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Rather than sneer at the revolving door at 10 Downing Street, we should be asking whether we are truly so much better off with our imperial prime ministership, writes Marcus Gee.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Canadians can be forgiven for feeling smug when they look across the pond at the disarray in British politics. The United Kingdom has had six prime ministers in 10 years and, if things go as expected, will soon have a seventh.
What a mess. The Canadian political scene is so much calmer, more settled, more stable. But is our way of doing things really so superior?
True, we don’t see our PMs come and go so fast that we miss them when we blink. On the other hand, we give the incumbents an unhealthy degree of power between elections. Unchecked, barely accountable, they rule almost as uncrowned kings, often staying on well past their sell date.
Our last two prime ministers governed for about a decade each. The latest recently wangled himself a majority, unearned at the ballot box, that should allow him to govern for at least another few years, essentially without challenge.
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Members of Britain’s Parliament may gang up to overthrow the leaders of their parties, as Labour MPs did to Keir Starmer and Tories did to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. But sometimes leaders deserve to be chucked out. Bumptious Boris certainly did. So did the hapless Ms. Truss.
Mr. Starmer looked like a solid bet when he was elected: a sensible moderate who would govern without too much drama. Once he was in power though, it soon became clear that, like a substitute teacher who can’t control his classroom, he lacked the natural authority to lead the country effectively. His government was deeply unpopular and badly adrift. Out came the knives again. Cruel, but probably for the best.
Such an event is rare in the Canadian system. Our MPs are powerless foot soldiers whose main role in the House of Commons is to arrange themselves behind the leader and clap for the cameras when he opens his mouth. Mark Carney has more or less given up attending Question Period, apparently concluding that Parliament is little more than dinner theatre.
Contrast the charade of our debates with the riveting spectacle you see at key moments in Britain’s Parliament, where ministers and prime ministers joust not only with their opponents but with dissenting members of their own parties.
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Here, even the Cabinet no longer exercises much of a limit on the power of our king-like prime ministers. Past cabinets included formidable ministers with the status to challenge the PM. Think of Paul Martin under Jean Chrétien, Don Mazankowski under Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, or Walter Gordon under Lester Pearson, to say nothing of historic titans such as C.D. Howe.
Who today has that kind of stature? How many Canadians could even name one of Mr. Carney’s top ministers?
Power has become more and more concentrated in the prime minister and the Prime Minister’s Office, Canada’s version of the West Wing. Oddly, you might even say dangerously, this concentration has reached its peak under Mr. Carney, who has the least political experience of anyone to hold the office in memory.
His view is considered law; nothing really happens without him. MPs hang on his every word, waiting to see which way he is leaning so they don’t end up on the wrong side. Just look at how Toronto MPs have quivered and quavered over the issue of jets at the island airport. They might think it is an awful idea, but are they going to say so before the PM forms an opinion? Not on your life.
They act as if he walks on water. He was a famously successful central banker, wasn’t he? He won us an election we were sure to lose and then got us a majority, didn’t he? Our saviour.
In fact, like all of us, Mr. Carney is quite fallible. His decision to give many of us a nice tax cut at a time when Ottawa is ramping up spending on defence, infrastructure, AI and a dozen other things is plunging the federal government deeper into the red than the big-spending Justin Trudeau ever dared. His tilt to Europe is quixotic. Canada is a North American country, like it or not. Using tens of millions in taxpayers’ money to buy up B.C. condos for affordable housing is a thoroughly bad idea that threatens to distort the housing market, as a banker should know.
Most Canadians seem to like Mr. Carney, whose confident manner and solid international reputation are reassuring in turbulent times. But he is as prone to error and overreach as anyone else. Focusing so much power on one individual is never a good idea.
Rather than sneer at the revolving door at 10 Downing Street, we should be asking whether we are truly so much better off with our imperial prime ministership.