White Paper: The Chrétien Command Mode
Smaller and Simpler?
When Jean Chrétien became prime minister in 1993, he maintained most of the features of a smaller cabinet structure. He appointed 22 cabinet ministers and 8 secretaries of state for a total of 31 senior members of government, including himself. He established only four cabinet committees—Economic Union, Social Union, Special Committee of Council, and Treasury Board—to review emerging policies and programs. The central agencies saw their staffs reduced in the overall effort to produce a less costly, more nimble government. Chrétien also abolished the short-lived Operations Committee and gave it no replacement, so the full cabinet of 22 ministers was, in theory, the strategic policy priority and planning body in lieu of either the Operations Committee or P&P. At the same time, the PM established a new system of financial management—the expenditure management system—intended to enhance the economy and efficiency of government operations while providing departments with much greater autonomy in developing and implementing their policies and programs.
In 1997, at the advent of his second term, Chrétien slightly modified the composition of cabinet, increasing its membership to 29 ministers and 8 secretaries of state, for a full ministry of 37 while adding the Communications Committee. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, the Committee on Security and Intelligence was added.
Chrétien’s system was significantly smaller, simpler, and, in theory, much more sensitive to ministerial and departmental initiatives than the more institutionally and procedurally complex Trudeau and Mulroney cabinets, suggesting to the uninitiated something akin to the departmentalized system from before the 1960s. With the absence of a central strategic cabinet committee such as P&P or Operations, the hierarchical structure of cabinet appeared to become more egalitarian, as each member of the full cabinet officially participated in the main decision–making body of the government.
Routine versus Strategic Channels
In assessing these structural changes, Aucoin (1999, 126) points out that the prime minister “expects his cabinet ministers to manage their portfolio responsibilities using their own individual statutory authority; they are to refrain from bringing issues to cabinet for collective decisions that they themselves can resolve.” This relative emphasis on autonomy should not be mistaken for a return to a departmentalized system of decision making, benefiting strong ministers at the expense of power centralized in the prime minister and his or her key advisers. Far from it. As Savoie (1999, 1–8) demonstrates in his incisive study of contemporary power relations in Ottawa, the Chrétien government witnessed a centralization of authority with respect to strategic priority setting and policy making to such a degree that one can speak of “court government”–in which decision making on strategic matters was effectively monopolized by the prime minister, a few select ministers, and a coterie of senior advisers.
Savoie is quick to point out that Chrétien merely accentuated a long–developing trend. However, the concentration of power at the centre was aided and abetted over the 1990s by the politics of deficit reduction. While prime ministers and ministers of finance have always been the two most powerful figures within any government, the perceived deficit and debt crisis that the federal government inherited in 1993 enabled Chrétien and his minister of finance, Paul Martin, to assume both strategic and operational control over the vast apparatus of the federal government. As the twin policies of deficit reduction and government downsizing came to dominate the agenda, Chrétien and Martin took effective control of all budgetary policy. This development, in turn, short–circuited routine departmental policy and program decision making and department–agency competition.
In a government environment in which most new departmental initiatives focused on financial cutbacks and related program service reductions, the scope of departmental activity was significantly delimited and channelled by those in command of the new budgetary process–namely, the department of Finance, the minister of finance, and the prime minister. Power and authority gravitated to the stellar centre of Ottawa, and the departmental “planets” were relegated to distinctly orbital positions, a dynamic already observable in the institutionalized system of decision making.
Savoie’s research shows how the slowly evolving division of labour between, on the one hand, the routine, administrative aspects of policy and programs and, on the other, their strategic development and management was well maintained by the Chrétien government. The former were left to the line departments, and new initiatives of less political significance were formally handled via the traditional memoranda to cabinet through to eventual full cabinet approval or rejection. (This process was of course marked by the bureaucratic politics and department–agency competition and in-fighting commonly associated with the institutionalized system.) The latter, strategic issues of great political import, were adopted by the forces of the centre as their prerogative and managed in any way they deemed appropriate.
