Individuals and Institutions: Creating and Recreating the Canadian Prime Ministership

Individuals and Institutions: Creating and Recreating The Canadian Prime Ministership

Kenny William Ie, Department of Political Science McGill University, Montreal August, 2010

A Thesis Submitted to McGill University in Partial Fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Master of Arts

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to give an account of institutional change in the Canadian prime ministership which illustrates the causal importance of individual, psychologically informed factors in explanations of political outcomes. Thus, there are two complementary motivations at work here: one theoretical, the other empirical. The first is an argument for the explanatory power of methodological individualism, as against approaches which subsume political actors to aggregative dynamics and obscure human agency. The empirical analysis tests this hypothesis by examining how the Canadian prime ministerial institution has evolved through the personages of particular prime ministers: John A. Macdonald (1867-1873, 1878-1891), William Lyon Mackenzie King (1921-1930,

1935-1948), and Pierre Trudeau (1968-1979, 1980-1984). The claim of this thesis is that each created a distinct form of the prime ministership which reflected their individual personalities; in turn, each

„prime ministerial style‟ created the general blueprint within which succeeding prime ministers conducted the office.

Sommaire

Le but de cette thèse est d'illustrer l'évolution institutionnel du premier ministre au Canada, avec emphase sur le rôle joué par la psychologie individuel en déterminant les résultats politiques.

Ainsi, ce project à deux objectifs complémentaires, soit théoretiques et empiriques. Le premier soutient le pouvoir explicatif supérieur de l'individualisme méthodologique contre les explications alternatifs, qui subsument les acteurs politiques aux dynamiques agrégatifs et l'agence humaine obscur. L'analyse empirique vérifie cette hypothèse en examinant comment l'institution du premier ministre a changé pour reflecter les personnages ce certains premiers ministres: John A Macdonald

(1867-1873, 1878-1891), William Lyon Mackenzie King (1921-1930, 1935-1948), et Pierre Trudeau

(1968-1979, 1980-1984). Ce thèse constate que chaque homme a crée une institution distincte qui

reflectait leurs personnalités individuels, et à leur tour, chaque 'style de premier ministre' a crée le plan suivit par le premiers ministres ultérieurs.

Acknowledgements This thesis has had a long gestation and an even longer journey to fruition. My academic interest in Canadian politics and in questions of political leadership took shape during my undergraduate career at Simon Fraser University, and a sincere expression of gratitude and recognition of the many teachers and friends is warranted. In particular, Prof. Lynda Erickson of the

Political Science Department at SFU played a significant role in my appreciation and understanding of the Canadian political landscape, and her courses allowed me the opportunity to indulge some of my peculiar fascinations with political power in Canada.

At McGill, I must thank Prof. Eric Bélanger and Prof. Richard Schultz for their invaluable comments on my thesis proposal. Prof. Schultz‟s graduate course on the Canadian political process was also one of the most enjoyable experiences of my time at the university, owing to his extensive knowledge of Canadian politics and, more importantly, his humour and joviality. Prof. Christa

Scholtz, as my advisor for this study, has helped me to improve the analysis in this thesis through her comments and critiques on both the proposal and previous drafts. Her advice and assistance in the process of thesis writing and submission are also greatly appreciated. Any analytical faults and undetected idiocies in what follows are errors of thought, judgment, or editing on my part completely.

Acknowledgements are also due to my fellow graduate students in the department of political science at McGill for creating a pleasant environment in which to work, as well as to many undergraduate students in conferences, whose various comments often provoked thought, some of which is reflected in this thesis. Particular gratitude is owed to Heather Hughson for translating the abstract into French.

Finally, and most importantly, I could not have completed this project without the love and support of my family.

iii

Table of Contents Abstract ...... i Acknowledgements ...... iii Table of Contents ...... iv Introduction: The Question and Outline ...... 1 Part I: ‘Institutions’ 1.1: Institutional Change ...... 3 A: Theories of Institutional Change ...... 3 B: A Framework for Measuring Institutional Change ...... 8 1.2: Institution of the Prime Ministership of Canada ...... 15 1.3: Evolution of Executive Government: Cabinet Models ...... 20 1.4: Conditions and Constraints on Prime Ministerial Action ...... 22 Part II: ‘Individuals’ 2.1: Approaches to Political Leadership ...... 31 A: Contextual Approaches ...... 34 B: Individual Approaches ...... 36 C: Discussion ...... 38 2.2: A Causal Model of Individuals and Institutions ...... 41 2.3: The Independent Variable: The Individual ...... 43 A: Psychology and Political Leadership ...... 45 B: Components of Independent Variable ...... 48 Part III: Creating and Recreating the Prime Ministership 3.1: Introduction ...... 55 3.2: John A. Macdonald: Creating the Prime Ministership ...... 56 3.3: Mackenzie King: Spiritual and Political Perfectibility ...... 69 3.4: Pierre Trudeau: Leadership in Modern Times …...……………..……….....….……………… 82 3.5: Summary and Discussion ...... 93 Conclusion ...... 100 Bibliography ...... 101

Introduction: The Question and Outline The central problem of concern in this thesis can be stated simply: how can we account for institutional change in the Canadian prime ministership?1 I argue for the importance of a kind of methodological individualism in the analysis of said development. To what extent have individual political leaders, in this case those who have occupied the office of prime minister of Canada, „created‟ and „recreated‟ the prime ministership itself? In examining this question, I view this thesis as having two analytical purposes. The first is a „meta-argument‟: an argument about explanations in political science, in general. I am using the context and content of Canadian politics, specifically, change in the institution of the prime ministership, to demonstrate the point that methodological individualism ought to be a more integral part of the discipline, especially if we are looking for causality and not just correlation; presumably, this is the case. The second is the more empirical study of the role of particular prime ministers, as individuals, in the institutional development of the Canadian prime ministership. To continue, the motivation for this investigation is one of coming to better understand the institutional evolution of the prime ministership as something more than a function of macroscopic social or economic forces, or constitutional factors – exogenous variables which constrain and prescribe action – or institutional structures. Rather, this thesis asserts a picture of institutional change from an „internal‟, endogenous perspective, as it were - individually focused and subject to the vicissitudes of particular leaders‟ character and personality. The assumption is that the Canadian prime ministership is not simply a set of rules and norms, structural constraints, and so on, but is also political power embodied in a real person: real persons as psychological beings who shape (as well as being shaped by) the environment they inhabit with „selfness‟. This particular mode of analysis has made valuable and interesting contributions to the study of the political executives in other polities. The American presidency, in particular, has received extensive treatment, among the most seminal being Richard Neustadt‟s The Power to Persuade, James David Barber‟s The Presidential Character and Fred Greenstein‟s The Presidential Difference. Alas, for a variety of reasons, investigations of this sort have not found much sympathy or attracted much attention in Canadian political science. As Ballard and Suedfeld note, there is “no comparably broad

1 Throughout the analysis I use the term ‘prime ministership’, rather than ‘premiership’, which is sometimes, and arguably more often, used. Though the former is perhaps more unwieldy, it specifies precisely the institution I want to discuss, in accordance with the common usage of ‘prime minister’ to denote the head of the federal government (in both official languages: le premier ministre) and ‘premier’ denoting the heads of the provincial governments outside Quebec.

research literature related to Canadian national leaders” (1988: 292; Fox (1980) makes similar arguments). Indeed, political psychology, as a whole, has been unduly neglected in terms of formal recognition and academic institutionalization in the Canadian political science community, if not in the value of individual contributors (see Nesbitt-Larking 2003, 2004). Where political-psychological work has been done in Canada, it has tended to focus on issues of mass or citizen politics: voter behaviour, opinion formation, and so on. In its modest way, then, this thesis is intended to begin to redress the situation. The aim is to elucidate the origins and subsequent developments of the prime ministerial institution through an investigation of the ways in which leaders who have occupied the office have shaped their political environment. The thesis is divided into three major parts, and a brief concluding section. The first part introduces the „institutions‟ aspect of the causal story. The next section of the paper, 1.1, considers theories of institutional change and provides a framework for measuring change, specifically with regard to institutions of political leadership. The next three sections, 1.2 through 1.4, discuss the specific institution of concern here: the Canadian prime ministership. Section 1.2 outlines, in brief, the institution of the Canadian prime ministership dictated by constitution and convention, especially in relation to its progenitor and kin, the British prime ministership. I discuss, in 1.3, the evolution of executive or cabinet government in Canada. The notion of constraints is a notable theme in the institutional literature; thus, continuing with the review of the prime ministerial institution, section 1.4 explicates various putative constraints on prime ministerial action. Part II of the thesis shifts to the „individual‟ element of the argument. The focus on micro- factors in political science explanations is contentious; section 2.1 explicates contending theories of political leadership, particularly in terms of their chosen level of analysis. Section 2.2 suggests a general causal picture for „personalistic‟ theories, and briefly discusses the component parts. Finally, section 2.3 explicitly treats the explanatory variable of the thesis: the individual as a psychological being. The third part of this thesis presents the historical and psychological analysis of institutional change in the Canadian prime ministership, as causally connected to individual political leaders. In section 3.5, I argue for a particular conception of how the prime ministerial institution in Canada has changed. In short, three „prime ministerial eras‟ are identified, corresponding to the three cases: John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, and Pierre Trudeau. Each „recreated‟ the prime ministership by setting institutional patterns within which their successors conducted the office.

Part I: ‘Institutions’

1.1: Institutional Change The explanandum of this thesis is the institutional form of the Canadian prime ministership, and change therein. That is, what varies with changes in the independent variable, individuals, is the character or shape of the prime ministerial institution. It should be noted that this is a more particular variable than that which is often explicated in studies of political leadership. Such analyses are usually aimed at relating individual attributes with particular policy or political decisions or explicating the determinants of successful political leadership or leadership style in general. This thesis is concerned with a narrower, and perhaps less observable, effect of persons: institutional form. A large part of the specification of the dependent variable is evident in the empirical analysis itself, as well as in sections 1.2 to 1.4, below, which discuss the prime ministerial institution, the evolution of „Cabinet government‟ in Canada, and putative constraints on prime ministerial power. In explicating theories of institutional change, it is difficult to relate alternative hypotheses for change in the Canadian prime ministership, in particular, because there has been little „scientific‟ attention paid to the issue. No systematic study of the Canadian prime ministerial institution exists, especially when compared with, say, studies of the American presidency or even the British premiership. In this section, then, I briefly take up the question of institutional change on a more general theoretical level. That is, I consider what has been called a “central concern in political science today” (Greif and Laitin 2004: 634): why do social and political institutions have the form they do, and why do they change (or why do they stay the same)? What sorts of explanations can adequately account for stability and change in institutions? Obviously, the aim of this thesis is to establish the significance of individual-level factors in explaining institutional change; the argument in section 2.1, that „individual-inductive‟ approaches to political leadership are valuable and necessary, applies equally in the more specific context of institutional change. A: Theories of Institutional Change So, institutional change, as a “central concern” of the discipline, is in need of explanation. Elgie (1997) suggests in preliminary terms three “sources of fixity and change” in his categorization of patterns of power relations between elements of political executives: institutionalism, exogenous factors, and leadership styles (227). Each suggests a distinct causal mechanism underlying institutional change. I elaborate in this section only on the first: institutionalist approaches, those

which treat institutions as significant in themselves, as “collections of structures, rules, and standard operating procedures that have a partly autonomous role in political life” (March and Olsen 2006: 4). The effects of exogenous events on institutional change are either, as Elgie notes, difficult, or perhaps impossible, to predict ex ante (1997: 230), or blindingly obvious, in some cases.2 Either way, exogenous effects in themselves are not particularly conducive to investigation; this is in part because such effects, I would argue, have salience only in so far as their interaction with institutions or individuals, and the latter two are far more stable and predictable. Certainly, as Thelen notes, some institutional explanations leave little room for endogenous institutional evolution, putting most of the causal work on exogenous „shocks‟; the language of path dependence or punctuated equilibrium models in terms of “switch points” and “lock-in mechanisms” can sometimes seem to suggest that “institutions either persist and become increasingly entrenched or are abandoned” (2003: 212). The parsimony of such approaches is commendable; all the same, it is clear that institutions can evolve in qualitatively subtle ways which may not be captured by an overly stark model. Indeed, the prevalent strain in the institutional literature evinces a fascination with precisely the opposite puzzle: how it is, exactly, that institutions can change endogenously; Greif and Laitin (2004), for example, remark that “[e]ndogenous institutional change appears, then, to be a contradiction in terms” (633). This is because institutionalist perspectives stem from the desire to postulate political and social entities which have some permanence, stability, and predictability as against the vicissitudes and flux of individual-centered theories. As Clemens and Cook (1999) note, to the extent that institutional arguments assert the relative invariability of institutions, they cannot at the same time serve as explanations for change; therefore, “change is most easily understood as the product of some sort of exogenous shock that disrupts an established order” (442). Institutionalism, thankfully, is neither rigid nor monolithic. Other institutionalists leave room for institutional change arising from within, emphasizing that institutions are not simply created and then self-perpetuated. March and Olsen, for instance, characterize the study of institutions as “emphasiz[ing] the endogenous nature and social construction of political institutions, identities, accounts, and

2 These are likely cases in which subtlety is not particularly evident: coups, assassinations, wars, invasions, severe natural disasters, etc. Of course, in such cases there will be an abundance of examples of unpredictable or unintended consequences, but it seems plain that there will also be many ‘blindingly obvious’ areas of institutional change.

capabilities” (1996: 248). In other words, institutions are subject to the collective intentionality of groups of individuals; they are, as it were, all and only what we make them out to be. Where institutional perspectives focus on internal rules and procedures of institutions and how they define the interests of and structure power relations amongst political actors (Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 2), the notion of “leadership style” reverses the causal direction. The emphasis in this approach is on individuals and how individual characteristics affect the institutional or political context in which they operate; as should be clear, this notion of “leadership style” encompasses the posited explanation of this thesis, in terms of the effects of individual psychological agents on an institution, the Canadian prime ministership. Elgie provides a relatively concise summary of the leadership style argument: Institutions may provide very strong incentives for people to behave in particular ways, but they still leave room for the impact of human agency… In other words, the impact of personality should not be treated as being either liberated from or imprisoned by institutions (and events), but as being relatively autonomous of them. That is to say, there are limitations to ways in which individuals can behave, but there is still some scope for personality differences to impact on the decision-making process. (1997: 230) However, the predominant mode of explanation for institutional change in political science comes within some form of institutionalism or “new institutionalism”, the latter commonly referring to the various schools of thought arising in reaction to the perceived “dominance of reductionist, behaviorist, methodologically individualist, and functionalist arguments in social science theory” in the post-war period (Clemens and Cook 1999: 444). This is best encapsulated in the appeal to political scientists to „bring the state back in‟ to their analyses which arose in the late 1970s and 1980s: to regard the state (i.e., institutions of governance) as partly determinative of political outcomes and not simply determined by broader societal or other factors. Institutional change from this perspective, then, focuses on how the rules, norms, and procedures of an institution are altered over time. There are, of course, varying views: the standard division is into rational choice, historical, and sociological-cultural approaches to institutions. An alternate distinction is posited by Thelen (2003), between “constant-cause” and “path-dependent” explanations, the former emphasizing one particular type of causal mechanism as continually underlying institutional origins and change, the latter suggesting that “institutions may outlive the forces that brought them into being” (214). In this schema, rational choice and sociological-cultural

institutionalisms are seen as “constant-cause” because they suggest that institutional origins and change are always explained by the same underlying causal arguments. Rational choice is sometimes associated with functionalist or utilitarian perspectives because, as Thelen notes, institutions in this view are often seen as the resulting equilibrium of actors rationally pursuing their interests; institutions are then defined by the functions they perform in achieving this equilibrium (ibid). Sociological or cultural explanations of institutional change “emphasize the overarching cultural scripts and see specific organizational forms as generated and sustained by such institutions” (217). On this view, institutions are a product of and reflect shared cultural or social understandings; only when those understandings change (which tends to be a gradual and long-term process) is it possible for institutional structures to change. By contrast, historical institutionalism is “a broad label for theories which „take institutions seriously‟ by illuminating how “political struggles „are mediated by the institutional setting in which [they] take place‟” (Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 2). Institutions are not simply by-products of „prior‟ and more fundamental processes – the rational action of strategic individuals or the force of cultural and social norms - but have independent causal relevance. Institutional change, then, does not occur just in case of change in cultural understandings or necessary functions. Institutions, so to speak, „have lives of their own‟, and can have considerable „staying power‟ “even in the face of developments that alter the set of conditions that originally brought them about” (Thelen 2003: 220). This concept of „path-dependence‟ suggests that institutions may generate their own „mechanisms of reproduction‟ such that they can sometimes outlive their usefulness or be out of touch with broader societal needs and values, an effect which seems impossible under „constant-cause‟ explanations. In spite of these distinctions, the various kinds of institutionalism should not be seen as mutually exclusive or all-encompassing; different phenomena may be more suitably explained by different approaches. However, this does not mean that the approach of historical institutionalism is entirely compatible with either rational choice or sociological institutionalism. This is the main argument in Thelen and Steinmo (1992): they contend that historical perspectives are better able to explain how institutions evolve. “Macro theories” which depend on cultural or sociological causes, they suggest, “often obscure the nontrivial differences between different countries with the same broad structures” (10). Their critique of rational choice concerns the nature of preferences and rational behaviour. The authors contend that “strict rationality assumptions [are] overly confining” and do not capture what actual people do most of the time (7). Instead of being rational optimizers of utility, people are „satisficers‟, following rules without a process of rational examination and „doing

the best that seems possible at the time‟. Actors have only „bounded rationality‟. The rational choice and historical variants of institutionalism also diverge on the issue of preference formation; as Thelen and Steinmo argue, “rational choice deals with preferences at the level of assumptions” (8), or even deduce the preferences of actors from the structure of the situation. For example, in the simplest and most famous illustration of rational choice analysis, the prisoner‟s dilemma, the preferences of actors are simply assumed: they each prefer less jail time to more. An obviously correct assumption, perhaps; nevertheless, rational choice ignores the question of why they prefer what they do. Historical institutionalism, on the other hand, takes “the goals, strategies, and preferences” of actors as requiring explanation (9). Any variant of institutionalism is as valid, and only as valid, as the theory it produces, and how that theory conforms to the evidence; still, to repeat the argument of this thesis, contextual approaches seem unable to explain subtle changes in the absence of broader (cultural, societal, economic, etc.) changes. Rational choice assumes that individuals are something they are not – rational optimizing agents – or else, they „read‟ the preferences of actors by their behaviour, essentially rendering everything rational and thus creating problems of unfalsifiability.3 Whereas Thelen and Steinmo suggest that „meso-level‟ institutions can do much of the work, there is also a need to examine micro-level factors, particularly individuals, and especially with regard to institutions of political leadership. Certainly, trying to explain endogenous institutional change, i.e., change with comes from within institutions, without reference to the individuals who make up those institutions, is unsatisfying. In fact, this seems to be a growing realization: a recent study of the „personalization of leadership‟, primarily in Western Europe, implores European political scientists to begin treating psychological explanation not „residually‟ but equally with other, mostly sociological, explanations (Blondel and Thiebault 2010: 7). What is clear is that „constant-cause‟ explanation of institutional change are difficult to sustain, since institutions vary so widely across space and through time that no one kind of explanation is adequate. Simplicity is a worthy goal but should not be valued above completeness. If it takes multiple methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, to capture as fully as possible the causal story behind political phenomena, then political scientists should embrace whatever tools are available, and not artificially delimit themselves out of concern for rigour or parsimony.

3 See, for instance, Hodgson (2003). For a more comprehensive critique of rational choice theory, see Green and Shapiro (1994).

B: A Framework for Measuring Institutional Change It is difficult to measure institutional change when there is basic disagreement in the literature over what is or is not an institution, what sorts of things are essential as opposed to accidental in an institution, and so on. Definitions of the term are usually too vague and broad to the point of uselessness. Without resolving such weighty issues, I would suggest that it is likely impossible to construct a framework of institutional change which is widely applicable but still precise enough to be meaningful. In this thesis, then, I provide a framework for interpreting institutional change specifically directed towards leadership institutions such as the Canadian prime ministership: institutions which are embodied by actual psychological beings. Such „personal‟ institutions are clearly different in nature than other political institutions such as electoral systems, constitutions, or even legislatures, and are far removed from more contentiously labeled institutions: cultural and social systems, economic paradigms, and so on. It is also important to note that I distinguish between leadership institutions and other governance institutions, where some might not. The former are, by supposition, limited to those institutions which are preeminent in the „apex of power‟ relative to a given frame of reference. An alternate conception could be of the smallest or most basic unit at which decisions are made or authority is instilled; this is an empirical question. The Canadian cabinet as a collective unit, for instance, is not a leadership institution in this conception because there are other, smaller groups of political actors, such as the prime ministership (a group of one), which are more fundamental in the decision-making process. This would not be the case if, say, the Canadian case illustrated genuine Cabinet government, in which decisions are taken collectively and the prime minister, if there was one, functioned more like a Chief Justice of a court than a „friendly dictator‟. To put it colloquially, we might ask “where the buck stops” within a particular power structure. So, mayors and deputy ministers could be leadership institutions, depending on the study; one might be an analysis of municipal government, the other of the civil service in line departments. This does not mean that an institution has to be successful in the exercise of power in particular circumstances, as long as it is possible to differentiate between governance institutions (e.g., prime minister and cabinet, mayor and municipal council). Weak or poor leadership on the part of one incumbent does not mean a leadership institution is any less so, though a sustained period of such leadership will probably tend to erode leadership capacities, especially in cases in which governance roles are not strictly defined and enforced. This distinction, between leadership and other governance institutions, is not mere semantics or fiddling with concepts, but is relevant to the

framework for institutional change presented, since, as will be evident, there are aspects of leadership institutions which only make sense if the concept does not encompass any and every governance institution existent. In a hypothetical pure direct democracy, for instance, in which power and resources are equally dispersed, the leader-follower dynamic envisioned here does not make sense. Having introduced the notion of leadership institutions, I turn to the issue of how changes in such institutions can be measured. Of course, there are obvious contexts in which change appears, as when a state‟s political system moves from presidentialism to parliamentarism, or from authoritarianism to some form of democracy. A leadership institution is also subject to change when substantial alterations are made to the polity which it governs; as discussed in section 3.2, the prime ministership in the province of Canada and its successor in the Dominion of Canada, though both held by the same person, John A. Macdonald, were significantly unlike institutions. Absent such observable political transformations, though, it becomes more difficult to gauge institutional change. Is the prime ministership of 1867, at Confederation, or 1905, when all provinces but Newfoundland had joined, different than the prime ministership of today, and how so? The framework developed here is intended to encompass the breadth of change in leadership institutions. One potential way of measuring change in leadership institutions is to typologize what Elgie calls „models of executive politics‟ (1997). Borrowing from a number of previous attempts, he sets out six distinct models, summarized in Table 1, in which there are variations in the power structure between the “four main actors… prime minister, cabinet, ministers and bureaucrats” (222). Although such a typology has great utility in analyses of interactions between these governance institutions, it is restricted in its application to leadership institutions. This is because positions of political leadership are not (or are not limited to being) mere elements in an executive power structure comprising a few key actors: ministers, deputy ministers, etc. Rather, the extent of political leadership is, potentially, much greater, encompassing other political actors, from interest groups to regional entities to the general public. It is, as well, a relationship between leaders and followers in which symbolism and „ritual‟ politics play a key role.

