministerial responsibilities and asked to defend a position he disagreed with, I suspect Rona will want to keep the car and driver instead. And it’s not like she hasn’t been busy.

Why, look at these media releases for 2008:



Well, maybe 2007 was a busier year:


OK, well, maybe not. It’s probable telling though whose picture is on the front page of the ministry Web site, and whose is not:


Maybe some enterprising member of the parliamentary press gallery will track down Michael Chong down in the hallways and ask him for his thoughts on Blackburn's promise. Anyone?

Anyway, back to the Conservatives; constitutional musings , which have generated quite a bit of blogsphere reaction. I thought the nation motion in 2006 was supposed to be the end of it, was that not what Harper told us? I think the only person that wanted to re-open the constitution for this, at least back then, was Michael Ignatieff.

Anyway, even if I favoured putting this in the constitution, and I don’t, it would never work. You couldn’t do just this one thing. You need to get the other provinces to support it. You can ask them to give this to Quebec and ignore the Senate inequality concerns of the West, the seat distribution concerns of Ontario, and other issues. We’d quickly get bogged down again in the constitutional moray and that’s not the priority of Canadians.

This is all just politics, of course: the Conservatives sense Liberal weakness in Quebec, and they’re looking to gain ground. It’s a continuation of their fighting with the BQ for the soft nationalist vote. It’s akin to Russian roulette though, because every vote Harper gains in Quebec by pandering to soft-nationalists is going to cost him one in the West. And that’s if he can convince Quebecers he’s serious. The BQ and PQ are going to constantly be moving the goalposts, and will use any failure to meet them as a betrayal of Quebecers, stoking the separatist fires.

And whatever Harper does, they’ll just raise the stakes higher. We saw that in 2006 with the nation motion. Duceppe was pleased as punch with how it played out, and his next demand was ok great, now let’s constitutionalize it. Now that Harper is doing that, I wonder what the next demand will be?

To square the circle, frankly I’m glad Gerard Kennedy, with his lack of support for the nation motion, is now our intergovernmental affairs guy. I think he’s actually the right person for us on this file.

We can’t compete with the BQ and the PQ for the soft-nationalist vote in Quebec. But there is an opening in Quebec, and in the rest of Canada, to be the strong federalist champion. It has been a traditional Liberal role, but it’s one we’ve gotten away from since the aborted Paul Martin era began. Let’s pick that federalist mantle up again.

If we do we’re appealing to a segment of Quebec the other parties are ignoring, and a segment that actually thinks positively of Stephane Dion. We need to get those voters back; if we do we’ll hold our own there. And we’ll gain ground across the rest of Canada as well.

We’ll have to wait and see what play gets called though. It's not without risk, but as Warren says it could galvanize the party. So for god's sake, don't wuss-out yet again.

Anyway, I leave you with these comments from Stephane Dion the leadership candidate on this issue back in 2006:

"People are all mixed up about this." Dion says. "It’s a very interesting discussion at a seminar of political science, but the moment you talk about putting that in the Constitution and you blame the other candidates for being afraid to raise the issue, then legitimate questions come: If you are a nation, what am I, mashed potato?"
--
"Now all of a sudden, the burden of proof is back on our shoulders. We need to deliver this mysterious constitutional change that will change Canada into a Federation of Nirvana through a magic word that everybody would agree upon. It will not work. Keep the burden of proof on the separatists."

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Imagine if...Michael Foriter had been environment minister?

According to a new book by Chantal Hebert it very nearly happened. I've nearly finished French Kiss: Stephen Harper's Blind Date with Quebec and I'll have a review up in a day or two. But I wanted to share this excerpt, which was news to me at least (emphasis mine):

The appointment of Rona Ambrose to the file had been an afterthought; Harper had originally considered starting off his mandate on that front with an absentee minister from the House of Commons. In an early Cabinet plan, Michael Fortier, the prime minister's Senate appointee, would have taken the portfolio with him to the upper house – where he would have been largely sheltered from daily opposition attacks over the Kyoto Protocol.

In hindsight, it was providential for the Conservatives that the scheme fell through…

Was a miracle for Steve is what is was. Could you imagine the Conservatives trying to pretend to be serious about the environment and climate change if the minister responsible were an unelected, unaccountable Senator that couldn't be questioned in the House of Commons?

And really, just the fact that Steve was even considering this, and that it was for the very reason of hiding the environment file from accountability, I think speaks volumes to the true commitment, or lack thereof, Harper really has to the environment issue.

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