Trudeau won’t sacrifice Prime Minister’s Office, come hell or high water
When Justin Trudeau was leader of Canada’s third-largest party in the House of Commons, he had big opinions on the Prime Minister’s Office and how it functioned.
According to Trudeau, Stephen Harper’s PMO (of which I was a part) was too secretive, too controlling and too partisan. “The boys in short pants” (as we were known) were running amok manhandling elected members and clubbing bureaucrats in the manner of baby seals (I paraphrase, but lightly).
The apotheosis of Trudeau’s outrage came in October 2013, when he tweeted: “(Retweet) to call on (Stephen Harper) to testify on the PMO Ethics Scandal under oath.”
As you’ve no doubt already guessed, Trudeau was referring to Sen. Mike Duffy and all of the wacky things our office did to try to extract him from the political mess of what turned out to be his perfectly legal and completely justified expense claims (thanks, judge).
Not only did Trudeau want Harper to testify about it all, he wanted every PMO staffer involved in the Duffy saga sacked.
A penny then for Prime Minister Trudeau’s thoughts on the employment prospects of those in the current PMO, what with his office being dunked in not one but two soups: Vice-Admiral Mark Norman’s sacking for supposedly leaking cabinet secrets (now before the courts) and the unfolding drama surrounding SNC-Lavalin, Jody Wilson-Raybould and what the PMO did or didn’t do about the former’s desire to not go to jail (courts, TBD).
Both are on par or arguably worse than Duffy and both involve a hyperactive PMO that was trying to alter the direction of travel of a sensitive file. In the case of the Trudeau PMO, finding out who leaked cabinet discussions (Norman) and leaning (allegedly) on the former attorney general to get her to look the other way on SNC-Lavalin.
Now, the gap between my writing these words and you reading them is such that an entire universe of news could have unfolded on either front in the interim, so I will make a broader point about prime ministers’ offices: Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil.
The Norman and SNC-Lavalin episodes show that what Trudeau promised to fix about the PMO during the 2015 election — making it more open, more transparent and less controlling — remains broken.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
It’s not a particularly insightful point given that people such as Donald Savoie have been banging on about the unholy concentration of power in the PMO since Trudeau was in short pants. Literally, as Savoie has been going on about it since the days of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Savoie argues the concentration of power in the “centre” is — in part — a consequence of the spread of government. Central agencies such as the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board were meant to co-ordinate government business across the growing panoply of postwar departments, but instead telescoped power away from departments to the centre. And that telescoping has now continued to the point where we have today the unelected and short-panted calling all the shots.
Of course, the people in short pants (hey, Justin Trudeau runs a gender-neutral shop) don’t really call all of the shots, but they do call enough of them to anger the nether regions of government.
All big decision roads still lead to the PMO, despite the change from Harper to Trudeau.
The reasons this concentration of power remains are many, but I’ll pick out two: a government’s first function is to get re-elected and the news cycle now moves too fast for bureaucracy. These two factors favour the political staff and place an inordinate amount of power with the prime minister and his advisers. The broader narrative and daily spin you need to cut through in a busy information environment just doesn’t get entrusted to the plebs.
And that goes double when the prime minister is a narrative juggernaut, as Trudeau was in his victory over Harper. God love the humble backbench MP, but the Liberals elected in 2015 did so on Trudeau’s coattails and most of them know it.
But the Trudeau government’s fresh face was also its Achilles heel; there were few experienced hands elected and few experienced staffers on hand to guide them. And when you add in Trudeau’s crippling reliance on his senior staff, none of whom have changed from opposition to government or in government over nearly four years, you create the perfect storm.
Harper could change staff like crazy because he was the driving force. I’ll leave it to you to figure out why Trudeau hasn’t changed his political mandarins.
That’s why Gerry Butts or Katie Telford will not be sacrificed, no matter how Duffy-esque the Norman or SNC-Lavalin episodes get. This PMO will battle through just as the previous PMO did before.
They have to. Trudeau just wouldn’t function without them.