Table 1: Elgie‟s Models of Executive Politics Central Decision- Role of Chief Cabinet Ministers Civil Service Making Power Executive Monocratic Chief Executive “a mainly Agents of Policy n/a residual executive‟s will Implementation organization” Collective Cabinet or Cabinet Coordination, Policy Input, Policy n/a Committees Policy Input Administration Implementation Ministerial Individual Ministers Coordination, Coordination, Policy n/a Policy Input Policy Input Implementation Bureaucratic Bureaucrats Political Political Political Support for Support for Support for n/a Policy, Policy, Policy, Advocacy Advocacy Advocacy Shared Plural Executive: e.g., Share in Political Non-Central Policy President/Prime Decision- Support for Ministers: Implementation Minister Making Policy, Political PM/Finance/Foreign Advocacy Support for Affairs Policy, Advocacy Segmented Functional/sectoral Sectoral Decision-Making (varies with form of Sectoral distribution segmentation) Decision- Making or Policy Implementation Source: Elgie (1997: 222-225) The concrete, formalized, and regularized aspect of leadership institutions is captured very well by differentiation of the kind in Table 2. What is not captured in Elgie‟s framework, however, is the „mystical‟ aspect of political leadership. Indeed, Elgie himself describes leadership, elsewhere, as “the unidentifiable in pursuit of the indefinable”, attesting to the difficulties of approaching an abstract concept by non-abstract methods (1995: 2). Leaders are not simply „head bureaucrats‟ or policy algorithms but symbolic institutions; Edelman (1964) suggests that “[t]he appeal of the public official exists fundamentally because of what he symbolizes to his followers” (90). Political leadership is at least as much about “dramaturgy” – good and evil, identity, conflict and cooperation - as it is about files and briefs (39-40). The leader-follower interaction is imbued with much more emotion and much less reason than one might presume. Indeed, one of the greatest ironies in Canadian political history is that Pierre Trudeau, a person for whom „la raison avant la passion’ became a governing philosophy, inspired and continues to inspire more passionate affection and loathing than probably any other prime minister. However much Trudeau wanted and expected Canadians to be as coolly rational and deliberative as himself (see section 3.4), the symbolic and affective aspects of leadership seem to be „hard-wired‟ in people. Edelman paints an evocative picture:

Governmental leaders have tremendous potential capacity for evoking strong emotional response in large populations. When an individual is recognized as a legitimate leading official of the state, he becomes a symbol of some or all the aspects of the state: its capacity for benefitting and hurting, for threatening and reassuring. His acts, for this reason, are public in character… The ruler‟s acts are public in the sense that they involve the fate of large populations, and his downfall can be tragic when interests of general public concern are thereby defeated. (1964: 73-74) Therefore, in order to capture the notion of institutional change as fully as possible, we need to attend to both the concrete and structural and the symbolic and affective. The framework presented here represents leadership institutions as having four components: internal complexity, „boundedness‟, level of discourse/range of governance, and symbolic representation. These are depicted as the continua in Figure 1. Figure 1: A Framework for Institutional Change

The first two are structural measures which are derived from Canon‟s study of leadership institutionalization in the US Congress (1989), though originating in work by Nelson Polsby. These are meant to capture the more concrete aspects of leadership. Internal complexity, in Canon‟s usage, measures the “degree of integration within the leadership – that is, the extent to which the various offices of the party structure are coordinated and utilized” (429). As indicators of greater internal complexity, he cites such things as increased delegation of responsibility to subordinates, increased organizational resources, and more regularized patterns of communication and behaviour (ibid).

Canon‟s definition is specific to the institutional context of the US Congress; we can, however, expand the concept to include leadership institutions in general. So, a leadership institution is more internally complex when it acquires greater resources, becomes more bureaucratized, and involves more of what Canon calls “universalistic practices”, replacing unfettered, discretionary behaviour with more routinized norms and practices (433). The basic sense of internal complexity can be put colloquially as, on the less complex side, leadership as a „one-man show‟ and, on the more complex side, more „moving parts‟. Ragsdale and Theiss (1997), in their analysis of the institutionalization of the American presidency, measure complexity very simply, by the number of staff within the Executive Office of the President. They find, for instance, that during the period of study (1924 to 1992), staff in the Office of Management and Budget increased fourteenfold while the White House Office staff increased tenfold (1296). They also note that as institutionalization occurs, specialization occurs; staffs go from being general advisors to having very specific titles and responsibilities (1297). Strictly speaking, the conception of leadership institutions that I have articulated might suggest that such institutions cannot become more or less complex, since they specifically refer to embodied institutions: prime ministerships, mayoralties, and so on. Prime ministers as persons cannot become more or less complex institutions. In this regard, then, leadership institutions include those entities which, while conceptually separate, can plausibly be seen as „functional extensions‟ of leaders‟ political „selves‟. So, the personal prime ministerial staff within or without the PMO, insofar as they perform this function, can show more or less internal complexity, as can the procedures and instruments of political action. The second dimension of institutional change is that of „boundedness‟, which Polsby describes as an institution‟s being “differentiated from its environment” (in Canon 1989: 420). Embedded within the „bounded‟ notion are the concepts of insularity and autonomy. These have to do with the formal relationships between leadership institutions and other political institutions: political parties, cabinets, legislatures, etc. Insularity is a measure of how „protected‟ a leadership institution is from what goes on in other institutions, notably political hazards and disasters. Autonomy refers to the amount of indirect or direct control or influence other institutions have on leadership institutions. Both are indicators of the notion of boundedness in terms of the „permeability‟ of institutions; the (hypothetical) maximally well-bounded institution will be completely unaffected by conditions and events occurring in, and will be entirely uncontrolled by, other political institutions. Although space does not permit a full account, it is easy to see that there

is at least a prima facie correlation between boundedness and internal complexity: as leadership institutions become more internally complex, they become more well-bounded. The latter two components, level of discourse/range of governance and symbolic representation, are more qualitative measures of change in leadership institutions. Unsurprisingly, they are also somewhat more difficult to define. In essence, these are the two sides to the „leader- follower‟ interaction: leaders leading followers, and followers following leaders. The „level of discourse/range of governance‟ measure, then, tries to capture the terms of the „leaders leading followers‟ aspect: what is the nature of the political leader‟s orientations towards other political actors, and how does he „calibrate‟ political action among various groups? Whose approval or opinion or support matters to the leader, or who are the salient „followers‟? The concept here echoes Blondel and Thiebault‟s explication of ways in which leaders relate to citizens, in terms of different types of discourse – populist, technocratic, preservation or change – and how leaders relate more directly to their supporters – clientelism, patronage, media dominance (2010: 33). I simplify and generalize this by conflating the two aspects. In short, this measure asks how a particular leader leads in terms of the range at which governance is conducted or discourse is „pitched‟. Leaders cannot simply confront the entirety of political reality without differentiation; the process of political leadership necessitates a distinction between relevant and non-relevant actors in governance, and so the unit of this metric is in terms of political groups: elites, parties, the general public, interest groups, etc. The focus and methods of communication between leader and follower is a significant clue to the range of governance at work. An elitist leadership institution, for example, will focus its political action on the upper echelons of the power structure, and governance will revolve around processes of elite bargaining and discourse will be direct and personal. Presthus‟ assertion that Canadian politics is mostly a matter of „accommodating‟ political and economic elites suggests such a model (1973). Intermediate institutions on this dimension practice leadership by dividing political reality into sectoral or factional components and engaging politics in those terms. This is typical of the consociational systems hypothesized first by Arend Lijphart, as well as classical pluralist models. At the other end of the scale, a leadership institution might be what I call „democentric‟; that is, centered on the public at large and engaged in „people politics‟ through mass communication. The trend, much maligned, of „governing by opinion poll‟, is one manifestation of democentric politics; another is the personalization or „leader-centered‟ trends in election campaigning, which has been

noted especially in the United States, but is also evident in, for instance, Canada and the United Kingdom. The final measure of institutional change in this framework captures the „followers following leaders‟ interaction, in terms of the symbolic representation of the leader to followers. Of particular interest is the magnitude of the symbolism in terms of the abstract concept represented by the concrete person. This may range from being „globally symbolic‟ or „mythical‟ to being either „locally symbolic‟ or devoid of symbolic meaning. So, at one extreme, a leadership institution can become a national or unitary symbol: the „embodiment of the nation‟. A leader in this context might be seen as „transcending‟ personhood, becoming a sort of national myth. The Weberian notion of „charismatic leadership‟ is related, insofar as charismatic leaders tend to be symbolically associated in this way. There are obvious examples of authoritarian leaders in which such symbolism is evident, but the „national symbol‟ motif also applies to less extreme circumstances: George Washington, for example, and the American presidency in general, are seen as being imbued with such symbolic import (see Binkley 1952). Leaders of social movements can also sometimes acquire this level of symbolic representation: think, perhaps, of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Intermediate-level representations are of various types: the „chairman of the board‟ or „executive‟ model, where a leader is seen in businesslike, „steady hand on the wheel‟ terms, or the „transactional‟ or „bureaucratic‟ type, wherein a leadership institution is embedded in a routinized and bureaucratic structure, and the leader is akin to a sort of „head bureaucrat‟. A „non-symbolic‟ institution would be one in which the capacities of leaders to gather support by appealing to a sense of connection between leaders and followers is non-existent. That does not mean, of course, that such a leadership institution has no political power: capacities for political action can also be embedded within the rules and procedures of decision-making. The important point about symbolic representation, though, is that symbolism is affective: it carries emotional weight, and thus conditions the leader-follower relationship. Global or mythical symbolic representations will tend to correlate with affection and devotion, even a kind of love; Weber writes of the charismatic leader that she has “a certain quality… by virtue of which [she] is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or exceptional forces or qualities” (in Blondel and Thiebault 2010: 43). History has shown, indubitably, the power of such symbolic representation in creating profound connections between leaders and followers and greatly strengthening the legitimacy of political action, at least among those followers. Charteris- Black makes the perceptive claim that “metaphoric and symbolic communication legitimizes leaders

and that the adoption of metaphors and symbols that converge with the aspirations of followers allows them to dispose of unwanted identities and undergo psychological catharsis” (2007: 2). Leadership institutions which are not seen in so „mythic‟ a light often correlate with affective ties such as admiration and trust, but can lack the symbolic resources to engender any profound or permanent connection with followers. Instead, they may rely on institutional structures to create capacities for political action; legitimacy comes primarily from the institution and not the individual. 1.2: Institution of the Prime Ministership of Canada The first part of this thesis focuses on the „institutions‟ aspect of the causal story. It is, then, important to give a sense of the particular leadership institution of concern: the prime ministership of Canada. This section and the section that follows is intended to do so; it also serves as a review of the literature, of sorts. The present section gives a general overview of the Canadian prime ministership, on its own and in relation to its forbearer, the British premiership. Section 1.3 outlines a particular model of the evolution of executive government in Canada, and the final section discusses a number of putative constraints on prime ministerial action. A word: the concern of this thesis, as I have stated, is not the perennial question of whether the prime minister or the executive centre has too much power and what this would indicate about the state of Canadian democracy. The argument about the concentration of power has been well (and repeatedly) articulated by Donald Savoie. The related academic anxiety over the supposed „presidentialization‟ of the system, what Smith (1977) calls “a presidential system without its congressional advantages” (323), has also been well-rehearsed. These are not unimportant questions, though I would argue that, even given that the prime minister can be shown to have too much power (a dubious proposition), the consequences in terms of political and policy outcomes would not be drastically negative; at least, that there is little reason to believe in a necessary link between the „concentration of power‟ and deficient governance, given certain fundamental constraints. As well, I would echo the assertion made forcefully by Blick and Jones (2010) concerning the British case, that “[c]laims about an increasingly dominant or more presidential premiership have a very long lineage, but there are difficulties in sustaining them”. As will be evident in part III, there is a sense in which „presidentialization‟ has occurred, notably in the increasing „personalization‟ and institutionalization of the office. However, the sort of negative connotations which the concept invokes, where collective Cabinet government has been replaced by autocratic prime ministerial government, is simply inaccurate. As Blick and Jones demonstrate, prime ministers, in Britain and in Canada, have always had enormous leeway in which to influence and decide the direction and policy

of government; one of the major conclusions of this thesis, however, is that the style of prime ministerial action and influence has evolved. This is all to say that the following discussions of the prime ministership, cabinet government and constraints are included in this study because they are, I think, integral as background to the case studies which follow in Part III, and are not, as such, intended to be normatively motivated. So, the „presidentialization‟ of the prime ministership notwithstanding, our views concerning the institution still presuppose notions of that essential feature of Westminster systems: cabinet government. Matheson, writing in 1976, writes that “[t]he cabinet in Canada is the centre and mainspring of Canadian government and of Canada‟s pluralistic society”, controlling, for all intents and purposes, the origin, development, passage, and execution of legislation (x-1). Similarly, Schindeler (1977) suggests that “for all practical purposes, the Cabinet is the final seat of power for the authoritative allocation of values”, as against the formal executive (26). Notwithstanding such highly remarkable „crises‟ such as the King-Byng affair of 1926, in which the Governor General refused Prime Minister King dissolution and, instead, asked Arthur Meighen to form a government, or the coalition conflagration of 2008, in which the Governor General acceded to the Prime Minister‟s request to prorogue parliament, the formal executive (the monarch) has never exercised effective governing power in a sustained and meaningful way (even in these cases, their actions were interventions rather than substantive governance decisions). Nevertheless, the institutional and constitutional origins of the Cabinet in Canada are not rendered nugatory. Indeed, the executive cabinet as an institution is one of the more telling arenas of comparison between parliamentary and presidential systems (the latter referring primarily to the American system). Westminster constitutional theory holds that the legitimacy of the authority of Cabinet is grounded in the delegation of power from the crown, „top-down‟, rather than from the people to the executive, „bottom-up‟, as is the ideal in the presidential system (White 2005: 12-13). The presidency in the American system is popularly elected, and the cabinet secretaries he selects must be approved by the Senate. Although convention and precedent have played significant roles in making explicit the scope and limits of the Presidency, the Constitution of the United States remains the foundation for all claims to legitimate political action. Indeed, the Supreme Court itself, as final arbiter of constitutionality in the American system, has, through rulings in several landmark cases, shaped the institution of the Presidency in noteworthy ways. This has not been the case in Canada in terms of the prime ministership or Cabinet.

It is true that the fundamental tenet of a parliamentary system is that “the government as a whole is subordinate to Parliament”; in Westminster systems, Cabinet is responsible to Parliament, while the Cabinet in the United States is responsible to the president (Savoie 1999: 47, 53). The political executive, i.e. the prime minister and the Cabinet, must maintain the confidence of the House of Commons, and ministers are, in theory, individually responsible to the House for the actions of their departments. This might be taken to mean that what is true in theory, the „top-down‟ picture, is not true in practice. Indeed, the notion that Cabinet derives its authority from parliament as a „committee of the House of Commons‟ has at times been used as political rhetoric (see Matheson 13), both by government and opposition. However, there is no constitutional basis, conventional or otherwise, to support such a claim: to be responsible to parliament does not strictly imply having authority granted by parliament. This could be thought of in terms of positive versus negative power, though it probably only goes so far. Parliament has negative power over the political executive: it can defeat legislation or, more drastically, defeat the Government. Its power acts as a potential „veto point‟ against the political executive (albeit usually a weak one). Parliament does not, however, have positive power over the prime minister and Cabinet; it cannot dictate political action. The British premiership is the model for the Canadian case, and thus is illustrative. The inherent power of the political executive in Britain, prime minister and cabinet, flows from a fundamental source: the „royal prerogative‟. This is, indeed, an extremely powerful source. Ward (2004) claims that “[t]he powers that Prime Ministers wield, mostly derived from the „mystical but mighty‟ powers of prerogative, are enormous, the constitutional constraints upon their office negligible” (72). Described variously as an „elective dictatorship, „surrogate monarch‟, an „elected monarchy‟, the „effective head of executive, legislative, and state‟, the British premiership, and by extension the Canadian prime ministership, is, relatively speaking, one of the most powerful positions of political leadership among democratic states (Ward 2004: 70; Brazier 1998: 109). The royal prerogative furnishes the prime minister with an exceptionally wide-ranging set of political powers and responsibilities; these are set out in detail by Hennessy (2000: 60-101), and in more succinct form by Brazier (1998: 103), but include powers of war and peace, control over the armed forces, appointing and dismissing ministers, dissolving Parliament and calling elections, and a wide- ranging set of appointments to public service and other positions. More poetically, the situation has been described thus: “It is the Prime Minister, nourished by the seemingly inexhaustible powers of Crown prerogative, whose growl makes underlings shiver, recalcitrant ministers come into line, and supine MPs gibber on the backbenches” (Ward 2004: 70).

So, in the Canadian system, Cabinet is, in formal constitutional terms, only a particular committee of the Privy Council whose function it is to aid and advise the head of state. Formal executive power remains vested in the Head of State, whence it “flows from the Crown via the Privy Council to the cabinet” (Matheson 13). Similarly, the oath taken by ministers upon entering the Cabinet and becoming a member of the Privy Council pledges the minister to fealty to the Crown and not to Parliament. In other words, the „political‟ executive in Canada exercises power on behalf of the Crown and not Parliament. This distinction is important because it has serious implications for the contours of the prime ministership in terms of political action. The institution of the prime ministership as a separate role is not mentioned in the Constitution Act, 1867; the Constitution Act, 1982, mentions the prime minister only in reference to her obligation to arrange conferences concerning the constitutional status of First Nations peoples. This is in line with the British case, in which “[t]he constitutional status of the Prime Minister is typically uncertain” (Ward 2004: 71). An Order-In-Council given in 1935 is one of the few legal documents which explicitly outlines the functions of the prime minister (Schindeler 1977: 29-30). The thin document nevertheless asserts the two most evident instruments of prime ministerial power, both stemming from the prime minister‟s “special relationship with the Crown” (Matheson 1976: 133), and again echoing the British example. The first is what Schindeler calls the prime minister‟s “fundamental weapon”: the exclusive authority to ask the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament (1977: 30). This de facto power of dissolution acts as a source of potential power against both the Cabinet and Parliament. The second “special prerogative” of the prime minister, in the order-in-council‟s terms, is the appointment power: of cabinet ministers, lieutenant-governors, senators, and Deputy Ministers, to name a few. Though these powers are fundamental bulwarks of the prime minister‟s capacity for political action, they are far from being exhaustive. The entire organization and functions of the Cabinet itself, and the role of the prime minister within Cabinet and as head of government and de facto chief executive, have been largely dictated by convention and, in line with the central argument of this thesis, the „motive force‟ of the persons who have inhabited these institutions. Because of this dependence on convention and practice rather than explicit constitutional strictures, the institutions of cabinet and prime minister are extremely malleable. There are voluminous illustrations of the dictum that “[t]he office of Prime Minister is what they do” (Ward 2004: 71). Though Hennessy suggest it is an exaggeration to “adapt wholesale… that premiership is what the Prime Minister does”, he nonetheless continues that “there is a large element of truth in it”

(2000: 17). Indeed, he cites numerous prime ministers making similar claims, such as Herbert Asquith in 1926, that “The office of the Prime Minister is what its holder chooses and is able to make of it”, and Harold Wilson, in 1965, asserting that “No. 10 is what the Prime Minister of the day makes it… The ability of the Prime Minister to use them [the „levers of power‟] depends on [him] being in touch with what is going on”, going on to say that “A Prime Minister governs by curiosity and range of interest” (3, 54). Savoie echoes this theme in noting of the Canadian case that “whenever the prime minister wishes to focus on an issue, he or she will get their way” (1999: 317). In more concrete terms, for example, the structure of executive government in the US, in terms of departments, is largely set by the Congress through legislation, rather than executive fiat, as is the case in Canada, where the expansion and contraction of cabinets has become a political instrument. prime ministers, as a result of their conventional authority over appointments and their position as „special advisor‟ to the Crown, are in the position of being “completely free to add, delete, and adjust the machinery of government at any time and as they see fit” (Savoie 1999: 43); Cabinet shuffles in Canada are almost always political in nature, and Canadian prime ministers seem to avail themselves of this prerogative decidedly more than first ministers in other Westminster systems (White 2005: 37). By contrast, the president in the American system simply does not have the same leverage or authority over the „architecture‟ or machinery of government. Presidents cannot create, combine, or abolish departments at his own leisure, though they can, of course, implore Congress to do so. Occasionally, even the authority of the President to organize the executive in more subtle ways is challenged.4 This sort of scrutiny over the political executive‟s command of the machinery of government is unthinkable in the Canadian context. As will be discussed, the transition to the „Institutionalized Cabinet‟, described by Dunn (2002) and elaborated by Howlett et al. (2005), is constituted in part by the increased ability and willingness of „first ministers‟ (i.e., prime ministers and premiers) to intentionally design the machinery of government for his own purposes (however characterized). As White notes, this does not mean that the institutions of executive government in Canada are unfettered; the basic principles of responsible government and rule of law constrain, in an important sense, the powers of these institutions (34). Nevertheless, the organization, composition, and political and policy processes of executive

