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Tommy Banks: Revive tradition of ministerial resignations

Columnist Don Braid nailed it when he wrote recently: “There was a day when ministers would quit for having the wool pulled over their eyes. Today, they have to get caught stealing the sheep.

Columnist Don Braid nailed it when he wrote recently: “There was a day when ministers would quit for having the wool pulled over their eyes. Today, they have to get caught stealing the sheep.”

Actually, there are a few sheep-stealers in federal and provincial governments who still haven’t resigned.

The concept to which Braid refers is absolute ministerial responsibility, one of the pillars of the Westminster parliamentary system, under a version of which we ostensibly are governed. And when that pillar is not observed, parliaments and legislatures don’t function well. It’s one of the legs upon which the proper functioning of our system stands. At the moment, the system is badly tilted.

The pillar is quite simple: “You, minister, are responsible for what goes on in your bailiwick. If something goes badly wrong on your watch, you wear it; and the consequence, which was once along the lines of ‘off-with-his-head,’ is that you must resign forthwith.”

In the good old days when ministers of the Crown understood that this is what was expected — demanded — of them, they took great care to ensure that snafus didn’t happen. They were more careful. They were more diligent. They were more prudent. Why? Because the consequence was the axe, literally or figuratively. These days we get variations on “Oh, it wasn’t me who did that. It was my underlings, and he/she/they have been sacked.” But that’s not how it’s supposed to work.

How it’s supposed to work is that the minor managers are supposed to know what their juniors are doing, and to be responsible for it. The big-league managers who manage the minor managers are supposed to know what the little managers are doing; and the people at the top are supposed to accept responsibility for reposing their confidence in those big-league managers.

When things work that way, which they once did in this country, the minor managers and the big-league managers and the people at the top, all knowing that they will be held responsible, tend to take great care in the matter of who is minding the store, and in ensuring that the ground rules are meticulously followed.

And in resigning when they’re not. Because all those people from the minister on down want to keep their jobs, the result is better and more careful government. A case in point is that of Lord Carrington in the 1982 Falklands crisis.

Carrington was widely held to be the best British foreign secretary since Anthony Eden. He was immensely effective and immensely popular in Britain and in the diplomatic stratosphere throughout the world.

Almost immediately following the surprise Argentine invasion of the Falklands, Carrington resigned because it had been his ministry’s job to ensure his government would be sufficiently informed to have known the invasion was coming; the foreign office had failed in that responsibility; he was the foreign secretary; and that was that. He would resign, and he would brook no argument.

His government pleaded that he stay on. The Americans were appalled at the prospect and urged him to stay on. The Queen urged him to stay on. The media, the people, the United Nations and all his distinguished foreign colleagues urged that he stay. But he would not be deterred from resigning.

He explained that the convention of absolute ministerial responsibility, essential to the proper functioning of the parliamentary system, demanded that he resign. He would have none of “My officials have failed to properly inform me,” or any of that kind of excuse to which we have now in this country become so used. He was exactly right.

That convention and practice had, after all, not been invented one Thursday afternoon over tea. It had evolved and developed over centuries and had resulted in a parliamentary system that was then and is now emulated the world over.

But that pillar — that clarity of responsibility and of duty — has been removed from our political culture in this country for a long time. We have to get it back. We must demand that our politicians get it back. If we don’t do that, our system will continue to fail us.

For our Parliament and provincial legislatures to return to the convention of absolute ministerial responsibility will require nothing less than a sea change in the way we think, in what we demand of our legislative representatives, and in the way politicians in all orders of government do their jobs.

We have the incentive, because this is a matter not of choice, but of abject and urgent necessity if our parliaments are to function properly.

 

Tommy Banks of Edmonton is a former senator.