Why do we have such extraordinary centralization in the PMO?

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Kevin Lynch is the former clerk of the Privy Council and deputy minister of Finance and Industry and Jim Mitchell is a former senior executive in PCO and Treasury Board. They are the authors of A New Blueprint for Government: Reshaping Power, the PMO and the Public Service.

While a powerful Prime Minister’s Office is not a recent phenomenon, the extraordinary degree of centralization of power in the PMO over the past two decades certainly is. It reached an unfortunate peak under the Trudeau government. While still early days, there does not appear to be a significant lessening of PMO control under Prime Minister Mark Carney. Whether this is transitional, or his preferred style of governing, time will tell.

Many journalists and academics have long recognized the dominance of the PMO within the federal government. We would argue that the more recent extraordinary centralization represents a fundamental “governance imbalance” in our Westminster system. Among the many unintended consequences of this imbalance is a country significantly underperforming its potential in a troubled world.

But what has driven this extreme centralization – a de-facto “presidentialization” of our Westminster system of government – during recent administrations? There are a number of likely factors.

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Many of the political staff under both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau came with experience mainly in provincial governments, particularly Ontario, where the premier’s office has long been the dominant force in managing the government. Neither the Harper nor the Trudeau governments had many ministers or political staff with experience in governing at the federal level. They imported to Ottawa what they knew.

There was also an emerging view among political advisers that “communications trumps policy” in a world of intensive social media. The obvious corollary was that creating the message, aligning the message across government, and delivering a “single message” meant the need for centralized control. The fear that ministers might go off message was one factor in why it was the Trudeau PMO which appointed ministers’ chiefs of staff, not the ministers themselves – conveying the clear message they reported to both the PMO and the minister.

The medium facilitated centralization of the message. The rise of social media as a dominant form of communication made PMO control of communications much easier and, if you believed that “comms trumps everything,” absolutely necessary.

The Trudeau government – which had a plethora of initiatives and elaborate, mandated interconnectivity among ministers and departments – created such complexity in file management that central oversight was thought to be needed to avoid chaos. Relatedly, consultations proliferated widely and became a form of government messaging, not listening. In communications-focused governments, this naturally led to centralized oversight.

Even the policy advice process became highly centralized. “Four corners meetings,” which began under Mr. Harper, and involved the PMO, ministerial political staff, the Privy Council Office and departmental public servants, were designed to ensure that the only advice that reached ministers and cabinet had been shaped, vetted and approved by the PMO. The objective was not to receive fearless advice from non-partisan public servants.

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The Trudeau government’s adoption of the progressive belief that debt – with interest rates near zero – was essentially free money meant that policy choices were unencumbered by the burdens of fiscal constraints and policy trade-offs.

In this world, who was better placed than the PMO to ensure the political wishes of the government were met? The budget became both a policy and a messaging document, leading to a much greater role for the PMO in all aspects of budget preparation, including communications. The memoirs of Bill Morneau provide a glimpse into this changing dynamic between the Finance department and the PMO.

In government, presence matters. The massive expansion of political staff in both the PMO and ministers’ offices also led to the intrusion of political staff into the administrative operations of government, which were traditionally the responsibility of the non-partisan public service. A vivid example was the Trudeau government’s embrace of “deliverology” which, as actually implemented, became more about centralized control than government efficiency. Not surprisingly, poor service delivery became a hallmark of the Trudeau government.

While these various factors help to explain the drive to excessive centralization of power, they do not excuse it. The role of the PMO is not to run the government but to assist the prime minister as head of government – governing is a team sport. What is needed is a much better understanding within government of how the Westminster system is meant to work, what the pitfalls of excessive centralization of power and advice are, and why balance in how government operates is ultimately in everyone’s best interest.