4 In the Fall of 2009, for instance, the Obama administration’s use of ‘czars’ (for health, environment, etc.), ostensibly in oversight and coordinating roles, sparked no small debate over the constitutionality of such actions, to the point where constitutional scholars were brought in to provide expert testimony to Congress.

government have been largely the product of convention, precedent, and politics, shaped in significant ways by the persons who inhabit the „apex of power‟. 1.3: Evolution of Executive Government: Cabinet Models Partly because of the aforementioned point that the political executive wields its power on behalf of the Crown and not Parliament, the prime minister will “seek to mould structures and processes to meet their political and policy objectives”, the extent of which is partly dependent on personalistic factors (Savoie 1999: 43). The significance of the prime ministerial institution to the evolution of Cabinet in Canada is shown by the fact that, as Aucoin (1986) notes, “changes in the central machinery of government invariably follow changes” in the embodiment of the prime ministership, i.e. the occupant of the office (3). Indeed, it is not coincidental, and highly significant, that the first three models, traditional, departmental, and institutionalized, are closely associated with the three „landmark prime ministers‟ and prime ministerial eras suggested in Part III: Macdonald, King, and Trudeau, respectively. The general trend in the evolution of executive government in Canada has been from „small and simple‟ to „large and complex‟. The Traditional cabinet, from Confederation to the onset of the „administrative state‟, was a relatively simple affair. Macdonald‟s first ministry had thirteen ministers, and when he died in office in 1891 there were only sixteen (Matheson 1976: 32). The predominant functions and concerns of Canadian Cabinets in the Traditional mode were patronage and the articulation and representation of sub-national (regional, local) interests (Howlett et al. 2005: 7). Governance was, in a technical sense, uncomplicated, though of course decision-making, on the part of the Prime Minister, say, was not any less problematic (in different ways, perhaps). Executive government in Canada in the country‟s formative decades was, as Savoie suggests, “easily understood and highly accessible” (1999: 21). The Traditional cabinet gradually transformed into the Departmental cabinet model as a consequence of the beginnings of a merit-based civil service (inaugurated by the Civil Service Act of 1918), the two war efforts, and new norms and expectations concerning government intervention in the economy and in social policy (Savoie 1999: 21). Departments and ministers acted as the main agents of public sector expansion, and deputy ministers, as the civil service became increasingly professionalized, became central actors (Howlett et al. 2005: 7). The prime minister continued to function as the agent of personnel choice, but the „architect of government‟ role was, as yet, not considerable. The term „Departmental Cabinet‟ itself provides a useful picture of the model; we can depict Department as vertical „silos‟, with the minister and deputy minister at the top, and with the

prime minister consulting one or another of the ministers. The „central agencies‟ of the period were departments such as finance and agriculture, not the Privy Council Office, which started becoming an important actor only beginning with the creation of the Secretary to the Cabinet position (Arnold Heeney effectively creating the position), nor the Prime Minister‟s Office. As Howlett et al. (2005) put it, the structure of Cabinet was simple (during World War II, King did organize several Cabinet Committees but they were of less importance post-war (Savoie 1999: 43)) and there was “little cabinet-level analysis” (12). The onset of the Institutionalized cabinet signifies exactly what the term connotes. Although Trudeau is most often associated with this phenomenon, and rightly so, Lester Pearson was the first prime minister to use Cabinet Committees extensively; in 1968 there were nine committees, including Priorities and Planning, which was established that year (Savoie 1999: 43; Matheson 1976: 166). By the following decade, the institutionalization of executive government was clearly observable: “powerful central agencies, extensive committee systems, highly formalized procedures for cabinet documentation and decision making, and substantial entourages of personal ministerial staff” (White 2005: 35). The Prime Minister‟s role as architect of the machinery of government had reached its maturity. Agencies with coordinating, planning, and oversight functions, particularly the PMO, PCO, Treasury Board, and Finance, became central to the policy process, to the diminishment of line departments. In Trudeau‟s last mandate (1980 to 1984), the number of ministers ranged from thirty-two to thirty-seven, with thirteen Cabinet Commitees; Mulroney, despite being a Progressive Conservative, continued the trend, with forty ministers and fifteen committees in operation by the time he left office (Savoie 1999: 43-44). Howlett et al. (2005) postulate the existence of a model which has succeeded the institutionalized cabinet: the Prime Minister-centered model, which, they argue, is implicit in Savoie‟s critique (8-9). Schindeler‟s sketch of the evolution of the Canadian executive, which corresponds almost exactly with the foregoing outline, also asserts the existence of a „Prime Ministerial model‟, in which “effective legislative power lies in the hands of one man [sic], the Prime Minister” (1977: 32- 33). In these models, then, the Cabinet is seen as increasingly „a focus group for the Prime Minister‟ rather than a significant decision-making body. Interestingly, this is posited as being simultaneous with a more restrained enthusiasm for Cabinet institutionalization, with Chretien significantly reducing both the number of ministries (though the increased use of secretaries of State somewhat counters this) and the number of Cabinet Committees, to four (Savoie 1999: 43-44). It is worth noting that the current Harper Cabinet has eight standing Committees and twenty-six ministers

(with ten secretaries of State) (Office of the Prime Minister).Whether this is truly a „new‟ model of executive government in Canada or simply the „mature‟ stage of the institutionalized Cabinet is difficult to know, and is not of major importance for my purposes. It suffices to say and repeat that the Prime Minister is now in a pre-eminent position; she has power over personnel choice, the machinery of government, and the de facto right to policy and decision-making in any area of government activity (Howlett et al. 2005: 12). As an institution, the prime ministership‟s capacity for political action is, arguably, unrivalled in contemporary democratic polities. Indeed, the so-called „presidentialization‟ thesis, in this sense, is actually quite inaccurate, since, as former Prime Minister Joe Clark notes (and laments), “the office of Prime Minister [is] far more powerful in our country than the office of President in the United States” (1981: 33). This is not to say, of course, that there are no constraints on prime ministerial action; the following section takes up this question. 1.4: Conditions and Constraints on Prime Ministerial Action While recognizing that the capacities of the Canadian prime ministership are “unrivalled”, there is not a complete absence of constraints. In keeping with the dichotomy, mentioned earlier, between popular and academic conceptions of the causal importance of individual political leaders, Paul Thomas asserts that “there are more constraints on the exercise of prime-ministerial power than is popularly assumed” (2003: 80). Hockin (1977) makes a similar point: that Canadians tend to view their prime minister as more impactful and unfettered than is warranted (2-3). Constraints of various kinds will always be evident. Indeed, a significant portion of the literature concerning political leadership in Canada concerns the existence or non-existence of constraints, particularly in the context of normative discourse over prime ministerial power. Most putative constraints on the prime minister are obvious and have been discussed ad infinitum (not to detract from their impact). The most obvious of these is whether a prime minister has a majority or minority government, and relatedly, what the party system and internal party dynamics of opposition parties looks like. Although this is, as I say, transparently significant, the import and consequences are relatively straightforward. Therefore, in what follows, I will put aside such issues, and only briefly touch on a number of other oft-cited constraints, giving short assessments of their salience. I will then assess, at greater length, two putative constraints: the fact of federalism and the more abstract notion of „time‟, which are somewhat less traditional and rather more fascinating. Institutional: Parliament, Caucus, Cabinet A Prime Minister is, of course, a leader of a party-in-legislature (the Caucus) and of a Cabinet. These two, caucus and Cabinet, can act as constraints, of sorts, on the Prime Minister‟s

space for political action. Weller (1985) characterizes the prime ministership as a position of „transactional‟ leadership: “Prime [M]inisters are party leaders; they hold the former position only as long as they hold the latter” (11). The „transaction‟ here is an instrumental one: the party selects the leader not for the leader‟s sake but in order for the party to achieve some other good, such as electoral success, ideological articulation, or party unity. No party caucuses are united on every issue, especially if the major Canadian political parties are still accurately depicted in terms of „brokerage‟ politics (which still holds true, though perhaps to a lesser extent than has been the case). Thus, prime ministers are sometimes circumscribed in terms of political action, since they cannot afford to ignore, as a matter of routine, the concerns of the party caucus. Successful leaders will have the ability and the willingness to gauge, with regard to caucus, “how extensive [the] freedom to act is and in what circumstances it can be used” (Weller 1985: 12). There are two counterpoints to this notion of caucus as a constraint. First, the power of caucus to materially affect the continuation of the prime minister in the office has been rendered null by the processes of leadership selection in Canada (Bakvis 2001: 67-68). Reforms in the interest of democratizing leader selection, beginning with the selection of Mackenzie King by a national Liberal party convention in 1919, have transferred this prerogative from caucus to the party writ large. This has had two effects: the formal inability of caucus to select and depose leaders, obviously, but also the more symbolic notion that party leaders now receive their mandate from the party membership and not the caucus, and are, therefore, not beholden to the latter. The second counterpoint is the rather telling observation that members of the government caucus simply “do not consider themselves to be an effective check on prime ministerial power”; caucus meetings are seen as “bitching sessions” rather than effective policy-initiating forums (Savoie 1999: 91, 93). Indeed, from the prime ministerial point of view, former Prime Minister Joe Clark suggests that “a Canadian Prime Minister is also a Party Leader and can, when in government, have almost virtually total control of Party apparatus and Party authority” (1981: 33). This mirrors the situation in the British case, although, as Elgie (1995) notes, there is some differentiation by political party in terms of leader control and authority5, and is easily contrasted with the American case, where the President

5 Elgie contends that there are salient differences between Conservative and Labour leaders in this regard. Conservative leaders tend to have an advantage, as the party structure is more hierarchical and the leader has greater control over certain functions: appointing party chairs, restructuring the party organization, and the contents of party election manifestos. Labour leaders, on the other hand, must contend more seriously with competing power centres such as the Cabinet, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the National Executive Committee. As a party, the Conservatives are generally more united than Labour. Conservative leaders, though,

is only nominally the „party leader‟, and often has great difficulty controlling and maintaining party cohesion and policy solidarity. Cabinet is a more effective constraint on political action in two related ways. The first concerns the conventional limits on Cabinet selection, having chiefly to do with representation. As Thomas argues, it is seen as being incumbent on the prime minister to make her government “appear responsive and legitimate to all segments of Canadian society” (2003-4: 82; see Punnett 1977: 58-82 for more detail). The second consists in the power of particular cabinet ministers as potential countervailing forces to prime ministerial action. In the previous section, 1.4, the notion that we now have „prime ministerial government‟, in which Cabinet is essentially a focus group and not a decision-making body, was raised. Still, this does not mean that ministers are powerless or that the prime minister is “surrounded by political nobodies” (Bakvis 2001: 65; Thomas 2003-4: 82). The argument is that strong ministers, whether by virtue of talent or position, still exist and can provide some sort of check on the Prime Minister; though Cabinet as a collective may be in an atrophied state, individual ministers may still have significant influence. As to the first, although the conventions surrounding cabinet selection obviously do act to constrain a prime minister‟s „free‟ choice, I am ambivalent as to their constraining effect for two reasons. First, Prime Ministers often use the „representative principle‟ to their benefit in enabling rather than constraining action; witness the use of Quebec lieutenants, most notably King‟s use of Ernest Lapointe and then Louis St. Laurent. Second, and more particular to this thesis, limits on cabinet selection do not seem very substantially constraining of the prime minister‟s capacity and intentions in terms of shaping the institution of the prime ministership. I would argue that the second way in which Cabinet is a constraint, i.e. the effect of individually influential ministers, is of more consequence, though perhaps this is not altogether evident in the Harper prime ministership. Other constraints sometimes cited include the media and the courts. I suggest that the latter is a constraint only on the margins. As mentioned earlier, the scope and extent of prime ministerial power has not, thus far in Canadian judicial history, been subject to much debate, unlike the American case, in which the scope and limits of presidential power have repeatedly been tested (e.g., U.S. v. Nixon, Clinton v. Jones). This is undoubtedly because of the aforementioned absence of any

tend to be more susceptible to challenges of their leadership, exhibit number one being Margaret Thatcher (1995: 43-49).

definition of the prime ministerial role in the Canadian Constitution. Of course, the rule of law and adherence to the Constitution and the Charter constrain the prime minister, though not uniquely, as they equally bind all other political actors. The „notwithstanding‟ clause also diminishes the capacity of the Courts, via interpretation of the Charter and the Constitution, to act as an effective constraint. The relationship between the prime minister and the media is, as Taras puts it, “one in which both sides are seeking definition and recognition and are constantly struggling against each other” (1988: 36). To this extent, the media provides a constraint on prime ministerial action; on the other hand, use of the media by the prime minister can also be a significant source of enabling action. I would characterize the media not as a constraint per se but simply as a background condition of political leadership. The intensive media scrutiny of political actors which has resulted from the increased media presence of the „electronic age‟ has changed the nature of prime ministerial conduct, as is evident in the nature of the modern prime ministership (see section 3.4, 3.5), and it has greatly expanded the role of communications: consultants, strategists, even „style‟ advisors. The capacities of the prime minister to control the essential functions of image management and public relations have, on balance, not altered greatly; different constraints coexist with different opportunities. Economic Constraints Rose (1991) suggests the salience of economic factors in mitigating individual political action. His main concern is to argue that circumstance supervenes on individual leaders (20). Presumably, such circumstances would be exogenously given and thus would be out of a prime minister‟s control, at least in the short term. In this effort, he cites as a particular case a prime minister in a modern welfare state with a mixed economy. The reasoning seems to be founded on two assumptions: 1) the economic situation of the state will be at heart a function of extra-political events and activities, and 2) the responsibility for the economic situation falls on political actors, especially the prime minister. The tension between the two is what gives rise to the sense of constraint that circumstances place on individual leaders. In addition to this domestic constraint, prime ministers are also constrained, argues Rose, by international economic arrangements of more or less formal kinds. The unprecedented economic and financial interdependence of states in the modern global economy means that external economic pressures and events can constrain political leaders just as much, if not more so, than domestic considerations in terms of their capacity for political action. As well, the response to economic problems may often be conditioned on the objective and intrinsic features of a state, particularly in terms of resources. As Rose suggests, the

space for political action available to a prime minister of a country with an abundant supply of oil will inevitably be different than that available to a leader of an oil-importing state (1991: 20). To a point, the contention that economic constraints are significant is indisputable. The existence of the Albertan oil sands, in relation to climate change policy, is an illustrative example of the salience of economic constraints on the prime ministerial space. Assuming good faith, Prime Minister Harper is severely constrained in terms of setting emissions reduction targets by the fact that the oil sands are so profitable and are such important engines of economic growth. The fact of the Conservative base of support being in Alberta also does much to constrain the prime minister in political terms. Though this could be considered a triumph of political expediency over political leadership, it is, I think, somewhat naïve to assert an obligation on the part of the prime minister if it has the potential to destroy his base of support; at least, a more charitable outlook is demanded. Were Michael Ignatieff to become prime minister, I would expect this particular constraint to be less demanding, though only for political and electoral reasons and not because Ignatieff is a more ideal political leader (though this may be true for other reasons). Simply put, exogenous economic conditions and international economic arrangements are considerably constraining on prime ministerial capacities, especially when short-term economic factors are weighed against longer-term political intentions. Federalism as a Constraint For various historical and other reasons, a strong federal system has developed in Canada; this gives the Canadian context a unique aspect with regard to other Westminster systems.6 While the „presidentialization‟ thesis has been expounded in terms of the Prime Minister of Canada, the same centralization of power is evident at the provincial level (Bakvis 2001: 68). Indeed, White notes that in many ways premiers are more powerful in their respective jurisdictions than the Prime Minister is in the federal government, and can often exercise “extraordinary powers well beyond what any prime minister could normally call upon”, citing particular instances involving two premiers of Ontario, Mike Harris and Ernie Eves (2005: 75-76). Although not a singularly recent phenomenon,

6 Perhaps the major reason for this is the division of powers set out in the British North America Act, 1867 (now Constitution Act, 1867). Sections 91 and 92 detail the various powers given to federal and provincial governments, respectively. The predominant view of the fathers of Confederation, most notably John A. Macdonald, was that great issues of national concern should be the responsibility of the ‘general’ government, as it was called, and powers which were parochial and essentially administrative given to ‘local’ governments. The latter included, at the time, education and health, which are, needless to say, no longer seen as minor and inconsequential policy areas.

the ascendancy of the provinces has accelerated in recent decades. Premiers, in particular, have gained increased stature, recognition, and influence at the national level and have, increasingly come to see themselves as the highest and most legitimate representatives of regional and provincial interests, perhaps by default as the importance and influence of „regional ministers‟ in the Federal Cabinet waned (Wallace 1988: 70). There is a great deal of truth in the contention that the provinces, and not the „official Opposition‟, are the true countervailing, opposing force to the Federal Government: the establishment of the „Council of the Federation‟ attests to this. Indeed, in his normative critique of the power of the office of Prime Minister, Clark suggests that “the constitutional division of power” between federal and provincial governments is the only significant constraint (1981: 34). The capacity of the prime ministerial institution, then, is meaningfully constrained by the necessity of consultation and negotiation between federal and provincial levels of government. Though there are areas of exclusive federal and exclusive provincial jurisdictions, many of the most salient areas of public policy and governance are concurrent in some way or another. This gives rise to the phenomenon of „executive federalism‟: a state of continual and continuous negotiation and interaction between federal and provincial leaders and bureaucrats (Wallace 1988: 69). Hockin argues that in such negotiations, particularly in actual First ministers‟ conferences, the most significant role of the Prime Minister is in terms of redistributive federalism: responding to the (usually) monetary demands of the provinces and balancing priorities and interests (1977: 17). This, he argues, has the effect of constraining the prime minister in terms of national leadership. In essence, the balance and bargain structure of Canadian federalism makes it such that “great national debates and resolutions on major questions of public policy and national purpose” are subdued and discouraged (18). While this may be overstated, the fact that decision-making, in an overall sense, is shared significantly between leaders with different bases of power and different incentives constitutes a major constraint to prime ministerial power. It is hard to disagree with Bakvis‟s assertion, in line with Joe Clark‟s, that “the presence of sophisticated and highly centralized provincial governments likely constitutes the largest single counterweight to… the prime minister‟s exercise of power” (2001: 68). Psychological ‘Self-Constraint’ There is some dispute as to whether the notion of psychological self-constraint is valid or meaningful (Grafstein 1986: 464). For some observers, only external constraints are true constraints; for others, the demarcation between external and internal constraints is vague and ambiguous, anyhow. For instance, Weller cites Rose‟s argument to the effect that prime ministers are always

“inevitably constrained by traditional expectations” (1985: 10). There are certain norms, patterns, and expectations about behaviour that a prime minister adheres to. Are these external or internal? They can certainly be characterized as features of what is often called „intersubjectivity‟. However, I would suggest they are also internal to individuals to the extent that an individual internalizes them.7 Though it seems circular, the point is just that norms and expected patterns of behaviour are not merely imposed on prime ministers from without, as though without this imposition they would act highly irregularly and eccentrically. This is related to the issue of the salience of context versus individual and the source of intentional states. Ultimately, then, it may be true that aspects of putative psychological self-constraint – internalized norms about liberal democratic political behaviour, for instance – are products of context and socialization. At the point in the causal chain we are interested in, though, they are, for all intents and purposes, internal constraints. The second issue is whether such internal constraints are true constraints. The dependent variable in this thesis is institutional change, specifically change in the nature of the Canadian prime ministership. Any phenomenon which acts, in some way, to delimit the capacities of the institution, should be considered a constraint. Though an explication of the point is beyond the scope of this thesis, I would suggest it is abundantly evident that psychological self-constraint plays a significant role in defining and shaping prime ministerial action. The Chains of Time Time is sometimes seen as being a constraint on prime ministerial power. Indeed, Thomas suggests that it may well be the “most fundamental limit” on the prime ministerial capacity for political action (2003: 81). The basic argument is simple: the scope of government is so broad that the prime minister simply cannot, as a matter of brute physical fact, be everywhere at once. Many policy decisions will be made without his approval or knowledge. Much of what is done within line departments will not be subject to prime ministerial scrutiny. Prime ministers do not have the time to read every briefing memo or policy recommendation, nor to meet with every official or interest concerned in every policy domain. All of this is undoubtedly true. Running a government is simply not something that can be done by any one person. In this sense, time does function as an external constraint on prime ministerial power. To the extent that it does so, however, it would seem to be only an epiphenomenal by-product of the increased presence of the federal government in policy

7 Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s dictum, that “If you make the self small enough, you can externalize everything”, may be an appropriate statement about the internal/external debate here.

areas in which it had heretofore not been involved. To say that time, in itself, is a constraint on prime ministerial power is just as valid as saying that a prime minister being non-telepathic or her being unable to be in the House of Commons and at a G-20 summit abroad simultaneously, are constraints. In other words, I would suggest that the time constraint is trivially true. Constraints, in order to be interesting, must have the capacity to be variable, to change over time, circumstances, or with intentional action. Time, on the other hand, is not variable, in any ordinary sense. Everyone is constrained by time in an equal way, in the sense that time is the same for everyone; the effect of the time constraint on an actor‟s capacity for action varies with how much they are trying to get done. That prime ministers are putatively trying to get more done in the same amount of time suggests not that time is a constraint on political action, per se, but that being directly involved in decision-making is constraining to the extent that direct involvement necessarily means neglecting other priorities. Meaningful constraints must have plausible counterfactuals. Trade agreements such as NAFTA are meaningful constraints on the prime minister‟s space for political action because one can imagine how constrained or unconstrained a prime minister would be if Canada were to renegotiate or withdraw from NAFTA. To say that if only the prime minister had one more hour in the day or an infinite amount of time, he would be unfettered, is to say something meaningless. The characterization that Savoie gives (1999: 313-336) of the necessity of governing by “bolts of electricity” is certainly reasonable but is only so because the breadth and depth of governmental action and policy-making is so extensive and not because of the “tyranny of the clock”, as Thomas puts it (2003: 85), which rules over everyone alike. Responsibility and Constraint Rose makes the claim that “[b]ecause a prime minister is not a chief executive, he or she need not be constrained by personal responsibility for specific policies” (1991: 13). The idea is that prime ministers are, to a significant extent, „insulated‟ from the mistakes of departments because departmental ministers, under principles of responsible government, are the primary bearers of responsibility and accountability. Although Rose does not elaborate on the implications, this would seem to suggest that the relationship between responsibility and institutional constraints on political power is as follows: the more the responsibility, the more a prime minister would be constrained in terms of political action. In a certain sense this may be true. If a prime minister were specifically and personally responsible for every policy decision made in the executive, she may feel constrained because, knowing she will be held accountable, she will act cautiously and not as she would like to, ideally, given her policy preferences.

