WHO’S THE BEST CANDIDATE?
Cabinet positions should be based on a person’s merit, not on gender
There never was a time when cabinet ministers were chosen strictly on merit. Region and language have been taken into account from the start, latterly joined by considerations of gender and ethnic balance; white men have benefited throughout from a preference, conscious or otherwise, that was until comparatively lately all but absolute.
Friendships, flattery, grudges: these, too, have always been important factors in deciding who’s in and who’s out — as, of course, is the simple matter of party affiliation. The numbers of the incompetent, the venal, and the merely mediocre among Her Majesty’s ministers, most of them white men, would fill a book.
The question is which direction we want to move from here. Do we want cabinet to move toward the ( still distant) meritocratic ideal, or away from it? Do we want individuals to be chosen more for their talent and experience and less for their sex, race and so on, or the reverse? Is merit an attainable or even desirable goal, or is the whole thing just a spoils system — in which the only objective is to make sure your group is at the front of the line?
How we answer this will depend in part on what we think cabinet is for. Is it intended to be a reflection of society, in all its multi- faceted diversity? Or is it intended to govern the country? If the first, then the dominant consideration in choosing a cabinet will be to hit the right percentages of sex, race, disability, etc. — or rather, since it is impossible to embody the full range of social differentiation in a cabinet of any manageable size, to balance the claims of competing identity groups for scarce cabinet seats.
If the second, on the other hand, then other traits — judgment, leadership, knowledge of policy, experience in running large organizations, experience in politics — will weigh more heavily in the decision. The more we decide that cabinet matters, the more we think cabinet ministers have real jobs to do with important, even crucial responsibilities, the less tolerant we are likely to be of other considerations taking precedence.
We see this in other areas. Where a thing is truly important to us — like the national hockey team, or to a lesser extent the Supreme Court — we tend to place relatively greater emphasis on merit. It’s only where we have decided an institution is more or less useless — corporate boards or, alas, cabinet — that representationalism takes its place. The more that cabinet has declined in importance, the more attention has focused, not on the fitness of a particular individual for a particular job, but on parsing how well different groups are represented within it.
But nothing we have seen before can quite compare to the course the Liberals have embarked upon: an explicit 50- 50 gender quota. This is not an objective or a target; not a balancing of merit and other considerations. It is a fixed rule, to be adhered to come what may. It is one, moreover, imposed without reference to the numbers of MPs of either sex from which cabinet is to be drawn. Women make up just over a quarter of the Liberal caucus, yet they will make up precisely half of cabinet. Your chances of getting into cabinet as a woman are as such roughly three times that of a man: 30 per cent, in a 28- member cabinet, versus 10 per cent.
The issue here, God knows, is not fairness to male MPs. They knew what they were getting into when they signed up for this. And in any event, you may be of the view that this is a sort of cosmic payback, an evening of the scales for past discrimination against female MPs. The problem is that the country has to be governed in the here and now. So far as we are putting representationalism before ability, we are also asking the country’s interests to take a back seat.
That is obviously — this should not need to be said — not because women are any less fit to govern than men. Quite the contrary: it is not the critics of quotas who assert a contradiction between fairness to women and hiring on merit. It is their advocates. The radical, unspeakable alternative to quotas is: just hire the best person for the job. If it’s a man, fine; if it’s a woman, fine. If the result is a cabinet with more men than women, or more women than men, fine either way.
Of course, assessing merit is an imprecise art at best, and fraught with potential for discrimination; it is the achievement of feminism to have forced the rest of us to acknowledge that. It is absolutely valid to insist those charged with making appointments look within themselves for unconscious bias, while looking outside their usual networks of friends and associates.
But casting a wider net in the search for merit — or even expanding the definition of it — is a different thing than discarding it altogether. However difficult it may be to judge merit, it’s a stretch to say it’s impossible, still less that there is no such thing ( as the quotation marks that so often surround the term would seem to suggest), or else we should just choose cabinets at random. If one politician is no better than another, why hold elections?
Moreover, casting the widest possible net is hard to square with a policy that automatically disqualifies 90 per cent of one sex from eligibility. A fixed rule that women must be no smaller a proportion of cabinet than they are of caucus would still be a quota, but it would at least pay lip service to merit: if we assume the relevant talents and experience are distributed in the same proportion among women as men, then we should expect, on average, to find cabinet- worthy candidates of either sex in proportion to their numbers in caucus ( though the actual numbers, in any given sample, might deviate to one side or the other).
It would not be surprising, indeed, to find a disproportionate number of the best and the brightest among female MPs, given the remaining barriers to women’s participation in politics. But three times as many? What principle can possibly justify this?
The more that cabinet has declined in importance, the more attention has focused ... on parsing how well different groups are represented within it.