White Paper: The Institutionalized Cabinet System
Prime Minister Lester Pearson established the Priorities and Planning Committee (P&P), a body designed to be, as its name implies, the lead voice in establishing and articulating the general policy agenda of the government. Given its central coordinating role in this new cabinet structure, P&P was the only cabinet committee chaired by the prime minister, with its remaining membership drawn from the chairs of all the other cabinet committees and among other ministers chosen by the PM. As such, P&P came to be seen by many as an “inner cabinet.”
This new structure was endorsed and strengthened by Pierre Trudeau, and his system of cabinet institutions was largely maintained by the government of Brian Mulroney. The full-fledged institutionalized cabinet, as it came to be called during the Trudeau years, was an amalgam of cabinet committees and advisory bodies known as central agencies. The purpose of such an involved structure, as Bakvis and MacDonald (1993, 55) have argued, was to permit cabinet to optimize its time and resources to address issues in a more professional and technocratic way, resulting in decisions that would be more coordinated, informed, and rational. The system was also designed to provide ministers with the institutional means to become the primary actors of government, with the cabinet collectively in control of a bureaucratic network that provided the full range of information, options, and advice to enable them to make sound policy and program determinations. The incremental approach to decision making associated with the departmentalized cabinet system was transcended by a rationalistic approach, placing great stress on top-down, centralized, and systematic decision making.
In the new structure, ministers received intelligence and policy advice through independent central agencies that were separate from government departments, so that individually and collectively they were no longer beholden to the possibly narrow and institutionally self-serving views of senior department officials. The creation of multiple cabinet support agencies was explicitly understood by Trudeau as a way to offer countervailing advice to cabinet. The cabinet, through either its committees or its deliberations in full, was then in the commanding position of being able to assess a variety of informed approaches to the same topic and choose the one that best met its policy and program aims.
This system of decision making, as refined by Trudeau and inherited by Mulroney, was desired for the premium it placed on rationality (Aucoin 1986). It was expected to produce policies and programs characterized by logic, adherence to established priorities, and sound practical design. Decision making became rigorously systematic, dispassionate, and intelligent. Key government priorities and goals were established at the outset and then programs developed to fulfil those ends. And in assessment of means–ends relationships, options were subjected to detailed analysis of strengths and weaknesses and costs and benefits. Only the most logical, well-founded, substantial, and competent option could survive such systematic scrutiny, according to advocates of the system.
In comparison to the ad hoc, bottom-up, incremental decision making of the departmentalized cabinet, this new approach was viewed by its early promoters as nothing short of revolutionary: the coupling of human intelligence and ingenuity to the technocratic processes of bureaucracy. As we will see, however, the best-laid and most rational plans do not always run smoothly.