I would suggest that the connection between responsibility and constraint lends itself to a slightly different interpretation, though not necessarily opposed. Abstractly, a plausible general claim can be made that if a person is responsible for something he will seek to have the maximal degree of control over events and actions which pertain to that thing, especially when irresponsibility cannot be excused by claims that events were „out of one‟s control‟. A parent, for instance, given responsibility over a child, will want to insist that he or she have all the power and control required in order to fulfill that responsibility. Similarly, then, if a prime minister, or any political leader, is de facto (or de jure, for that matter) responsible, it seems to make sense that they would seek to have the necessary political power and control. That is, though they may feel constrained initially, they will want to enlarge institutional capacities by whatever means are available. In this overall sense, greater responsibility does not have the ultimate effect of constraining action, as seemingly implied by Rose; it necessitates the transcendence of constraints and an expansion of the space for political action. The point would be moot in terms of real empirical validity, of course, if Rose‟s claim, as initially given, were actually the case. The interpretation suggested above is a claim about the relationship between greater responsibility and the notion of constraint. If it were true that a prime minister were not a chief executive (and thus did not have responsibility), then whatever interpretation of the second clause one has will not make a difference. So, while it is certainly true, formally (ie. constitutionally), that the Canadian Prime Minister is not a chief executive in the same manner as the American president, does she nonetheless bear the burden of political responsibility? The „presidentialization‟ thesis would seem to suggest that, because of a variety of factors, it is the case that Canadian Prime Ministers are seen as being responsible for the policies of the executive, if not wholly. This is also evident in the British case, in a comment of Lord Lipsey‟s8 to a House of Lords committee investigating „The Cabinet and the Centre of Government‟: the media did not, in our day, hold the Prime Minister responsible for every single thing that happened in every single corner of Whitehall ... and there was not need for the Prime Minister to react swiftly to everything that happened, as present Prime Ministers have to. I think that is a very strong pressure which tends in the direction of a more prime ministerial system. (qtd. in Blick and Jones 2010) In other words, prime ministers, Canadian or British, cannot simply „pass the buck‟ or „wash their hands‟ of problems in departments or fire or discipline ministers without political consequence. A prime minister who does so will be open to charges that she is evading or shirking responsibility,

8 A special adviser to former Prime Minister Jim Callaghan (1976-1979).

or else that she is not in control of her government. The formally correct excuse, that, as Rose puts it, “[e]xclusion from direct responsibility for policy insulates the prime minister from blame for the mistakes that government departments inevitably make” (1991: 14), would be extremely flimsy, indeed, if given by a prime minister in the modern media and political climate. The contemporary media has “a tendency”, as Savoie notes, “to lay ultimate responsibility for every act at the prime minister‟s door” (1999: 97). Such a climate has increasingly made the Prime Minister and the executive centre “extremely sensitive to potential media-inspired developments it cannot control and to surprises which can give rise to political problems and embarrassments” (Savoie 1999: 339). Though Rose‟s point that departments and ministers are unequal in terms of closeness to the centre, and thus that some will matter more than others, is certainly well-taken, it is surely not the case that prime ministerial responsibility cannot be seen to extend to particular areas to the point that “a prime minister can ignore the concerns of many ministers and many departments” (1991: 14). In an age of political „containment‟ and a strong PMO, no area of policy-making in the executive can be seen to be completely outside the aegis of personal responsibility and accountability on the part of the prime minister. Thus, I suggest that the interpretation given of the links between responsibility, constraint, and the capacities is plausible and implies that prime ministers will seek to expand or evolve institutionally to meet the political responsibility they are seen as having.

Part II: ‘Individuals’

Part I has centred on institutions: theories of institutional change, a framework for measuring such change, and the specificities of the Canadian prime ministership. Part II, then, turns to the other aspect of the causal story: individuals, especially political leaders, as psychological beings. Because the causal relevance of individual political leaders in explaining the outcomes of political leadership is often dismissed, the next section discusses approaches to the study of leadership in general. In section 2.2, I elaborate the causal picture and illustrate a general causal model of an individual-centered approach to political leadership. The last section of part II, 2.3, elucidates the independent variable of this thesis: individuals as psychological actors. 2.1: Approaches to Political Leadership Political leadership is a ubiquitous phenomenon but it appears at times to be antithetical to a „scientific‟ understanding of politics; Fox (1980) argues that “[l]eadership is such a prime ingredient of politics that it is astonishing not to have attracted more scientific study by political scientists”

(681). Perhaps because it is seen as a particularly vague and ambiguous concept, or because a concept which necessarily has a limited number of cases and a plethora of possible variables is unappealing, the discipline has tended to “deliberately avoid so-called individualist reductionism in order to focus more profitably on the aggregate analysis of collectivities” (Edinger 1990: 509). Hargrove and Owens (2003) express the concern that analysing personal skills of leaders rather than institutional roles “seems too psychological and raises difficulties of generalization about leadership” (2). Political scientists may have valid concerns about wading too deeply into the waters of historical narrative or psychoanalysis. Simply put, neither methodology is seen to be sufficiently rigorous. Nonetheless, I suggest that methodology in political science, as in every other field, should be guided primarily by the subject matter of the question at hand, and not by abstract anxieties about its status as a „true‟ science. The method used must be fixed by the understanding sought. The question then becomes: what does an understanding of the intricacies of political leadership require by way of method? There seems here to be a curious and potentially troublesome disconnect between what many political scientists imagine when they think of „politics‟ and what the ordinary person imagines. For the latter, it would not be implausible to say that politics is politicians, above all, though not only. The „naïve‟ view is that political leaders have agentic, creative power in making policy decisions. One leader will do things differently than another leader; the shape of the political process itself will depend on the people involved. In brief: leaders matter, not just as institutional seat-fillers but as actual persons. In the public discourse, it is not the case that leaders are seen as substitutable, all else being equal, i.e. that given the same external context (however defined), any person in some particular leadership role will act in the same way. Against this, there is the claim, made by Rose (1991), that “[t]he attention given to a prime minister‟s personality is not proof of influence” but an “artefact of methodological determinism” on the part of the media, academic scholars, and the prime minister‟s own political office (21). I suggest this claim is overstated; it creates a straw-man to the effect that attention to individual aspects is naïve and inherently excludes other methodological insights. No intellectually honest investigator would suggest that the hegemonic dominance of political leaders that is found in the mass political discourse is all that politics is about, or that various other explanatory approaches may not also be essential to a complete understanding of the political phenomena under study. It is to say, however, that any causal story about political processes, such as the development of an institution such as the prime ministership, cannot be fully explicated without taking into account leaders qua persons.

Theoretical approaches to political leadership, then, are methodologically diverse, but they are not sui generis. They share with other political scientific theories certain features by which they can be classified. Kohli et al.‟s (1996) work, for instance, invokes two dimensions by which theory in political science (in their case, comparative work) can be categorized, the macro-micro and the deductive-inductive. The first refers to the unit (or level) of analysis a theory asserts as being explanatorily significant, the second to the logical method of argumentation. So, deductive theories, roughly speaking, argue from the general to the specific, and are, ideally, nomological in approach. Inductive theories argue in the opposite direction, from the specific to the general, and tend to be less sanguine about the notion of „covering laws‟ in political science. Table 2 reproduces this typology. Table 2: Dimensions of Theoretical Scholarship Deductive Inductive Macro Structural Functionalism Single or comparative case studies; Marxist Analysis political institutions and social groups as empirical foci Micro Rational Choice Anthropology-inspired local political studies; social structural or cultural foci Source: Kohli et al. 1996 (47) Adapting this framework, and following Hargrove and Owens‟ (2003) lead, we can position theories of political leadership according to their method of argumentation (deductive or inductive) and their focus of analysis (context or individual). This spatial rendering is depicted in Figure 2. Figure 2: Theoretical Approaches to Political Leadership

This depiction gives us four quadrants as four ideal types of theories: context-deductive, context-inductive, individual-deductive, and individual-inductive. Actual approaches to political

leadership may, of course, not fall strictly within one or another ideal type; indeed, this is the reason for representation on a continuum rather than a typology. For our purposes, however, theories can be characterized as generally embodying a type, without great distortion of the details. My aim here is to make as plain as possible reasons for believing that none of the first three approaches are equipped with the necessary assumptions and methods, and thus why an individual-inductive approach is necessary, useful and informative to understanding leadership and political action. A: Contextual Approaches Houghton makes a basic distinction between what he terms situationism and dispositionism in explanations of political behaviour (2009: 4-5), paralleling the distinction I make here between context and individual (the latter chosen as a more general and inclusive term than its counterpart). Both context-deductive and context-inductive approaches to political leadership, as ideal types, would take the situation or environment of a leader as the salient level of analysis. Both would explain institutional change primarily as a result of aggregate-level forces: social or cultural trends, economic patterns, or exogenous institutional rules and norms, for example. Essentially, the methodological assumption is that context is everything, and therefore, that making sense of the aggregate-level phenomena is both necessary and sufficient to understanding political leadership (in terms of outcomes). The contextual approaches differ, of course, in the way in which the relationships between theory, context, and outcome are posited. The feature which is the sine qua non of a context-deductive approach is the positing of an a priori theoretical framework determining how context and outcome are related. The closest to an ideal type here would be something like Marxist or Hegelian analysis, in which particular actions of political leaders are subsumed (and determined) wholly under the rubric of some broader, non-concrete notion, say, economic class or the world-historical context or „spirit‟. A Marxist analysis of institutional change might emphasize the balance of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, for example. In the Canadian context, Presthus‟ theory of elite accommodation (1973), as an analysis of the decision-making of elites, could fall somewhere in the context-deductive quadrant, in so far as it engages in a sort of Marxist class-based analysis. Under this view, the decisions of political leaders are epiphenomenal to the underlying notion of class; economic elites make the decisions, and the outcomes which occur (i.e. the decisions made) are a result of the elites being elites and not being particular individuals. A second type of context-deductive approach is exemplified by Weber‟s account of political leadership in terms of authority. This account distinguishes between patriarchal or traditional,

charismatic, and bureaucratic or legal-rational sources of the legitimate right to be obeyed (Dion 1968: 7 and Elcock 2001: 29-30). The importance of context is plain enough; the account is deductive to the extent that it formulates a general or universal framework which is then applied to specific cases as explanatory. Weber‟s explanation of the role of the bureaucrat as “determined by the laws and regulations which define it… and not through the bureaucrat‟s personal attributes” can, I think, be applied also to the political leader, and is indicative in this way (Elcock 2001: 35). To reiterate, a context-deductive approach is characterized by a set of a priori assumptions which determine how a context relates to outcomes.9 A context-inductive approach would invert the relationship between the theoretical framework and the specific context and outcomes. The traditional definition of inductive reasoning is generalization from specific observations to universal laws or principles. Context is still the key arena of analysis, but the fundamental components are not abstract notions such as class or culture but specifiable, more concrete entities: most often institutions, but also social groups (if these are not considered institutions). Hence, the grand tradition of institutionalism in political science, and in Canadian political science especially, falls into the context-inductive quadrant (again, in ideal form). Most of the literature that deals with some facet of the activities of political leaders in Canada also falls into this space. It is evident whenever we invoke institutions and institutional rules, norms, and cultures as sufficiently explanatory in decision-making. Howlett et. al‟s (2005) explication of the evolution of Cabinet government in Canada, discussed in section 2.2, is a prime example. The concept of a „political-administrative style‟, as “a more or less consistent and long-term set of institutionalized patterns of relationships, norms, and procedures existing between the different arms or branches of government” (4), is characteristic of the level of analysis in context-inductive approaches. Indeed, the fundamental assumption of public administration studies, of which Howlett et al. (2005) is an example, is captured in the following: While the concept of a style refers to the behaviour of political and administrative agents, it has a heavily structural or institutional

9 To say that a set of assumptions is a priori does not mean that it is ahistorical or that it is not derived epistemically from experience. In the strictest sense, a priori means knowable by reason, a posteriori means knowable only by experience. ‘2+2=4’ is an a priori proposition even if it is learned by experience. This is only to say that the assumptions are taken as given, prior to the empirical data of the case at hand. An explanatory model in the ‘Presthusian’ mode would say something like: economic elites make policy decisions which favour themselves and disfavour the lower economic classes because they are economic elites, who, ex hypothesi, prioritize class interests over any other. The direction of argument is from the general (the assumed relationship between economics and political outcomes) to the specific (elite behaviour in Canadian policy-making).

component, as it is assumed that these agents are not free-floating and unencumbered, but rather operate within an institutional context that at least in part determines their behaviour… [T]he institutional structure of an administration creates a distinct pattern of constraints and incentives for state and societal actors. Since institutional structures are different, however, it is to be expected that there are many different kinds of political-administrative styles, each style being defined by the set of institutions, rules, traditions, and cultures of which it is comprised. (Howlett et al. 2005: 5-6, emphasis added) The emphasized clause suggests the motivating methodological assumption of the context- inductive approach, viz. that the actions of political leaders are, in large part, determined by the context within which they are embedded. These contexts are identified, in contrast with a context- deductive approach, by observations of particular phenomena, which may include individual actions. The emphasis, though, is on the context: the explanation of political behaviour is given by institutional or structural variables. That is, political leaders do what they do not because of who they are but because of the imperatives of their context. Institutional treatises can be, of course, more or less sensitive to the role of the individual. Aucoin‟s analysis (1986), for example, of the changes in the cabinet system from Trudeau to Mulroney, characterized as “rational management” under the former and “brokerage politics” under the latter, is a laudable effort to argue the significance of both institutions and individuals; it exemplifies a kind of institutional analysis underpinned by an emphasis on individualistic, idiosyncratic tendencies of leaders. B: Individual Approaches The analytical distinction between context and individual approaches, or between situationism and dispositionism, is handily captured by Philip Zombardo‟s notions of “the apple” and “the barrel” (Houghton 2009: 4). In reference to the notorious events at Abu Ghraib, the question is whether the responsibility (moral or otherwise) is attributable to the “bad apples”, i.e. the individual soldiers, or the “barrel” itself, i.e. the environment in which the soldiers found themselves. Individual-deductive and –inductive approaches take the salient unit of analysis to be the „apples‟. The extreme „apple‟ position on the context-individual dimension is taken up by those theories which assert that (certain) individuals transcend contextual constraints, that they are „unlimited‟ in the extent to which they can shape their environment and capacity to act politically. The “great man” theories, predominantly of the 19th century, epitomize this position (Hargrove and Owens 2003: 1). Thomas Carlyle‟s version of a “great man” theory, which is probably the most notable, is characterized not only by an empirical argument about the significance of particular

individuals but a normative claim about the value of “great men” and the duty of the public to obey. The following exhortation is typical: “Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country” (Carlyle, as qtd. in Elcock, 2001: 30). More recent (and more realistic) individual-centred theories do not occupy this extreme position: the significance of context is simply too real to ignore. I conceive of individual approaches, both deductive and inductive, as recognizing the relevance of context but refocusing the analysis on how individuals act within contexts, from the point of view of the individual. The difference can be crudely characterized as the contextual approach being „from the outside in‟ and the individual approach being „from the inside out‟. As with the contextual approaches discussed above, the distinction between deductive and inductive lies in the direction of the argument. The individual-deductive quadrant is evident in the intersection of mathematics and political science: rational choice. Rational choice is individual-deductive almost by definition: the individual, as a rational and strategic actor, is the predominant unit of analysis,10 and the reasoning proceeds from abstract axioms and assumptions about these individuals to particular instances. The application of rational choice to aspects of political leadership, such as the capacity of leaders to create space for political action, is an interesting and, I think, useful endeavour, in which I have done a modest amount of work (Ie 2009). Individuals (political leaders) are seen as rational utility- maximizers playing a game in which the rules dictate their actions, in accordance with their beliefs, preferences and information states. In this vein, one of the most evident roles for political leaders is as the key instruments for solving problems of social coordination among strategic actors. The relationship between leaders and followers is also amenable to rational choice analysis: Calvert‟s effort to formalize the conditions under which leaders will either punish rebellious followers or acquiesce to their demands provides an excellent example (1987). We might also think of certain formal modeling techniques as individual-deductive. The Downsian model of party competition, for instance, could be seen in this light, if we conflate parties with their leaders. Thus, we might argue that, in order to capture the median voter, Prime Minister Harper has moved from the right side of the ideological spectrum toward the centre, or that the „Third Way‟ policies of Tony Blair and „New

10 Strictly speaking, this is not true, since it is often the case that groups of individuals and even sub-national or national entities are the actors involved in rational choice analysis. However, it is, I think, always the case that these aggregate entities are ‘treated’ as individuals or reduced to something like an individual. Thus, the prisoner’s dilemma can be applied, theoretically, whether the ‘prisoners’ are actual, individual prisoners or states.

Labour‟ in the UK and Bill Clinton and the Democrats in the United States were strategic moves from the left.11 C: Discussion Three quadrants of Figure 1, the context-deductive, context-inductive, and individual- deductive, have been explicated. So, what is it that these approaches ignore or fail to give proper significance, or what is inadequate about their assumptions and methods? Why argue for the importance of individual-inductive approaches, as this thesis is intended to do? The first point concerns the notion of context, for which some clarification is required. Apart from the „hard-wired‟ features genetically coded into persons, there is a sense in which everything is context-dependent (Houghton 2009: 6-7). The independent variable of this thesis (explicated in section 1.22, below) is constituted by individual-level features: personality, beliefs, etc. The ultimate causal sources for much of the variability in these features, across individuals, are contextual in nature. A proponent of contextual or situational approaches can almost always look further and further back into the causal story to support the claim that context really is everything. However, the basic assumption of my argument (a conceit, perhaps, though an explanatorily useful one) is that, in order to have causal explanations which are meaningful, we must “break into the causal chain… and consider only the proximate or most recent causes of an event” (Houghton 2009: 7). The causal effects of aggregate or abstract phenomena such as economic class, say, or institutional structures, are often pervasive and long-lasting. However, if we want to explain something like institutional change in the prime ministership, we often want to know about direct and immediate causes. A contextual explanation might provide a useful heuristic with which to think about the case. I argue, however, that a meaningful causal story about an institution such as the prime ministership must acknowledge the crucial role of purposive human agency as the basic element of political action. This is especially the case because the prime ministership is what I have called an embodied institution: an institution necessarily constituted in part by a set of particular persons. The prime ministership of Canada has existed as long as there have been actual individuals inhabiting the office, and the institution is largely the way it is because of what these individuals do and have done, albeit in relation to some context. There is a relevant difference in explaining institutional change between embodied and non-embodied institutions, and this is that the latter cannot change as a result of

11 These are simply possible explanations and not, on my part, assertions.

internal action; endogenous change cannot occur with reference to the institution itself. Perhaps the premiere example of a non-embodied institution is the constitution of a state. A constitution, as the fundamental laws and principles governing a state, can cause change in other institutions but it cannot change itself. Other institutions can change the shape of the constitution: courts can decide on what is constitutional and what is not, and parliament and provinces, in the Canadian case, can amend the text of the document itself. This thesis argues that the prime ministership of Canada, as an embodied institution, can and has changed itself in significant ways, through the actions of individual prime ministers. It might be argued, however, that the prime ministership does not change itself any more than the Constitution does. This depends on a picture of the prime ministership as an institution entirely distinct from the people who have inhabited it, such that a prime minister is an exogenous force vis-à-vis the prime ministership. I suppose this is simply a matter of disagreement between „thin‟ and „thick‟ conceptions of the institution. For the former, the prime ministership is merely the rules, norms, conventions, etc., such that it can be wholly described without references to individuals. I simply disagree with this „thin‟ conception of the institution in favour of a more robust notion which sees individual leaders as integral and intrinsic parts to the institution as a whole. The notion implicit in the contextual argument, in its ideal form, is that it makes no salient difference who the individuals who occupy institutions of political leadership are. Individual, personalistic considerations are simply not determinative of anything in terms of political outcomes; all features of the context being equal, individuals are substitutable. It is, I think, the case that most rational choice analyses would also feature substitutable persons, in the sense that the actions of strategic actors are, assuming rationality, determined wholly and invariably by the „rules of the game‟. As well, the basic assumption of rationality is employed as a given; part of the role of political psychology is to explain if and when people really do act rationally in the political sphere.12 Taken together, the contextual and the individual-deductive approaches are characterized, in their ideal forms, by a „systematic‟ or „systematizing‟ urge which views leaders as “products of social, economic, or political forces or as responding rationally to institutionally structured incentives” (Jones 1989: 3, emphasis added). The implication in the emphasized terms is, again, that of variable substitutability;

12 It should be noted, though, that there is an important rational choice literature on the role of individuals; an outstanding example is William Riker’s The Art of Political Manipulation (1986), in which he explicates the notion of ‘heresthetic’, as the ability of individual political leaders to creatively structure the world in favourable ways.

the same input of forces will always output the same product (i.e. political leader), the same institutional incentives will elicit the same responses, given rational behaviour. In general, when some facet of political leadership is discussed it is usually abstracted towards the contextual pole in the context-individual dimension and embedded within analyses of aggregate phenomena such as institutions, economic class, or, at an even higher level of abstraction, structures and functions of various political objects – the „cog in the wheel of the machine‟ approach; else, it is treated as an economic problem of utility maximization. Jones (1989) speaks of this general paradigm as „Newtonian‟, marked by “high information and systematic predictable interactions among well-behaved variables” (8). I argue that such analysis does not get at the heart of what political leadership is in the real world of politics, nor, in particular, is it sufficient for a meaningful understanding of institutional change in the prime ministership. Attention needs to be paid, at the individual-inductive theoretical level, to accounts of the actions of political leaders. A political leader is not a passive actor enabled and constrained to act solely by external „rules of the game‟ or by where they fall in a complex of institutional structures. Some substantive evidence is more obvious than others; Dahl (2006) suggests a number of clear instances in which “human actors were unconstrained by political culture and institutions, or were only weakly constrained”, such that who those human actors were, as individuals, mattered greatly (8-10). To subsume under aggregative institutional, socioeconomic, or historical regimes is, I think, to discount a fundamental element of the political world, which is “the motive force of individual political leaders” (Fox 1980: 682). If we think of the importance of political leaders in terms of a „counterfactual test‟, as Edinger suggests, any reasonable person would say that leaders do matter (1990: 512). In Part III of this thesis, I argue that prime ministers, in particular, though not only, Macdonald, King, and Trudeau, have left indelible marks on the prime ministership as individuals and not as substitutable persons; if others were in their place, the observable institutional patterns would have taken different forms or would not have occurred. I do not hesitate to assert that thinking about the „counterfactual case‟ is a strong argument in itself for the utility of an individual- inductive approach. This is notwithstanding the fact that counterfactual conditionals, especially historical-political ones, can be frustratingly ineffable and immune to scientific „proof‟. The importance of political leaders as individuals in institutional change should not be underestimated or ignored.

2.2: A Causal Model of Individuals and Institutions The underlying framework of this thesis is conceptualized in terms of a „personalistic‟, individual-inductive methodology. It takes as its starting point the individual political leader, and hypothesizes that the individual as a psychological figure significantly affects the institutional context in which they are embedded. Though I cannot give a complete account of such a framework, it would be desirable to have some (more or less) concrete picture of the hypothesized causal process. To that end, Figure 2 depicts a generic model of a „personalistic‟ approach to political leadership. Figure 3: Generic Model of a „Personalistic‟ Approach to Political Leadership

The attributes listed under „individuals‟ in the diagram are those which a person possesses prior to entering the political arena or engaging in political action. By prior is meant „independent of a particular political context‟, and not necessarily temporally preceding political action. That is, whether a person is emotionally distant or rates high in cognitive complexity or believes in energetic and active policy-making does not depend on the other aspects of the causal picture. It is independent though not necessarily insulated; the dotted line connecting outcomes and institutions to individuals is meant to suggest that it is an open question whether outcomes or institutions can alter the fundamental elements of persons; it is possible there are cumulative effects which will cause such changes.13 Regardless, any approach to political leadership which endeavours to explain aspects of institutions or political outcomes must posit that the individual, as in the diagram, remains essentially

13 The dominant view of psychologists is to see this as a case of interaction in which a person’s “personality and behaviour… *are+ the outcome of the interaction between his or her innate temperament and all the experiences he or she has had up to that point” (Hunt 2007: 400). If this is the case, then a person’s experience of both the institutional context and the impact of political outcomes will have some effect on the inner psychological components.

autonomous in their psychological being. Thus, individuals are treated as the independent variable of this analysis and are discussed at greater length in the next section. The model suggests that individuals do not act directly on outcomes; rather, institutions mediate the relationship. The idea that „no man is an island‟ suggests the same: that no person, much less political leader, is „institution-less‟, so to speak. The prime ministership, as well as being an institution itself, is enmeshed in a network of institutions: cabinet, parliament, the federal structure, the media, etc. Political leaders cannot act without acting within an institutional setting; the salience of psychological traits as political behaviour is conditioned by this setting. In the model, then, I capture the „impressment‟, so to speak, of leaders on institutions by the notion of „instrumental modes of action‟. Though length does not permit a full treatment of this concept, they are nevertheless an extremely important part of the hypothesized model. Modes of action, such as persuasion or the use of formal power, are what I consider as actually doing the work in expressing individual attributes in the political arena. They are the means by which persons affect desired ends: more specifically, the means by which individuals as political leaders shape both their own context (in terms of institutional roles) and, ultimately, the outcomes which result. These „modes of action‟ are constitutive of what Robert Craig Brown calls the “interplay… between circumstances and character” (1988: 31). A complete taxonomy of possible modes of action would be impossible, but here I suggest two broad categories: the formal and the informal. The distinction here is between „codified‟ modes, whether constitutionally or conventionally derived, and more abstract modes. Formal modes of action are invariable across prime ministers. That is, they are not inherently subject to change in the occupancy of the office, though, of course, they may change as norms, customs, and convention change with time. Contrastingly, the use and nature of informal instruments, I suggest, are inescapably (but not exhaustively) related to particular leaders, and may take various forms, such as symbolic power, persuasion of both elite and mass types, and skills and capacities of organizational management. In section 1.1, above, I depicted institutional change in leadership institutions as variations along four dimensions. Here, I define institutional form generally as the ‘boundaries’ or orientations of an institution in relation to other actors or institutions with reference to a chosen parameter(s). Conceivably, most anything can serve as a parameter by which to analyze institutional form, but it would most plausibly be something which is comparable, observable, and important, in some sense, to the nature of the institution. For instance, an analysis of electoral systems might take electoral proportionality as the

measure of institutional form; when the proportionality changes, one could conclude that the institution has changed. As figure 3 and the foregoing discussion indicate, a personalistic approach to leaders and political action should not be taken as excluding context. The „filtering‟ effect of the intervening context, institutional or otherwise, between individuals and outcomes varies with both individual and contextual aspects. Some variable aspects of individuals, both in terms of internal psychological states and capacities for political action, will simply be cancelled or outweighed by context. It is not counter to the thrust of this thesis to agree with Rose (1991), that there are many situations in which “circumstances outside a prime minister‟s control can be as important as the initiatives of an individual office-holder” (21). It is uncontroversial to go even further and assert that there are times when „initiatives‟ of leaders simply are not part of the causal picture. The causal picture invoked by this thesis, however, does not concern these times, or does so only by implication or default (since explicating the relationship between the variables I am concerned with surely says something about those which fall outside of it). Rather, I am interested in how aspects of individuals qua individuals, taken to be the independent variable, affect the dependent variable, specifically, change in the Canadian prime ministership. 2.3: The Independent Variable: The Individual In previous sections, I discussed the relative hesitancy of political scientists towards embracing individual-level analysis in explaining outcomes in political reality. Kaarbo (1997), in discussing the dearth of research related particularly to prime ministers as opposed to the US presidency, suggests that this ambivalence is rooted in three reasons: “methodological difficulties, misunderstandings of the concept of personality, and a focus on the power of the prime minister as the dependent variable” (556). The methodological difficulties have been explicated in earlier discussion. The second reason, the „misunderstanding‟ of personality, rests on the fact that „personality‟ is used in the general vernacular differently than as a scientific construct. This confusion can lead otherwise sensible scholars to draw flawed conclusions, e.g., Rose (1991), who seems to equate personality with popularity and the more trivial or superficial aspects of political leaders (20- 21). A similar mistake is sometimes made when pundits, commentators, and critics decry the elevation of „style‟ over „substance‟, of discussion of „personality‟ rather than „policy‟; personality is a

much deeper concept in the psychological literature than is evident from such dismissals.14 One standard definition of personality is of “an overarching construct used to identify the characteristics (e.g., traits, motives, interests, goals) that influence an individual‟s unique pattern of thinking, emoting, and behaving” (Matheny and Kern 2004: 685). The notions of „pattern‟ and „uniqueness‟ are similarly emphasized in other descriptions.15 The issue of prime ministerial power as the dependent variable, asserts Kaarbo, arises because “comparativists tend to divide countries into types that give prime ministers different powers and then see how these different types affect prime minister style” (555). That is, the emphasis is on institutional or constitutional structure, rather than individuals within those structures, and the analysis tends to be across, rather than within, polities. Again, Rose is seen as a primary offender here, particularly in his analysis of „prime ministerial roles‟, depicted thus: Table 3: “A Typology of Prime-Ministerial Roles” Constitution Centralises Yes No Party Government One Leader Bargainer Many Juggler Symbol Source: Rose (1991): 19. It should be clear that such a view of prime ministerial roles leaves no room for individual variation within states nor for the influence of individuals on institutional change, except in the restricted cases in which individuals can alter the constitutional or party system dimensions themselves. Indeed, the typology suggests that if the constitution and party configurations are static, all prime ministers in a given system play identical roles. This is patently absurd, and suggests one of two things: that the concept of „prime ministerial roles‟ is so minimal as to explain nothing about

14 Unsurprisingly, I argue that the perennial plea for discussion of ‘policy’ or ‘issues’ to the exclusion of personality, especially during elections, does a great disservice to the electorate and detracts from the quality of democracy. Although it is obviously important to understand a political leader’s general ideological orientation, particular issues and policies are inevitably subject to change in their salience, feasibility, and so on. Political reality is unpredictable. Personality, however, is much more stable. Thus, it is much more important, in my view, to have a deep and expansive understanding of the personalities of potential leaders: how they think, their fundamental assumptions about politics, their affective qualities, how they interact with other actors, etc. Moreover, the sharp distinction between personality and policy is off the mark, since personality has a great deal to do with what policy outcomes occur and how the political process works. Frankly, if policy were to be wholly constitutive of leader evaluations, we would not need leaders at all, only legislative automatons with policy checklists. 15E.g., Strickland (2001: 490): “The unique pattern of psychological and behavioral characteristics by which each person can be distinguished from other people”, or Pervin (2000: 100): “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.”

actual political outcomes, i.e., the variations in outcomes because of different leaders is explained entirely without reference to „roles‟, or that „roles‟ as an analytical concept needs to be expanded. Either way, it seems unwise to ignore such a visible manifestation of political reality: the individual. A: Psychology and Political Leadership In asserting the causal importance of the individual to political outcomes, specifically, institutional change, I want to guard against a form of application of psychology to political leadership which can, at times, provide valuable insight but can also sometimes be overindulgent, and, to be frank, inane. This is the (intellectually sincere) attempt to apply psychoanalytical insights in systematic ways to particular leaders, often in the form of „psychobiography‟. Harold Lasswell‟s influence, and Freud through him, is seminal in this regard. His two most important works, Psychopathology and Politics (1930) and Power and Personality (1948), are elaborations on two themes: (1) that there is such a thing as the „political personality or type‟ which is constituted by “Private Motives / Displaced on Public Objects / Rationalized in Terms of Public Interest” (Lasswell 1948: 38)16, and (2) that political power is compensatory for low self-esteem (39-58). The role of childhood and adolescent development is emphasized as having considerable explanatory value. A notable work on Woodrow Wilson, for instance, argued that the treatment of Wilson he received from his father, depicted as stern and demanding yet emotionally indifferent, accounts for the adult Wilson‟s ambition to achieve “great deeds in compensation” as well as his inflexibility and unwillingness to compromise (George and George 1964; Houghton 2009: 88-89). Steinberg‟s Shame and Humiliation (1996) is another psychobiographical account of American presidents, in this case Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon, as those presidents most tied to the war in Vietnam. She characterizes the thrust of her argument as follows: [A] psychoanalytically focused exploration of feelings and emotions, particularly those involving shame and humiliation, as they operate within the construct of a narcissistic personality structure can expand our understanding of presidential decision making during the Vietnam War. [N]arcissistic political leaders are particularly vulnerable to issues of shame and humiliation... an actual or potential loss of self-esteem will affect their decisions. (Steinberg 1996: 4)

16 The rendering of the quotation is accurate to the source, which has each phrase on a separate line, as though it were a poem...

In the analysis that follows, then, she traces the development of narcissistic tendencies in these Presidents, Johnson being an „Humiliated Narcissist‟, Nixon an „Angry Narcissist‟, and Eisenhower a „Healthy Narcissist‟. There have been several attempts at psychobiography in the Canadian context, most having King as subject. Two noteworthy examples are Knight of the Holy Spirit: a Study of William Lyon Mackenzie King by Joy Esberey (1980) and Canada’s King: An Essay in Political Psychology (Roazen 1998); it is unsurprising, though unfortunate, that King is the subject of both works as the outstanding psychoanalytical curiosity in terms of Canadian prime ministers. Certainly, if we are to treat individual political leaders as the independent variable in a causal framework, we should not dismiss, out-of-hand, any insights into a leader‟s personality; to the extent that (Freudian) psychoanalysis can tell us meaningful things about, say, personal dispositions or sources of preferences, it can be a valuable tool. However, to the extent that it is over-dependent on certain unfalsifiable, untestable, and outdated Freudian tropes, or is overly psychologically deterministic, I suggest it has a deleterious effect. While recognizing the importance of the more psychoanalytical perspectives, it is important to emphasize that this thesis is not particularly concerned with the sources of psychological attributes but, rather, the effects of said attributes on the broader context of institutions and political reality. This is reflected in the relative inattention to the childhood and strictly personal and private lives of the prime ministers in the case studies of part III; at some point, the causal connections between the inner mental life and an external political reality need to be broken, if anything useful is to be said. A more substantial and observable application of psychology to political phenomena is the project of classifying or categorizing political actors into types or leadership styles. The grounding assumption is that, although individual-level analysis is essential, individuals are not „unique‟; they conform to some general pattern of personality or behaviour. In this way, the problem of generalizing from idiosyncratic cases is negated. We can sort or classify leaders into categories, based on psychological concepts: motivations, attitudes, social behaviour, etc. A foundational work in this regard is Barber‟s The Presidential Character (1992; c1972). In it, the extent to which the character of individual political leaders affects the decisions which they make is addressed. He makes the important point that “every story of Presidential decision-making is really two stories: an outer one in which a rational man calculates and an inner one in which an emotional man feels” (Barber 1992: 4). Political action, in other words, is as much a product of internalities being projected outwards as externalities being pressed upon an individual. Barber suggests a three-fold differentiation of the pattern of personality: style, world view, and character,

with the last being the most salient (5). Character is divided along two dimensions (see Table 4), the active-passive and the positive-negative, varying according to how much energy and effort a leader puts in and “how he feels about what he does”, respectively (8). The active-passive dimension measures the extent to which a leader initiates and generates political activity, acting rather than simply reacting to events. Do they seek out issues to address and problems to solve or do they, instead, let the waves roll over them, as it were? The positive-negative dimension gauges the extent to which leaders enjoy political activity or are apathetic or antipathetic to it. So, these “crude clues to character” sort leaders into four categories, in terms of broad tendencies rather than strict lines: active-positive, active-negative, passive-positive, and passive-negative (9-10). This typology of political leaders, while more rigorous than explicitly psychoanalytical accounts, might still seem untestable; Barber‟s characterization, for instance, of passive-positive leaders as „seeking love‟ from the public echoes Lasswell‟s arguments and seems rather opaque. Certainly, as Esberey points out, the criteria used to identify a leader‟s character, in terms of key traits and the ideal types, are vague and unspecified (1976: 101). The extent to which these ideal types correspond to some particular modes of decision-making or sets of mutually exclusive political outcomes is also dubious. Moreover, the subtitle of the book, “predicting performance in the White House”, is overstated; while there is undoubtedly value to be gained in psychological or personalistic explorations of political leadership, it is far too simple to expect that such a typology as Barber‟s will be strongly predictive of political success. Simonton (1993) seems to realize this when, while pointing out the virtues of the individual-inductive approach, he evinces caution. The variance accounted for by prediction equations is “seldom overwhelming”, such predictions as do relatively well are laden with situational and contextual variables, and the effects of character traits are probably non-systematic (i.e., one active-positive president may be a great success while another a dismal failure) (542-543). Overall, then, Barber‟s analysis should not be taken as analytically rigorous but as a tool by which political leaders can be understood, and broad judgements made about their character and decision-making.17

17 Barber’s typology, notwithstanding the criticisms raised in the preceding discussion, has been used in the Canadian context, notably in a scholarly dispute concerning Mackenzie King. In his study of King’s political leadership, Courtney (1976) uses Barber’s typology as an organizational device to explicate King’s political behaviour. Contrary to F.R. Scott’s 1957 poem W.L.M.K., which depicts King as “remembered / Wherever men honour ingenuity / Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity”, Courtney evaluates King as an active-positive Prime Minister. He cites biographical details, much of which is taken from the King diaries, to provide evidence for his thesis. For instance, King is described as having a “relatively high self-esteem... by no means agonized by self-

Table 4: Presidential Character Types Active Passive Positive High level and enjoyment of “Compliant, other-directed”, reactionary rather political activity, “productiveness as than action-oriented but agreeable and receptive a value” and “high self-esteem” Aim: Seeking Love Aim: Achieving Results Negative Intense effort and energy put into Orientation toward dutiful service, “in politics political activity but “low emotional because they think they ought to be” reward” Aim: Emphasizing Civic Virtue “Compulsive, ambitious, aggressive” Aim: Getting and Keeping Power Source: Barber 1992 (9-10) B: Components of the Independent Variable I turn now to the question of the nature of the independent variable itself: the individual. In this, I am guided by perhaps the most fundamental tenet of political psychology: that “political structures and actions are shaped and channelled by people‟s personalities… by their individually patterned integration of processes of perception, memory, judgment, goal-seeking, and emotional expression and regulation” (Winter 2003: 110). I reiterate the claim that the study of political leaders

doubts” (80), the evidence for this being that he was not particularly riddled by personal disappointment and despair after receiving what he considered unfair grades in his third-year at the University of Toronto. King’s ambition and enjoyment of political activity stems, in part, from his desire to clear “the blot of rebellion” from his family name, his maternal grandfather being, of course, William Lyon Mackenzie, he of the rebellions of 1837 in Upper Canada (82). Where Scott sees King as a Prime Minister prone to inactivity and delay (to “postpone, postpone, abstain.”), Courtney suggests that King had a sense of balance in which conflict should be avoided, but that this meant that if the natural, harmonious balance that should exist in the world did not, in terms of, say, industrial relations, people were obligated to take action, political leaders foremost among them (85). He also remarks on the Prime Minister’s “boundless energy” and “attentive personality” (94). Rather than remaining on the sidelines, King deliberately and successfully engineered the succession of Louis St. Laurent to the Prime Ministership, another example, argues Courtney, of an active character. Thus, it is argued, Mackenzie King should be seen, using Barber’s framework, as active-positive. In the article immediately succeeding Courtney’s, Esberey provides a rejoinder in arguing that “the classification of Mackenzie King as ‘active-positive’ is not entirely convincing” (1976: 105). Courtney’s examination is in doubt because of both methodological and empirical grounds. At the core, the dispute is simply about the actual character of King. Esberey describes politics for King as “a duty rather than a pleasure” and an “onerous burden” (106), and bemoans the fact that “there is little sign of neurosis in the character of Mackenzie King as outlined by Courtney” (102). In short, Esberey sees a different Mackenzie King than the one envisioned by Courtney. Certainly, this attests to the enormous difficulty of assessing a political leader’s psychological character without intimate knowledge of the person. Even when we have access to autobiographical details, such as is voluminously available in King’s diaries, conflicting portraits can still be drawn. However, though the complexity of a particular political leader can never be completely formalized into a systematic and general framework, both Courtney and Esberey would agree that the individual leader is an essential element in the explication of political processes. From that starting point, we should endeavour to muddle through.

as individuals is not simply the journalist‟s or historian‟s game but is integral to a comprehensive understanding of political outcomes. There is a problem for political psychology, however, in attempting to reduce political leaders to their psychological components, especially those no longer living: the unavailability of the kinds of methods which make up the bulk of psychological research. None of the three cases in this study, John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, and Pierre Trudeau, can be subjected to experiments, asked to take a personality test such as the MMPI or CPI18, or psychoanalysed in person. Thus, researchers have largely relied on techniques which „study leaders at a distance‟, constructing psychological profiles from publicly available sources: memoirs, letters, speeches, interviews, etc. From these sources, various methods of content analysis have been used in order to move from impressionistic evidence to more „quantified‟ data. The studies of Canadian political leaders summarized in Suedfeld et. al (2001), for instance, use various means: speeches to deduce „integrative complexity‟ (see note 20), newspaper articles, songs, and comic strips to get at „motive imagery‟ (11).19 Of course, political psychology is a voluminous and diverse field with a plethora of concepts and theoretical frameworks about one or another, or all, of these elements, many of which would surely be integral to a comprehensive account of the effect of individual psychology on institutions and institutional change. Within the strictures of this thesis, however, only a limited number of possible components of individual mental life are seen as particularly significant to understanding how prime ministers shape the institution they embody. The conclusions I draw in the studies in part III focus on two broad categories of psychological attributes: intentional states, in the form of political beliefs, preferences, orientations towards political reality, and so on, and affective attributes, a term which includes not only what might be called „temperament‟ and emotions, but also interpersonal style, how particular individuals view, interact with, and react to other individuals and the environment. Taken together, these are the greater part of what constitutes the „personality‟ or

18 The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a commonly used test to diagnose aspects of personality (introversion, aggressiveness, etc.), and the California Psychological Inventory, a battery of 480 questions, which provides results on scales such as ‘self-acceptance’, ‘tolerance’, ‘flexibility’, and so on. 19 As the authors explain, ‘motive imagery’ is employed to measure leaders’ orientations in terms of the “seminal motives of power, affiliation, and achievement”, under the assumption that such (unconscious?) motivation is a salient factor in political leadership. Unsurprisingly, the motivation of power was the “dominant image”, achievement coming in second (Suedfeld et al. 2001: 12).

„character‟ of an individual; there may be other aspects which will, alas, be neglected here.20 I would also add that, of necessity, my explication and use of each will not do justice to the literature which has been produced. Intentional States: Political Beliefs and Orientations Intentionality, in general, refers to those aspects of consciousness which are about an object; intentional states are those which have this sense of „directedness‟. So, these are phenomena such as beliefs, desires, goals, preferences, attitudes, etc., in so far as each can be characterized, in specific circumstances, as directed toward an object. For our purposes, the role of beliefs is preeminent. Beliefs are central elements of the intentional activity of persons, and it is almost a truism that “our behavior [sic] in many situations is frequently shaped by what we believe” (Houghton 2009: 106). Beliefs are also a significant part of how we understand and react to the world; we use our beliefs both to “diagnose the political world” and to “choose” and “shift” among possible political actions (Winter 2003: 123). While beliefs are part of personality, it is important to note that the terms are not coextensive; two people may have very similar sets of beliefs but very different personalities in other terms (social personality, for instance). Houghton, for instance, suggests that the two most recently former British prime ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, provide an illustrative contrast, both sharing, and indeed, defining, the „New Labour‟ philosophy but with strikingly

20 One particularly significant component which is, unfortunately, not explored here is the notion of cognitive capacities, referring to the aspects of persons which concern information processing: how we handle the information our perception bombards our brains with. Houghton explicates two classes of theories which attempt to explain what individuals actually do when faced with cognitive complexity. Attribution theory argues that individuals try to uncover causes and create causal stories as ways of understanding the world; the analogy is to “naive scientists” (2009: 118). Schema theory, on the other hand, sees individuals more as categorizers, taking each new piece of information and ‘sorting’ it according to already existing ‘schemas’: “generic collections of knowledge” (121). A related strategy for information processing is ‘analogical reasoning’, in which we take new observations and compare them with similar, or seemingly so, prior observations or background knowledge (126). An especially interesting concept is integrative complexity, which is a catch-all term for the level of complexity of a person’s information processing. So, a prime minister on the simple end would tend to make decisions based on a small number of clear considerations, ignoring subtleties and other points of view, thinking in black-and-white terms, and avoiding ambiguity and uncertainty. A prime minister with high integrative complexity is flexible and can integrate various points of view and divergent sources of information without cognitive ‘stress’ (Winter 2003: 124; Houghton 2009: 102). Ballard (1983) hypothesizes that severe political crises produce a decrease in “integrative complexity” on the part of political leaders. In other words, stressful political situations tend to reduce a political leader’s ability to evince effective cognitive coping strategies and maintain a high level of information-processing complexity in thinking about the issue at hand. As is evident, a further exploration of these aspects in terms of Canadian prime ministers would be fascinating. Lamentably, it became clear during the research and writing of this thesis that the analysis of the cognitive capacities of these particular leaders was not coming together to the author’s satisfaction, and so, had to be aborted.

different affective attributes: Blair outgoing, „political‟, and risk-taking, Brown reserved, bookish, and cautious (2009: 105). Certainly, such contrasts could also be made between, say, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, or between Robert Borden and Arthur Meighen. The method of operational code analysis is one way of „getting at‟ political beliefs in a more or less systematic way. The approach originates in a study of political beliefs among Communist elites in the Soviet Union by Nathan Leites in the early 1950s, in which he identified shared patterns of psychological responses among members of the Politburo; these responses, according to Leites, functioned as a “series of decisionmaking rules” (Walker 1990: 403-404). These observations were restructured and revised by Alexander George (1969) into two fundamental categories of beliefs: those which are „philosophical‟ and those which are „instrumental‟. These are given in Table 5. Table 5: Operational Code Analysis Philosophical Beliefs 1) What is the “essential” nature of political life? Is the political universe essentially one of harmony or conflict? What is the fundamental character of one‟s political opponents? 2) What are the prospects for the eventual realization of one‟s fundamental political values and aspirations? Can one be optimistic, or must one be pessimistic on this score? 3) Is the political future predictable? In what sense and to what extent? 4) How much control or mastery can one have over historical developments? What is one‟s role in moving and shaping history in the desired direction? 5) What is the role of “chance” in human affairs? Instrumental Beliefs 1) What is the best approach for selecting goals or objectives for political action? 2) How are the goals of action pursued most effectively? 3) How are the risks of political action calculated, controlled, and accepted? 4) What is the best “timing” of action to advance one‟s interests? 5) What is the utility and role of different means for advancing one‟s interests? Source: Houghton (2009: 109)

Thus, philosophical beliefs concern the “nature of political life... and the predictability and controllability of political outcomes”: general orientations towards political reality and the place of political actors within it. Interestingly, „answers‟ to these questions will tend to correlate with the dichotomies explicated earlier, between deductive-inductive and context-individual approaches. The second group of questions, instrumental beliefs, are those about how best to pursue goals and calculate the risks and optimal „timing‟ of political actions (Winter 2003: 123; Houghton 2009: 108- 109). This, as well, comes close to the notion of beliefs about what „modes of action‟ are conducive

to political action, and what modes will translate individual interests into institutional and political outcomes best. As Walker (1990) suggests, there are fundamental assumptions and an „inference pattern‟ which underlie this approach to explicating leader psychology (406-407). First, we need to assume that political actors “vary significantly in choice propensities, beliefs, and personality traits”. This is not an unreasonable assumption, and indeed, a belief that actors, and persons in general, differ from each other in salient ways is rather deeply embedded in the psychology of everyday experience. Second, we presuppose that these aspects “structure the decision-maker's range of goals and shape the analysis of alternatives by the decision maker”; they act as heuristic devices ordering an otherwise chaotic political reality. Finally, the approach suggests that actors‟ choices conform to the structure whenever possible, and that the structure “constitute[s] the boundaries of rational behavior”. The last supposition is essential because it posits a link between „internal‟ psychology and external political action. So, the operational code approach assumes that actors can be differentiated in terms of particular psychological aspects, that the perspective or approach which actors „bring‟ into the political arena are defined and delimited by their individual aspects, and that rational actors will make concrete choices from within this framework. Both kinds of beliefs are integral elements of the causal story relating individuals and institutional change. While there are a multitude of ways one could potentially „get at‟ the beliefs of leaders, this method of analysis frequently uses public communications of leaders, and, less often, memoirs and other more personal sources. The analysis in Part III is roughly in the operational code framework, though the „questions‟ are not answered directly for each case. A lack of resources does not, unfortunately, permit the sort of quantitative content analysis which is usually employed. Instead, the analysis relies on qualitative accounts to construct pictures of the leaders‟ general world views and political beliefs. Personality: Affective Attributes and Interpersonal Style Investigating the beliefs of leaders tells us something about the way they see the world. A second important aspect of individual psychology is personality: the study of which “attempts to describe, predict and explain those recurrent behaviours that set an individual apart from some or all other” persons (Asendorpf 2009: 43). There are many variant perspectives on the concept, each with its own language and causal story. Cloninger (2009) provides a comprehensive list, among them biological theories, including evolutionary explanations, theories of learning, most associated with B.F. Skinner and behaviourism, and psychodynamic, the analysis of interactions between different

parts of the „psyche‟ (4). Here, I employ the „traits‟ framework, which is, if somewhat traditional, still of use. Major concepts of this framework include but are not limited to “type, factors, neuroticism/emotional stability, [and] extraversion” (ibid). The personality trait perspective focuses on “enduring dispositions” which “describe what people are like” (Caprara and Vecchione 2009: 593). In this study, the empirical explication is limited to two particular aspects of the personality trait framework: emotions or affect and interpersonal style. The study of affective attributes is the study of personality traits which concern emotion. Although the concept cannot be captured in a single definition, it seems, at least, intuitively evident that, as Reisenzein and Weber suggest, it encompasses the “transitory states of persons denoted by ordinary language words such as „happiness‟, „sadness‟”, and so on (2009: 55). To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it, even if it cannot be precisely defined. Houghton, for one, distinguishes between „object-specific‟ and „diffuse‟ affects, the first being reactions to more specific things, the second general, less transient emotions which we might call temperament or moods (2009: 133). As in everyday life, politics is experienced as much through emotion as through reason, if not more so. We do not need to have a formal or sophisticated theory of emotions, or a normative view on the place of emotion vis-a-vis reason, to recognize the influence of affective dispositions on political behaviour. Recall Barber‟s positive-negative dimension: essentially, this is a measure of how political leaders feel about what they do, the position they hold, and so on. The affective attributes of political leaders are particularly crucial to an understanding of political outcomes because they affect how and how successfully leaders govern. The concept of „emotional intelligence‟, for instance, is central to Greenstein‟s analysis of leadership style in the American presidency. He defines it as “the president‟s ability to manage his emotions and turn them to constructive purposes, rather than being dominated by them and allowing them to dimniish his leadership” (2004: 6). Greenstein sees Harry Truman, for one, as having high emotional intelligence, describing him in terms of courage, decisiveness, self-restraint, being judicious and measured, and having self-discipline (41). Bill Clinton, by contrast, was “emotionally challenged”, a “politically talented underachiever... whose psychic shortcomings were debilitating” (188). Thus, emotional intelligence requires the capacity to regulate emotions and use effective coping strategies (Reisenzein and Weber 2009: 64); political leaders need to be able to calibrate their emotions to fit circumstances. Affect conditions the way leaders react to situational phenomena. The way in which a leader handles stress, for example, has been studied by Robins and Dorn (1993). They categorize leaders

under three ideal types, summarized in table 6: the sturdy warrior, the battle-hungry warrior, and the frail warrior (6), with subcategories. The underlying premise is that potentially stressful situations are a natural part of the political world. What matters to political outcomes is the way in which leaders react to potential stressors. Thus, sturdy warriors are those who “cope with and neutralize potential stressors well”; battle-hungry leaders are “driven to demonstrate their prowess in stressful situations, but who find it a joyless pursuit”; and frail warriors are those who are simply unable, or barely manage, to cope with potentially stressful situations (6). Plainly, there are echoes of Barber‟s active- passive and positive-negative dimensions of presidential character, as discussed above: sturdy leaders are likely to be more active-positive, battle-hungry leaders active-negative, and frail leaders passive- negative, although the last congruity is the most tenuous. Table 6: Stress and Political Leadership Leader Type Description Examples Subtypes Sturdy Warrior Hardy or even happy in the face of the Harry Truman Well-tempered sort of threats and challenges that Franklin D. Roosevelt Happy politics typically produces. Charles de Gaulle Creatively Flawed Battle-Hungry Psychologically driven in a patterned Richard Nixon Warrior manner to seek and even provoke Winston Churchill political threats and challenges. Frail Warrior Weak in the face of the sort of threats Warren Harding Circumstantial and challenges that politics typically Enticed produces. Ephemeral Source: Adapted from Robins and Dorn 1993 (5) Psychologists have generally come to agree on a so-called „Big Five‟ as the basic dimensions of personality, constituting the „Five-Factor Model‟: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness (Cottam et al. 2009: 19). The first two are particularly important in this context. Watson (2000) posits neuroticism in opposition to extroversion, and shows correlations between the former and negative affect and the latter with positive affect (183). He then breaks down the concepts into component personality traits: neuroticism is associated with, among others, depression, self-consciousness, oversensitivity, and stess overreactivity (coping poorly with stress). Extroversion, on the other hand, is described in terms of gregariousness, energy, excitement seeking, and dominance of social situations (192). These measures, then, are often taken to constitute particular leader types. In Rubenzer et al. (2002), for instance, presidents fall into one of eight types: dominators, introverts, actors, good guys, innocents, philosophes, maintainers, and extroverts (114).

Introverts are highly neurotic and conscientious, but score very low on extroversion (seemingly obviously); extroverts score highly on extroversion but particularly low in agreeableness, which suggests they tend to be antagonistic, distrustful, and unsympathetic towards others. Interpersonal styles have also been correlated with political types in general. For instance, Kirkpatrick‟s typology associates particular interpersonal styles with different political types: „leaders‟ are seen as having an eclectic style, „personalizers‟ ingratiation, „moralizers‟ seeking ideological affirmation, and „problem- solvers‟ engaging in purposive socializing (in Elms 1976: 81). Since institutions such as the Canadian prime ministership are embodied institutions, it only stands to reason that the affective and interpersonal styles of leaders will have some relation to the institutional patterns created by particular leaders. Politics and political leadership are symbolic and affective processes; it would be imprudent, therefore, to divide political actors into the rational and emotional and ignore the latter. Political leaders should not be treated simply as living sets of policy positions.

Part III: Creating and Recreating the Prime Ministership of Canada

3.1: Introduction The model here emphasizes the effects of psychological persons on the shape of a particular institution, the Canadian prime ministership. Part III, then, illustrates this relationship in the study of particular cases and also finds that a general periodicity is evident in the history of the prime ministerial institution. In essence, the argument is that both individual difference and historical continuity are observable in the evolution of the prime ministership: „landmark‟ or „critical‟ figures create or amplify institutional norms which, then, are followed by a process in which institutional norms are largely adhered to and reproduced. The „landmark‟ figures, I suggest, are the first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, the longest-serving prime minister, and Pierre Trudeau, arguably the most charismatic and controversial of Canadian political figures: all three among the most significant leaders in Canadian political history. My aim is not to hypothesize and test a particular relationship between a kind of leader or set of personality traits and institutional form. It is, rather, to argue for the significance of particular leaders in the development of the prime ministerial institution, given that that development has occurred. As I have noted earlier, I also claim that this relationship between person and institution is inherently evident in every case in which there is sufficient opportunity. That is, this relationship

holds, to varying degrees, for every prime minister of note; the selected cases are only those which I believe to be the most informative and useful. I suggest this claim is consistent with the general analytical assumptions of this sort of investigation, notably Greenstein‟s work on the American presidency, from which I have drawn inspiration. As I argued earlier, there are, of course, other factors causally related to institutional change. These other factors may have more or less salience, but what is constant is the fact of the embodied institution, and this is precisely the concern here. The following sections, then, explicate the prime ministerships of John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, and Pierre Trudeau. Because of both space and analytical considerations, the discussion is not a complete account of either their tenures as prime minister or the leaders as persons themselves. I do not indulge in biographical or historical details except where it is relevant, although each section begins with introductory remarks. Instead, I focus on the psychological components discussed in section 2.3: affective and interpersonal attributes and political beliefs, and how these shape, in each case, the conduct of the prime ministerial institution. 3.2: John A. Macdonald: Creating the Prime Ministership From the beginning, the prime ministership of Canada was a peculiar office. The earlier discussion in part II should suggest that the prime ministerial institution at Confederation in 1867 could be characterized as both a blank slate and a highly regularized and familiar one. Of course, the prime ministership of the Dominion of Canada had its immediate predecessor in the prime ministership of the province of Canada, an office John A. Macdonald had held, in tandem with a French-Canadian „co-premier‟, since 1857.21 Both derived their content from the British example. In this way, the prime ministership of Canada was merely a continuation of the preceding office. The continuity of the institution was made all the more evident when Macdonald was chosen prior to Confederation by the Governor-General, Lord Monck, as the only Canadian leader able to command the confidence of the new parliament of Canada, which had yet to exist (Creighton 1998: 470). Thus, Macdonald‟s „indispensibility‟ as a political leader was evident from the outset; in his formal correspondence with the designated prime minister, the Governor-General confides that the choice was principally grounded in the unanimous vote for Macdonald as chair of the London Conference in 1866 (Pope 1921: 46). At the same time, the role of the prime minister after Confederation was both qualitatively and quantitatively different in scope and purpose than its predecessor. Now added to the great and

21 Except for a short time in opposition, between 1862 and 1864.

precarious balancing act were the Maritime Provinces and the great unconquered West, and the presence of the „elephant‟ to the South became all the more acute. The prime minister of Canada was no longer a co-premier, though, of course, the „French lieutenant‟ role remained. Instead, as Lord Monck presciently suggested, “the system of dual First Ministers” would be abolished “with a view to the complete consolidation of the Union” (46). In order to make a success of the Canadian experiment, the prime ministership of Canada could not be a mere continuation but, rather, “built of native materials without any precedent or plan” (Hutchison 1964: 7). Indeed, the constitution of the nation created by the British North America Act did not mention the prime ministerial institution, and as Marc Lalonde notes, “[a] strictly constitutional description of the office of prime minister would reveal that it has changed little during the past century in Canada”. Instead, he continues, the institution has been defined by the “„pith and substance‟ of [the] office arising out of the exercise of political power” (1971: 510). Macdonald was the first to occupy the office and thus embody the institution, and in so doing, “set the genetic code for the role of prime minister of Canada” (Bliss 2004: 29). As we will see, the first prime minister was not one for abstract conceptualizations, and the institution he shaped and left to his successors was not the product of Trudeauesque „rational planning‟ but, to echo Lalonde, of concrete political decisions and actions. In speaking of Macdonald‟s role in creating the prime ministerial institution, Donaldson writes, tellingly, thus: “It is said of the modern American presidency that the office expands and ennobles the man. Often it does. Sir John A.‟s duty was to expand and ennoble the office of Prime Minister” (1994: 17). The argument in the following discussion, then, affirms Bliss‟ contention that Macdonald founded a “distinctively Canadian version of monarchical parliamentary politics” (2004: 29). It was „monarchical‟ because it was based on elite governance patterns and symbolism. Like most historical monarchs, the prime ministership Macdonald created was internally simple, elite-centred, and carried considerable symbolic affect. Unlike many contemporary monarchs who are figureheads, Macdonald‟s prime ministerial institution was not insulated from other governance institutions, but highly integral and integrated into other governmental and institutional structures. Macdonald’s political beliefs John A. Macdonald was not a radical, or even a liberal. He had, in Creighton‟s words, “the conservative‟s feeling for historical continuity, for the stages in the process of national growth” (1998: 467). This was not merely political ideology or expediency but deeply rooted in his character: he was “conservative by temperament, seldom venturesome, seldom precipitate” (MacDermot 233:

248). In the mid-nineteenth century, this was the major division between those considered Conservatives or „Tories‟ and those considered Liberals or „Grits‟: attitudes towards tradition and change. The „High Toryism‟ of, say, the Orange Order, of which Macdonald was a member, “stood for ecclesiastical privilege for the Church of England-which was, after all, "the Tory Party at prayer"- and its adherents, and the maintenance of the restrictive prerogatives of the traditional landed and commercial elites” (Preece 1984: 464). When William Lyon Mackenzie, grandfather to Mackenzie King, and the Rebels began their campaign in 1837, Macdonald took up arms to defend Kingston, though never actually fighting, or even coming close (Creighton 1998: 46-48). Macdonald was undoubtedly conservative. Preece argues against MacDermot‟s conclusion that Macdonald was a pragmatist and “a man of no ideas”. “To think of Macdonald as a merely practical man is not only to ignore the evidence”, he writes, “it is also to create a false dichotomy between theory and practice” (1984: 460). He concludes that “Macdonald [was] the statesman embodiment of the principles of Burkean philosophy”: anti-rationalism which privileges loyalty and duty, the importance of tradition and the rule of law, order above liberty, constitutional monarchy and British institutions (486). His beliefs about political or societal change are eminently conservative. To Macdonald, “the word „reform‟ was largely devoid of positive significance”; change for the sake of change was improper and foolish (Waite 1968: 53). He had the conservative‟s scepticism of the ability of political institutions and legislation to be the “panacea” for societal ills, and he believed, rather, that societal change only came with the “efficacy of time” (Preece 1984: 470; Waite 1968: 53). This view has much to do with his view of human nature, which, again, hues closely to the conservative tradition. Macdonald was not a believer in the „perfectibility‟ of human beings, often associated with the liberal and progressive movements in his time and after. People did not change fundamentally, and they were not Kantian rationalists and could not be „reasoned with‟ in any significant sense; instead, they were sentimental and emotional, motivated by feelings such as greed, friendship, and love (Waite 1968: 61). So, Macdonald “took men as they were”; to his critics, such a „low‟ view of human nature led inexorably to his manipulating the baser instincts, of using the “vulnerabilities of human nature that were the most conducive to political success” (54). Macdonald, however, was too much of a politician to put abstract principles above maintaining political power and the status quo. He knew that preservation of the stability of the existing order could require moderation and compromise. As MacDermot suggests, Macdonald was “intellectually well rooted in the past” but pragmatic enough to remain in harmony with a changing nation (1933: 249-250). So, for instance, he was a latecomer to the project or idea of Confederation;

he was “temperamentally too conservative to be a constitutional activist” and preferred to act only when actual harm resulting from existing structures was evident (Bliss 2004: 12). However, once the direction of momentum was clear, he enthusiastically supported the idea, becoming the preeminent actor. Indeed, as Preece points out, the foundations of the Liberal-Conservative coalition which Macdonald led were general principles of moderation, balance, prudence and order, and not either radicalism or High Toryism. Instead, “the centre of the stage belonged to the trimmers” (Preece 1984: 465). Preece elaborates on the „trimmer‟ notion as follows: It is thus that the philosophy of the trimmer - and Macdonald was, indeed, a trimmer-became the founding philosophy of Canada. It is thus that "efficiency, harmony and permanency in the working of the Union"" were preferable to the abstract principles of the Enlightenment and its rationalist utilitarian successors. The practical question for the founders of the Canadian constitution - and theoretical questions were best understood when posed as practical questions - what constitutional arrangements, what principles of government organization would best guarantee "peace, welfare and good government." (1984: 463) A second component of Macdonald‟s conservatism was his belief in elitism, in the notion that elites should govern on behalf of the people and with limited direct public participation. Representatives were elected to represent the people, and so they should. Of public opinion, Macdonald stated that “[i]f a statesman should follow public opinion… he should follow it only in the way a coachman follows his horses, guiding and directing with a firm hand” (Waite 1968: 55). Thus, he was not insensitive to public opinion, but believed that it was the duty of leadership to shape and direct it, not simply react or govern based on transient public moods.22 Political leadership was not, as it would become, primarily a matter of mass communication and public appeal, but manoeuvring within the much more proximate political arena: the cabinet and the legislature. Much of Macdonald‟s political belief system stems from his affection for British institutions and values as against American practices. MacDermot suggests that “Macdonald‟s Canadianism was hardly less strong than his attachment to Britain” (1933: 253). He had both philosophical and practical aversions to the style of democracy engrained in American tradition, and considered it something akin to mob rule, leading inexorably to the American Civil War. To Macdonald, the “monarchical principle” was what would both unite and strengthen Canada and maintain ties with

22 Of course, the methods of gathering and reporting public opinion were much more primitive in Macdonald’s time, and so the pressures and opportunities to ‘govern by polls’ were significantly fewer.

the mother country. This belief he retained to the end; in 1889, writing to Lord Knutsford, Secretary of State for the Colonies, he proclaimed that: The monarchical idea should be fostered in the colonies, accompanied by some gradation of classes. At present, with few exceptions, Canadians are all on one democratic level, as in the neighbouring Republic, and this fact, among others, is appealed to by the annexationists in Canada, as proving that our national sympathies are with the Americans, or should be so.” (Pope 1921: 449-450) Macdonald‟s belief in the „monarchical principle‟ as against „democracy‟ is a recurring feature of his political leadership. Prior to Confederation he had argued that a referendum or plebiscite was not only unnecessary but “anti-British”; he thought it “obviously absurd to submit the complicated details of such a measure to the people” (Pope 1921: 21). To the legislature of the province of Canada, he opined that “[i]f we do not represent the people of Canada, we have no right to be here. But if we do represent them, we have a right to see for them, to think for them, to act for them” (Bliss 2004: 11). Further, he believed not only in strict representation but in the special status of property. Macdonald was not a social egalitarian, and he did, not, for instance, believe that there was an “inalienable right in any man to exercise the franchise” (MacDermot 1933: 251). Political power, then, was not only the due reserve of elected representatives but should especially be vested in those who had a „stake in society‟. He argued at the Quebec Conference in 1864 that the Senate was a necessary and useful body because it would protect minority rights; “the rich”, he said, “are always fewer in number than the poor” (Bliss 2004: 11). Macdonald‟s elitism was also evident in his government‟s economic policy. In line with traditional Toryism (and unlike modern-day conservatism), Macdonald was paternalistic in his sensibilities. He believed government‟s role was to ensure the appropriate conditions for prosperity; it was “a lever for the upward mobility of those with the right connections and attitudes” (Bliss 2004: 17). The National Policy was not a deliberate and systematic ideological effort, but the product of practical and political considerations and calculations. Nevertheless, underlying the National Policy was the conservative notion that government, and the elites who controlled it, knew what was best for individuals and thus should have a significant, even central, role in directing and supporting national economies. The high tariffs on imports, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting Canadian industry, was, as Bliss notes, a paradigmatic example of “state paternalism” (Bliss 2004: 18). Its economic effects are contentious and mixed, but the political effects are clear. Macdonald, with his famous “A British subject I was born – a British subject I will die” refrain and open accusations of

Liberal treason, defeated Wilfrid Laurier in the first great Canadian „free trade‟ election in 1891; Laurier defeated Charles Tupper in 1896 partly on the basis of promising to continue the Macdonald policies. Macdonald, then, was not for change for change‟s sake, and he had generally conservative beliefs but he was also, Plamondon argues, “a man of vision and progress, not details and ideology”; he was “[a] moderate, more interested in accomplishment than in debate” (2009: 25). If something could be done which would increase the prosperity of the nation without altering established rights and social structures, it should be done. The first prime minister was not an orator, an intellectual, or a prophet; he was simply a politician, dedicated to “work[ing] the new machine… with as little friction as possible” (MacDermot 1933: 254). Like Mackenzie King after him, Macdonald was sometimes accused of procrastination and excessive caution. As earlier, he believed that acting hastily was, more often than not, an imprudent decision: it unduly constrained future political capacities. Time itself would often be efficacious in resolving difficulties, if gradually. In the halcyon days of the spoils system of patronage and an amateur civil service, one of the essential activities of the Canadian prime minister was nation-building in the form of party-building. At this, Macdonald was unmatched; he was “the Prince of Canada”, bestowing gifts and favours among political supporters (Bliss 2004: 19). He had less sympathy for ridings which were not held by Conservatives; he wrote that “We have been always in the habit of consulting our leading friends in those constituencies which are so unfortunate as to be represented by Grits, but that is merely a custom, and is in no way obligatory upon us. The contrary doctrine is democratic, and must be repudiated by all Conservatives” (Pope 1921: 272). Echoing Mackenzie King‟s „five-cent piece‟ remark, Macdonald told Toronto Tories that “[a]s soon as Toronto returns Conservative members it will get Conservative appointments” (Bliss 2004: 5). To Macdonald, party loyalty was “sacred”, and though he was a pragmatic and broad-minded leader, he also could be highly partisan. Such partisanship is a reflection of the fact that, as MacDermot suggests, “power and party were becoming synonymous in John A. Macdonald‟s mind with the very existence of the dominion” (1933: 260). As leader of the Conservatives in Canada West pre-Confederation, Macdonald is said to have been the party‟s “chief strategist, fund-raiser, and campaign organizer” (Johnson and Waite 2007: 7); he continued this highly personal involvement in the party as prime minister of Canada, all the more so when his great French lieutenant, George-Etienne Cartier, died in 1873. Macdonald saw the role of the prime minister as much in terms of leading a political party as leading a nation; the two went hand in hand.

Macdonald‟s political beliefs are also reflected in his attitudes towards federalism and national unity. Pre-Confederation, for example, he was against the representation by population scheme advocated by George Brown, the Liberal, because it would have given Upper Canada increased power at the expense of Lower Canada. Macdonald insisted on unity: national unity, party unity. His conception of Confederation, indeed, was that of a powerful central government with provincial governments essentially acting like local governments: “the building of a kingdom in everything but name” (MacDermot 1933: 257). In a letter concerning the Franchise Bill, the intent of which was to create a uniform franchise rather than allow provinces to maintain their own elector lists, Macdonald states that “the General Government… should pay no more regard to the status or position of the Local Governments [provincial] than they would to the prospects of the ruling party in the corporation of Quebec or Montreal”, going on to assert that “it is impossible, of course, that the elective franchise should be at the mercy of a foreign body” (Pope 1921: 75, emphasis added). He expected that the „local governments‟ would wither away, but a series of constitutional interpretations by the Imperial Privy Council gradually extended or defined powers to the provinces; by the beginning of the 20th century, the power of disallowance had fallen into disuse and “provincial autonomy” was “something of a sacred cow” (Bliss 2004: 23). Macdonald aspired to be a national leader, and believed the fledgling nation needed the prestige of a national political leadership. While he lived, he was as close as Canadians ever got to a „national myth‟. Macdonald: Affective and Interpersonal Aspects Macdonald was a master of a kind of politics appropriate to the times: a glad-handing, backslapping, personal politics where much business was conducted and concluded not in sterile and well-panelled offices or over the airwaves but in rowdy taverns and the proverbial „smoke-filled‟ backrooms. In Donaldson‟s words, he “carried a gay, disreputable air about him, a breath of smoky back rooms and a sniff of whiskey” (1994: 3). Unlike both King and Trudeau, Macdonald was a gregarious and extroverted leader, who could, while being hated for his policies, attract the admiration of opponents. A contemporary who was an ideological opponent and a Liberal nevertheless describes Macdonald as having “a mysterious quality of personal magnetism” and expresses appreciation for his “cheerful audacity” and “strong and picturesque personality” (Smith and McLeod 1989: 62, 64). Bliss relates the story of a Liberal MP, David Thompson, who had, due to illness, missed nearly the entire parliamentary session. The anecdote is worth quoting in full: The first man I met on coming back was Blake [Edward Blake, Liberal Party leader]. He passed me with a simple nod. The next man I met was Cartwright [former minister of Finance under Mackenzie], and his greeting

was about as cold as that of Blake. Hardly had I passed these men when I met Sir John. He didn‟t pass me by, but grasped me by the hand, gave me a slap on the shoulder, and said, “Davy, old man, I‟m glad to see you back. I hope you‟ll soon be yourself again and live many a day to vote against me – as you have always done!” Now… I never gave the old man a vote in my life, but hang me if it doesn‟t go against my grain to follow the men who haven‟t a word of greeting for me, and oppose a man with a heart like Sir John‟s. (Bliss 2004: 25) Though Macdonald was serious about governing and had an “all-consuming passion for politics”, he was not neurotic about political life nor resentful or bitter; nor did he take himself too seriously.23 Waite describes Macdonald in the House of Commons as having a “nonchalance of manner” (1968: 65), and his speeches in the House of Commons were not philosophical treatises with elaborate arguments or policy details but jocular sessions of banter, often humorous, sometimes sarcastic, meant to enthuse his own side; he is even described as often “turn[ing] his back upon the Liberals and address[ing] himself directly” to his bench (Smith and McLeod 1989: 63). Surprisingly, perhaps, for a politician, Macdonald did not nurse resentments or carry grudges, as a rule. He wrote in 1885 that “there is no room in politics for personal resentments”, and MacDermot suggests that his relations with adversaries and colleagues such as George Brown, A.T. Galt, and Cartier attest to this (1933: 255). This sense of equanimity is, perhaps, related to his views of human nature, discussed earlier. He „took men as they were‟, and he was not surprised, nor particularly angry or frustrated, when others acted in disappointing or offensive ways. Relatedly, we can characterize his response to the stresses of political life as that of a „sturdy warrior‟ in the sense given in Table 4, earlier; Agnes, his second wife, describes him thus: “He can throw off the weight of business in a wonderfully short time. He has a good heart and amiable temper which are the great secrets of success” (Creighton 1998: 2). This is a particularly interesting aspect of Macdonald‟s personality because other accounts reveal a disjunction, at times, between the public and private affective and social personalities. As Patricia Phenix‟s book Private Demons makes clear, Macdonald‟s private life is filled with almost unbelievable tragedy, moreso than any other Canadian prime minister. When he was seven, his brother, James, two years younger, was murdered by a drunken babysitter. His father, Hugh Macdonald, died in 1841 when John A. was twenty-six; this had, according to Phenix, severe effects

23 This latter trait is illustrated in the famous story about Macdonald in 1871 during trade negotiations in Washington. See Smith and McLeod (1989: 94).

on the son‟s health (2006: 49). Macdonald‟s own first son, his namesake, died in September 1848, barely a year old. Almost exactly a month after Macdonald became prime minister of the province of Canada in late November 1857, his first wife, Isabella, died, after spending most of the thirteen-year marriage “confined to bed in an opium-induced haze” (viii). As a result, Macdonald was, despite his public personality, privately melancholic, prone to depression so acute it left him bed-ridden for days; despite his public charisma and sociability, he took measures to avoid visitors at his home (4). Though he and Agnes entertained occasionally in his Ottawa home, he preferred spending evenings alone, when he would play “innumerable games of patience” (solitaire) (Creighton 1998: 9). The public-private distinction is also suggested in Phenix‟s characterization of Macdonald at the Quebec Conference in 1864, at which the public leader was the “consummate conciliator and conference leader”, while in private he seemed to “buckle under the strain”, drinking heavily (166), and in her comment that though he tried to be “imperturbable and jocund in all things” in public, he worried, after Isabella‟s death, that he would be alone for the rest of his life (148). His public persona, the interpersonal style and affective qualities he exhibited in the public sphere, were genuine manifestations of his personality but also, perhaps, a necessary coping mechanism: as Donaldson suggests, “[h]e needed earthy politics as an antidote to the loneliness of leadership and the torments of his tragic private life” (1994: 3). Macdonald also can be credited with having high emotional and political intelligence (Bliss 2004: 25). His inherent psychological tendencies, in terms of extroversion and positive affect, served him well in the political arena. He was able to navigate the turbulent waters of political leadership by his “inclusive and amicable approach” (Plamondon 2009: 26), and he displayed what MacDermot calls a “breadth of… view” and an “almost inexhaustible tolerance” towards others (1933: 255). Macdonald was a genuine „liker of people‟, as it were, despite, or perhaps because, he did not expect too much (Waite 1968: 65). In this vein, he writes to advise Sir George Stephen, President of the Canadian Pacific Railway, not to be “disgusted at the ingratitude of the Manitobans. I have been long enough in public life to know how little of that commodity there exists in this world” (Pope 1921: 419). Macdonald, in Hutchison‟s words, “had no illusions about himself or any human being” and therefore could “laugh at his own follies” (1964: 9). What comes through is that Macdonald had, in MacDermot‟s words, an “unfailing touch with the most practical component in politics – the individual. This was supported, of course, by a remarkable memory, a wide humanity, and a democratic sense of humour. But he raised the personal touch in politics to the level of a science” (1933: 258). It is, in part, because of these psychological

attributes, his political intelligence, and his ability to manage and manipulate people, that Macdonald was able to control and shape, in as much as possible, the institutional context surrounding him. As Matheson notes with regard to cabinet, “his personality was such that in difficult times he could impose his will on his colleagues while still retaining their support” (1976: 136). He was able to form strong and lasting affective bonds with other political actors and the Canadian public, and became, in Hutchison‟s words, “a personal institution” (1964: 3). Creighton remarks on the affective ties between Macdonald and the Canadian people: They could scarcely remember a past without him. They could hardly conceive of a future in which he would cease to be… John A. was politically indestructible. He was the monarch who had become so necessary that he would surely live for ever. (1998: 400)

Macdonald and the Prime Ministership In section 1.1, I suggested four dimensions by which to measure institutional change: internal complexity, „boundedness‟, the level of discourse/scale of governance, and symbolic representation. In Figure 4, I place Macdonald‟s prime ministership on each of these indicators. Figure 4: The Prime Ministerial Institution under Macdonald

Clearly, some of these are more related to individual, idiosyncratic features of political leaders than others. In terms of internal complexity, for instance, the prime ministership as created by Macdonald was extremely simple; it did not need to be more complex than it was. Although, as discussed earlier, prime ministers of Canada have always had great leeway in arranging and rearranging the machinery of government, Macdonald and his successors in the first prime

ministerial era did not need much machinery to begin with. In terms of personal staff, they were able to handle the nation‟s business with only a small office, primarily composed of secretaries. Alexander Mackenzie, in fact, answered all correspondence personally when he first became prime minister in 1873, complaining that “As letters come in bushels I have to answer them as fast I can drive the pen” (Punnett 1977: 75). The sources of policy advice, such as they were, were external: cabinet, party stalwarts, business elites. Simply put, the non-complexity of the Canadian prime ministership during Macdonald‟s tenure was primarily a function of the limited role of government in society. As noted in section 1.3, the prime ministerial role which Macdonald and his successors filled was quantitatively distinct from that in later periods. The nation was smaller in population and in territorial extent, more homogenous, more potential than actual; the centre of government, and government in general, were “easily understood and highly accessible” because they required little technical knowledge or specific expertise (Savoie 1999: 21). Even if, as MacDermot suggests, Confederation “suddenly and greatly magnified” the problems Canadian prime ministers would face, it was in the political rather than technical that complexities multiplied (1933: 247). Macdonald and the prime ministers who followed him did not need to create an institution which was internally complex. This speaks more to contextual factors than individual ones. Earlier, I suggested that the „boundedness‟ of an institution and its internal complexity are usually related, especially when institutional dynamics are of interest: the two measures tend to be positively correlated. This is the case here, as we will see; as the internal complexity of the prime ministership increases, the institution becomes more well-bounded. In its origins, though, the Canadian prime ministership was neither wholly undifferentiated nor completely bounded. As indicated in Figure 4, it occupies the mid-range of the scale.24 Certainly, it is the case that the Canadian prime ministership under Macdonald was already a significant office, in part due to Macdonald‟s own reputation, manner, and the fact that he had been prime minister in the pre- Confederation era. During his tenure, Macdonald was relatively autonomous of other governance institutions; not only did he command the cabinet, but he was clearly differentiated from his colleagues by his personal qualities and „indispensibility‟. After his death, the Montreal Star observed that “it did not much matter who was in the cabinet”, as long as Macdonald was in charge (Johnson

24 Obviously, these are not exact measures but general depictions of the institution at a particular time. The more important indication of institutional change is the change over time on each dimension, as illustrated, e.g., in Figure 7, pg. 94.

and Waite 2007: 49); the notion of primus inter pares is belied from the start. A centralist, Macdonald intended for Confederation to create a strong central government with a strong executive, one which could lead without being hindered by provincial governments and which had clear authority over national affairs. His anti-American sentiments and attachment to British tradition have much to do with his insisting on a primary role for the Canadian prime minister; the two fundamental deficiencies of the American system, which had led to the Civil War, were the democratization of the ballot and a weak executive. Of course, things did not develop in quite the manner he had intended. At the same time, Macdonald‟s prime ministership was not particularly „insulated‟ from other governance institutions, particularly the Conservative party. This was in large part due to Macdonald‟s own sense of party preference and predilection for patronage. Macdonald‟s politics were intimately tied to his political party. This allowed him to build the nation as he built his party, and created an identification between the two which served him well. Macdonald, as Johnson and Waite point out, “maintained a strong personal hold over office-giving while in power and he used offices, or the promise of office, in a deliberate attempt to strengthen the party at the local level” (2007: 9). This meant that Macdonald could not extricate himself from, and indeed, was personally involved in, the more „earthy‟ side of politics, most notably in the CPR scandal which forced him out of office in 1873. As well, Macdonald‟s personality lent itself to a personal kind of politics of direct, face-to-face political negotiation, rather than the sort of impersonal, „at-a-distance and through subordinates‟ style of leadership which commonly marks a well-bounded institution. Thus, there are two somewhat opposed aspects of Macdonald‟s prime ministership in terms of „boundedness‟: a clear differentiation of roles between the prime minister and other governance institutions is accompanied by a strong attachment to party and a personal political style which reduces the „insulated‟ component. Thus, the prime ministerial institution created by Macdonald falls somewhere in the middle of the „boundedness‟ scale. Macdonald‟s political beliefs were oriented towards elitism and centralization. It is evident, then, that on the „level of discourse/scale of governance‟ measure, his prime ministership is characterized by elite-centered politics. Macdonald did not believe, as noted earlier, that the „people‟ in general had any right to participate in government nor to vote, and he held conservative views about the state‟s „paternal‟ role in society and the economy. He was no leader of a mass movement, but the preeminent actor in an enclosed and tightly-knit arena of business and political elites, whose job it was to govern on behalf of the people. His political action was carried out through elite

instruments: the cabinet, the legislature, etc., rather than by public appeal. The level of discourse, in other words, was inter-institutional rather than extra-institutional. Though I suggest this is causally related to both his political beliefs and his interpersonal style, it is also clear that there is a significant element of context here as well, particularly in terms of public expectations of leaders. As Lalonde notes, “[c]hanges in the nature of the body politic have had a profound effect upon relations between the public and the executive and between the public and the prime minister” (1971: 517). The modern prime ministership is expected to be „plugged in‟, so to speak, to the public, to be available, to be both „seen‟ and „heard‟. This is manifested in communications and in summer bus tours, in town hall meetings and on television, radio, and the internet. Public expectations of their leaders have, in general, been motivated by a desire for greater transparency and accountability, a sort of „bottom-up‟ perspective, rather than the „top-down‟ mode which characterizes Macdonald‟s prime ministership. Of course, infinitely more sophisticated communications and transportation technology have also contributed to this shift in public expectations. Finally, the symbolic representation of Macdonald‟s prime ministership, and which continued, especially in the form of Wilfrid Laurier, comes as close to the „national myth‟ ideal that Canadian politics will ever likely see (perhaps René Lévesque comes close). To his followers, he was, as in the Creighton quotation above, a “monarch who would surely live for ever”. Bliss remarks that, though some prime ministers “were more successful than Macdonald, some were more respected” ,“[n]one was more loved” (2004: 29). Political adversaries, fiercely opposed to Macdonald‟s policies, nonetheless held “grudging admiration” for him, and his own followers “loved the Old Man and at his death they mourned for him as if he had been taken from their very bedsides” (Johnson and Waite 2000). During the final years of his prime ministership, many Canadians voted for „Old Tomorrow‟ just because he was John A. Macdonald, the „father of his country‟ and the only prime minister they had ever really known (Creighton 1998: 400).25 The „mythic‟ symbolic representation is directly related to Macdonald‟s beliefs and affective attributes as expressed in his political behaviour. In his elite-centered views and national aspirations, he offered himself as the national leader: the leader in whose hands the Canadian public‟s trust was reposed, and who was the living embodiment of the unity of the country. Macdonald was the

25 Alexander Mackenzie, of course, was Canada’s prime minister from late 1873 to 1878, but he never established the rapport with Canadians that Macdonald did.

nation-builder: he had cobbled together Confederation and had expanded the country from east to west. Whether economically successful or not, the National Policy‟s program of protective tariffs was a reflection of the progress of a burgeoning nation. At the same time, Macdonald was not an aloof or insensitive leader, but one who was deeply engaged in the everyday machinations of politics, who enjoyed and understood people, and who was sympathetic. His brand of politics was personal, and though he believed in elite governance, connected with the common people instinctively. He himself famously noted that the Canadian people preferred him drunk to George Brown, leader of the Liberal party, sober; this was no mere rhetorical flourish but a recognition of his indispensible and inimitable role in Canadian politics. In sum, Macdonald was able, by his personality and his conduct in the prime ministerial office, to fulfill his duty to “expand and ennoble the office of Prime Minister” (Donaldson 1994: 17). 3.3: Mackenzie King: Spiritual and Political Perfectibility In his account of Canadian politics in the 1930s, H. Blair Neatby describes Mackenzie King as “one of the best known and least liked of all our prime ministers” (1972: 73). This description of King has, as historical distance grows, become increasingly mistaken. King is not now well-known, and when known, it is likely only for the „bizarre‟ details of his „Very Double Life‟, and not for his political leadership.26 He is not now the „least liked‟ of prime ministers, partially because of this historical amnesia and partially as a result of his personality and leadership style, which seems to embody the „old‟ Canada: sober, uncharismatic, and passive. As Wardhaugh puts it, “[t]he prime minister‟s style and leadership were anything but awe-inspiring” (2002: 80). It is difficult, now, to be very passionate either way about Mackenzie King, though some of his contemporaries did detest him. Nevertheless, King stands as the most successful of Canadian Prime Ministers and the longest serving elected leader in the English-speaking world – a fact which he himself noted with numerical precision, as Robertson notes (2000: 52).27

26 Unfortunately, this prejudice extends to Canadian academia. In a discussion of caucus control over party leaders, Bakvis and Wolfinetz (2005) irrelevantly refer to “the eccentric leadership” of King, footnoting to add that “King made decisions only when the hands of the clock were in certain positions… With the help of a spiritualist, he regularly consulted his dead mother and dog” (206, 218). Aside from being inaccurate, this ‘Staceyesque’ attitude strikes the author as being exceedingly priggish. As a rationalist, I cannot forbear myself to add that all superstitions are equally ‘bizarre’, yet no academic would make light of Macdonald’s Presbyterianism or Trudeau’s Catholicism. 27 The staff in the Prime Minister’s Office “determined with meticulous care” the exact number of days served by prime ministers in commonwealth countries. Sir Robert Walpole was at the top – 7,619 days, John A. Macdonald the runner-up at 6,937 days. King would equal Macdonald’s mark on June 7, 1946, during a Commonwealth Conference in London. Norman Robertson had seen a three-volume biography of Walpole, The Endless Adventure,

King was a conciliator, a consensus-builder, and a politician par excellence, perhaps second only to Macdonald. To his detractors and opponents he was a pusillanimous and unworthy leader. Arthur Meighen, on the event of a farewell gathering for R.B. Bennett, Prime Minister from 1930 to 1935, criticized his perennial adversary by proclaiming that “political captains in Canada must have courage to lead rather than servility to follow… [T]here must be something better than an ambition to be re-elected, or democracy will fall, even in this Dominion” (Dawson 1977: 142-43). King, for his part, deplored Meighen; when he was faced with the prospect of Meighen becoming Conservative leader once again, in late 1941, he wrote in his diary: “I am getting past the time when I can fight in public with a man of Meighen‟s type, who is sarcastic, vitriolic and the meanest type of politician” (Nov. 6, 1941). The King-Meighen rivalry, dating back to the days when they were fellow students at the University of Toronto, is a valuable contrast of personalities and leadership styles. Meighen possessed the sometimes admirable but always politically fraught virtue of „righteously standing on principle‟; King, as we will see, certainly held liberal political beliefs but was guided in behaviour not by ideology but by “caution and [a] search for common ground” and a concern with maintaining a fragile equilibrium among conflicting groups (Dawson 1977: 144). They differed in their attitudes towards the public as well as to the practice of politics. Meighen‟s self-righteousness and confidence in ideological solutions made him “inclined… to be somewhat contemptuous of and superior to public opinion” (144), writing in Maclean’s, just prior to the 1926 election, that “[t]he people of Canada are on trial. On the integrity of their thinking, as reflected in the verdict of tomorrow, will depend in no small measure the standard of our public life for years to come” (Bliss 2004: 106). Meighen, who King called “a Tory of the Tories” (Dawson 1958: 342), was a paternalistic elitist, convinced, unwaveringly, that good government required only that the public choose the most righteous and intelligent to lead; if they did not, as he believed had happened in 1926, it was a failure of the public and not of those elite. He had Macdonald‟s sense of elitism without, however, his political and emotional awareness of the public mood or his genial and practical sensibilities.

and, signed by PMO staff, was presented to King. The prime minister wrote in his diary that he was “touched by this exceptionally appropriate gift in its association with the day”. King would equal Walpole’s mark on April 19, 1948; on that day, he noted that the British cabinet had passed a resolution in his honour.

King‟s attention to public opinion, and his concern for national unity and preventing, as best as possible, factional and regional discontent, is well-reflected in his oft-lampooned statement about conscription: “Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription”. Jack Pickersgill, King‟s indispensable man in the Prime Minister‟s Office, later Clerk of the Privy Council and then Cabinet Minister, notes that one of the Prime Minister‟s favourite aphorisms was that “it was not what a leader accomplished but what he prevented that mattered most” (1977: 25). Though the purpose of this investigation is not to evaluate or appraise, in normative terms, particular leaders or leadership styles, it must be repeated that King remains, arguably, the most successful political leader in Canadian history, if not the most heroic. He stands as the preeminent example of how to govern in, as Macdonald famously noted, “a country difficult to govern”, and epitomizes the axiom about Canadian political leadership that “the most successful leaders in Canada have been the ones most irritating to zealots and those who have absolutely clear definitions – economically or ideologically – of where we should go” (Fraser 2000: 201). It remains, then, to explicate further the notions introduced in the foregoing remarks. King’s Political Beliefs and Orientations Although Mackenzie King is the most highly educated of Canadian prime ministers,28 he did not seem to have a comprehensive or cogent political philosophy which guided his conduct as a political leader (Pickersgill 1977: 16). He was both a liberal and a Liberal; his two great mentors, one in spirit and one in flesh, were his grandfather William Lyon Mackenzie and Wilfrid Laurier. He never articulated his vision of what liberalism meant in concrete terms; Neatby writes that “King was incapable of any coherent presentation of his political philosophy”, and that when he did expound on its meaning it consisted of “trite and meaningless platitudes” (1968: 121). The examples are sometimes almost comically abstract, as when he describes liberalism as “the continuous releasing or unlocking of a great onward force - an energizing force, a vital force, a force that is forever serving all mankind” (Neatby 1976: 12). Even Industry and Humanity, King‟s 1919 tome on industrial relations, does not provide any concrete analysis or serious thought about the liberal perspective. Like Macdonald, King was, first and foremost a practical politician; he mistrusted ideology, doctrine, and arid reason. His attitudes towards intellectuals, for instance, are recorded in

28 From the University of Toronto he received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, as well as an LL.B. He then attended Harvard University, where he earned another MA degree. He was later granted a Ph.D. from Harvard for a dissertation which consisted of work done while King was the first deputy minister of labour.

his diary: academics needed to be “balanced by wide political outlook or experience… Logic is a means to an end. The academic mind is apt to make, of logic, an end in itself” (June 25, 1938). King, then, was not a philosopher like Trudeau, or even Macdonald, who, despite his valuing the practical above the theoretical, had indisputably conservative tendencies. Still, he was a liberal in broad strokes and generally by intuition and sentiment rather than reasoning. He would tend to sympathize with the disadvantaged rather than the privileged, the worker rather than the industrialist. This was the central concern of Industry and Humanity and his work settling industrial disputes and investigating industrial practices, first as a civil servant, then as the Minister of Labour. He had general beliefs in free trade, a dislike of business interests, and greater individual rights and freedoms. He believed, most of all, that the common good was more important than the private good, especially when the latter was actually harmful to the former “Wherever in social or industrial relations the claims of Industry and Humanity are opposed,” King writes, “those of Industry must make way” (Donaldson 1994: 119). Dawson describes King‟s liberalism in terms of a “hatred of entrenched privilege and special position” and a concern for the dignity and worth of the common, working person; he can be characterized as a moderate reformer in the direction of social equality (1958: 317). The vague and broad strokes of King‟s liberalism were both philosophically and instrumentally grounded; they allowed him much greater room to manoeuvre if necessary, and did not anchor him to any inconvenient or impractical ideas or policies. Political reality, in King‟s view, was not fundamentally conflictual, but harmonious, and he acted in the prime ministership accordingly. Comparing him again with his perennial adversary, Bliss notes that “Meighen wanted to divide Canadians on fundamental principles; King wanted to bring them together” (2004: 138). His basic conception of the Canadian polity was that of a “political association of diverse cultural, regional, and economic groups”: a political partnership (Neatby 1976: 5). He was optimistic, in general, about the good faith and willingness to compromise of the Canadian people, and he had a deep belief in people‟s rational ability to look beyond their own interests to the public good and the interests which they held in common. King did not see the political world as being ineluctably divided between opposing forces, and he believed that, though conflicts between factional interests would always occur, they could be “resolved by reason”, and by “appealing to this fundamental identity of feelings and aspirations” (Neatby 1968: 130-131). Dawson remarks on the differences between King and Meighen‟s approaches (1958: 417). Both leaders, he notes, were apt to justify their leadership styles by pointing to the “heterogeneity of the Canadian people”. Meighen used the fact to argue that leaders had to formulate a conception of

the national interest which would transcend divisions and then persuade the public of it. King, on the other hand, believed that divisions were not so easily broken down; trying to do so would cause further division. Emphasis, therefore, should instead be placed on common interests and areas in which people could cooperate. Critics of Mackenzie King took this approach to politics as an abdication of leadership. Even generally positive portrayals tend to fault King for not doing with political power what he could have done (Dawson 1977: 144). The criticism is captured by Matheson (1976), who writes that “King has become a symbol of what many observers believe to be the national failing of Canada. He is accused of being responsible for mediocre politics, for having no purpose but to remain in office, [and] of unparalleled timidity” (149). In light of his fundamental beliefs about political reality, however, King‟s approach is entirely comprehensible, and even laudable. Mackenzie King was a conciliator: first, in terms of industrial disputes, then in the prime ministership. Conciliation and consensus building were the key hallmarks of King‟s attitudes and practices concerning political action. As above, King believed that Canada was a voluntary association which could be brought together harmoniously, but that harmony was not simply present or absent but had to be fashioned and constantly monitored. Political action for King, then, took the form of what might be called an „equilibrium‟ approach: to maintain the balance between „partners‟ by preserving the status quo if necessary and addressing grievances when necessary. As Paul Martin noted, among King‟s political talents was “his ability to recognize the direction of change and to adjust accordingly” (1977: 35). When private interests, for example, substantially harmed the common good, the equilibrium was disturbed; in such circumstances, Neatby notes that “King was prepared to take political action when he became aware of public wrongs” (1968: 125). To reiterate the famous phrase, King credited himself more with preventing events than in positively accomplishing things. In having such a framework for political action, Matheson argues that King avoided two common pitfalls of political leadership: building expectations only to disappoint, and having to prostrate oneself for failing to achieve a predetermined goal (1976: 150). He was never, then, the “passionate advocate of new causes”, but he was inordinately capable of fashioning consensus positions and consolidating the common will when possible (Dawson 1958: 404). King‟s beliefs about political reality and his views about political action which derive from those beliefs are certainly not heroic or inspirational leadership. Nonetheless, King perfected, in as much as that is possible, the art of maintaining the equilibrium: between the West and Central Canada, Quebec and the rest of Canada, free-traders and protectionists, pro and anti-conscriptionists, and so on.

He was, though, always cautious, never precipitate in making decisions. Esberey (1980) suggests that one element of King‟s personality was an obsession with timing (193). It could be surmised that King believed that „chance‟ played very little role in political reality; every action and inaction had an appropriate time and place. This manifests itself not only in trivial personal details but in the willingness of King to wait until an opportune moment to introduce policies: he was patient but he was not, as Courtney suggests (1976), passive, simply waiting for a crisis to build or ignoring potential indicators of future trouble. This caution, if sometimes overdone, seemed to serve King well, for the most part. Meighen and King‟s differing reactions to the Chanak incident are a case in point. The British government had requested Commonwealth troops to aid in the defence of the neutralized zone around the Dardanelles, including the Turkish cities of Chanak and Constantinople.29 While King‟s response, that parliament would have to be consulted first, was cautious, measured, and largely aligned with popular opinion, Meighen famously made it clear that Canada should have said „Ready, aye ready: we stand by you‟. Whatever the merits of the positions, Dawson concludes that King gained Progressive and Labour support while Meighen widened the gap between the Conservatives and the other parties; King gained prestige and was seen as being sensible and calm in crisis (1958: 415). King‟s emphasis on harmony rather than conflict did not mean, of course, that he embraced all political actors. King was a thorough Liberal partisan, not merely for narrow ideological reasons, but on deeper, if uncharitable, grounds. In later decades the Liberal Party in the 20th century would come to be known as the „natural governing party‟: it started with King, and King believed it not simply as an empirical claim but as a normative one. The Liberal Party was the great moderate party, he believed, and its natural constituents were all and only those who were the „reasonable‟ persons, in the manner stated earlier. Certain groups were simply not liberal, not open to reason and malignantly attached to special and divisive interests (Neatby 1968: 126). Unsurprisingly, these included the Tories and the Socialist parties: against these, he would always be vociferously opposed. The Tories, especially, were, to King, one of two kinds: business elites or „Anglophiles‟ who valued the British connection above even Canadian interests. Other parties were simply „misguided‟ Liberals, such as the Progressives, whom King successfully co-opted. He saw moderation not only in terms of political ideology but also in terms of social standing; the „true Liberal supporters‟ were the

29 The Dardanelles is a straight separating Europe from the mainland of Asia, between the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea.

middle and working classes who, he felt, had common interests in stable, sober, and gradual reform, rather than the status quo or drastic change. In his diary, King records a fascinating conversation with R.B. Hanson, then interim leader of the Conservative party; it gives a clear account of King‟s beliefs: Hanson then said: Then you feel that you should not lead? To which I replied: That is not the case. That I believed the people had a true instinct in most matters of government when left alone. That they were not swayed as specially favoured individuals were by personal interest, but rather by a sense of what best served the common good. That they recognize the truth when it was put before them and that a leader can guide so long as he kept to the right lines. I did not think it was a mark of leadership to try to make the people do what one wanted them to do, as to whether the course pursued was the best for the nation or not. (Dec. 9, 1941) King‟s approach to politics was calibrated to ensure that the Liberal party was seen as the embodiment of the partnership and harmony of Canada. At this, he was inordinately successful; as Wright suggests, “the keystone of his political reputation was the calculated identification of himself and his party with the cause of national unity” (1977: 289). Neatby takes this notion further, stating that “King was essentially a party leader. He was a national leader only through his leadership of a national party” (Neatby 1976: 14). Macdonald‟s nation-building took form in party-building and patronage. King successfully made the Liberal party synonymous with government itself for the better part of the century; to maintain the Liberal party was to maintain the nation. The primary instrument through which he did so was the Cabinet. Indeed, King‟s prime ministership was largely effectuated through that body; he was not the public communicator that his contemporaries Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were. What Pickersgill calls his “concept of leadership in a self- governing community” revolved around the Cabinet table; it was the primary arena for the modes of political action King employed (Pickersgill 1977: 25). As Wright comments: The Cabinet was the most significant theatre in which King pursued his objectives. In its most important members reposed the trust of their constituencies; their presence in the Cabinet provided the guarantee of policies that would not be biased against any group. Keeping them in harness together was a practical necessity for King, for during a prolonged period of apparent amity in the Cabinet, sectional rifts might be palliated and his leadership strengthened. (1977: 286)

King respected ministerial autonomy; Bliss calls his style “a team approach to leadership” (2004: 166). He largely allowed ministers to run their departments without interference, except when, of course, „corrective‟ action to restore harmony was required. He was not afraid to appoint powerful politicians to the Cabinet, and his Cabinets are among the most impressive in Canadian political history. Of course, a central relationship within the Cabinet was that between the Quebec lieutenant and the prime minister. King recreated the notion of a strong representative from Quebec which had largely laid dormant since the death of George-Etienne Cartier in 1873; he made sure to retain a „French-Canadian‟ minister as a close advisor. King knew that the strength and prestige of the Quebec lieutenant in Quebec depended on his being seen as exercising real political power, and so King “provided the evidence” of that power (Neatby 1976: 128). He consulted his Quebec minister, Ernest Lapointe until 1941, then Louis St. Laurent, on every major issue and, especially on issues directly related to that province, accepted the lieutenant‟s advice. It was, then, primarily through the Quebec lieutenant that “the interests and sentiments of French Canada were incorporated into the decision-making process”; similar arrangements applied to other regional ministers. As a consequence of the power of some cabinet ministers, and King‟s belief in harmony, Wright suggests that the prime minister‟s power was sometimes proscribed; the non-support of legislation on the part of key ministers would be fatal to King‟s leadership (1977: 291). However, King was, for the most part, able to manage his cabinet effectively by convincing it, and the Canadian people in general, that he was indispensible. King, by cultivating his role as conciliator among interests and maintainer of a delicate equilibrium, was able to craft himself and the prime ministerial institution in symbolic terms as the “essential peacemaker and protector of group interests” (290): Neatby describes this as “the wise father whose sage council would avert civil strife and chaos” (1968: 124). By structuring institutional arrangements such that Cabinet ministers would run their own departments and several would act as regional representatives, King was able to fashion himself as a „rootless‟ figure, not representative of a particular department or region but of the government and the national partnership as a whole. This also had the added benefit of making it difficult for rival leaders to emerge, as ministers became too identified with particular interests, rendering them less acceptable to other parts of the country. Affective and Interpersonal Aspects King presents a fascinating case in terms of the effects of affective attributes and interpersonal style on institutions of political leadership. On the one hand, it is arguably the case that

he is the most psychologically compelling Canadian prime minister. Joy Esberey, as mentioned earlier, wrote an in-depth account of King`s various neuroses. There are the well-known „bizarre‟ elements of his personal life: the spiritualism, the ruins at Kingsmere. Hutchison describes “the central fact” of King‟s life as death (1952: 1). Yet, perhaps more than any other leader, it is difficult to find a connection between his private affairs and the way he conducted himself as prime minister. His private „eccentricities‟ did not seem to manifest themselves in the political arena to any significant extent, and especially not in terms of the prime ministerial institution. Indeed, part of the „rehabilitation‟ of King‟s image in the Canadian historical narrative is to emphasize that he did not make policy or political decisions based on spiritual signs. To Canadians, he had almost seemed to “institutionalize dullness” (Matheson 1976: 149). He seemed a bland figure precisely because he cultivated that image; as Donaldson notes, King “could knife an opponent so gently he hardly felt the pain, or smother him slowly with the velvet pillow of his cultivated dullness” (1994: 122). His diary entries reveal King, according to Matheson, to be arrogant and vain, but these aspects were carefully hidden from public view. Canadians would, he thought, “prefer a bland man to an arrogant man” (Matheson 1976: 154). So, we have in King a clearly psychodynamic aspect in his private spiritual realm and a carefully constructed public face which seems to have little to do with his private one. Although C.P. Stacey used the term pejoratively, that King led “a very double life” is aptly descriptive of his dual emotional states. Nonetheless, a constant theme in King‟s psychological personality is his religious fervour, which can be seen as motivating many of his emotional and interpersonal tendencies. King was “intensely religious and idealistic” from his early days (Bliss 2004: 131). His Presbyterianism was a form of „Christian perfectionism‟, prevalent in the Victorian era, which taught believers to be perpetually self-critical, to serve others as a moral obligation, and shun commerce as being crassly material. From religion and the maternal influence he saw public service as the duty and responsibility of good Christians, and he practiced this throughout his life. After attending the University of Toronto, he went to Chicago where he began graduate work in sociology.30 There, he began work at Hull House, a sort of community centre in a neighbourhood of largely unskilled immigrants. “My work in the settlement,” he wrote to his parents, Isabel and John King, “makes me a factor in human progress, I feel I am aiding in a movement which is leading to uplift & better

30 Westhues (2002) provides an interesting account of King’s work in sociology. Indeed, he describes King as Canada’s first sociologist.

society” (Dawson 1958: 56). To King, his expressions of duty and faith in God‟s work were sincere; to observers, it may seem self-aggrandizing. As Neatby puts it, King felt “he was serving God and man by staying in office and by exercising power” (1969: 123). Hutchison‟s appraisal is much more barbed: he describes this as King‟s “ceaseless itch for power, an egotism unique and ruthless because he conceived himself as God‟s chosen instrument” (1964: 203). His religiously-derived belief that he was, as he put it, “only at the Master‟s work now” (August 10, 1919), provided a coping mechanism with which to deal with the stresses of political life. As noted earlier, Esberey concludes, as against Courtney (1976), that King was not a „happy warrior‟ in politics; he pursued politics because it was a „pilgrim‟s progress (1980: 216). Neatby, for his part, echoes Esberey‟s view, writing that King was a “dour Presbyterian… fighting the good fight” (1969: 124). It is possible that both views are partly correct; King was sustained in his political career by his deeply-held belief that he was doing the work of the Lord, but he was not, so to speak, an „unhappy warrior‟. It beggars belief to suggest that in a political career as long and as successful as King‟s, he did not derive some pleasure out of elements of the political game. Again, it is difficult to assess King‟s affective attributes in terms of, for example, emotional intelligence, because of the dualistic character of his psyche. Certainly, as a political actor within governance institutions – cabinet, parliament, etc. – he mastered the regulation of emotions and used his carefully cultivated persona to his benefit. His approach to political leadership was “appropriate to his personality. He had exceptional patience and self-control. He could accept prolonged discussions and delays” (Neatby 1976: 10). Mackenzie King was not an extrovert and was not naturally attractive to people. He did not have the sociability of Macdonald nor the presence or charm of Laurier. This led King to more subtle and, perhaps, manipulative techniques. He is said to have remarked that “you can control people better if you don‟t see too much of them” (Bliss 2004: 142). Gordon Robertson‟s impression was that King was “was a lonely man and, throughout his life, intensely self-centred” (2000: 70); Hutchison questions whether King, indeed, had any friends at all. “Those most familiar with” King the prime minister, he writes, “could hardly name a single person who would call King, the man, a friend” (1952: 9). Robertson, who worked directly under King, first in the Department of External Affairs (King was the Secretary of State), then in the PMO, and who later became the Clerk of the Privy Council under Pearson and Trudeau, remarks a number of times on the difficulties of working with the prime minister. “There was never any sense”, he recalls, “that [King] had the least interest in his ministers, his Members of Parliament, or his staff as people” (2000: 70). King expected

perfection and was “virtually impossible to satisfy”, being “engrossed in his own ego” (39, 48, 49). Paul Martin recalls that King would never meet socially with backbenchers, and he “rode his secretaries to nervous breakdowns” (1977: 33; 1952: 4). Underlying his interpersonal style were his spiritual inclinations; he was, according to Pickersgill, reclusive by choice, since he could be a “superb host and fine company when he wanted to be., but usually regretted having wasted time on the vanities of the world” (Bliss 2004: 142). Again, though, King‟s political leadership did not seem to be much affected by his affective and interpersonal styles. Rather, he seemed to construct a leadership role, that of the conciliator and peacekeeper, and a psychological persona: drab, dull, and steady. King‟s prime ministership, then, revolved around this leadership role. The Prime Ministerial Institution under King As with Macdonald in Figure 4, I have indicated the contours of the prime ministerial institution „recreated‟ by Mackenzie King in Figure 5, below. Here, certain patterns of institutional change in the Canadian prime ministership become evident: from Macdonald to King, the institution becomes somewhat more complex, more well-bounded, begins to „devolve‟ political discourse and governance from being elite-centered to being „democentric‟, and loses its trappings of global or mythical symbolism and tends towards non-symbolism. The internal complexity of the prime ministership under Mackenzie King was greater than that of Macdonald. However, this again seems to be more a function of context than any particular individual aspect. King himself was not very interested in the machinery of government; as Mallory notes, he “believed in working through men, and had little trust in organizations as such” (1976: 260). As noted above, King preferred to act primarily through cabinet, which he saw as the ideal arena for conciliating and maintaining the political partnership that he believed Canada to be. Although the PMO staff had grown to thirty under King, it was still in the tradition of the office heretofore: a small number of political advisors, press relations staff, and secretaries to handle correspondence (Lalonde 1971: 519). Although, as Mallory relates, the idea of a strengthened and empowered „Cabinet Secretariat‟ in the British mould had been floating around King since 1927, it was not until 1940, when the responsibilities of war dictated it, that Arnold Heeney was named Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet, gradually building the Privy Council Office into what it is in the modern prime ministership (1976: 266). The war also necessitated the formation of cabinet committees, another development which would come to fruition only during the Trudeau era. As discussed, King was not one to tinker with governance or leadership institutions

when circumstances did not require it, and thus the prime ministerial institution only acquired greater complexity when the context „forced‟ action on his part. In line with the gradual increase in internal complexity, the prime ministership became more well-bounded under King, although, as with Macdonald, there are conflicting tendencies. To reiterate earlier comments, King deliberately and purposively created a prime ministerial role which was conducive to his political purposes. In order to fulfill the conciliatory role as the „balancer of interests‟, he kept the prime ministership somewhat insulated and aloof, at arm‟s length. He allowed ministers to run their own departments, for the most part, and cultivated the role of the dull but competent leader who was indispensible because of his abilities in building consensus, and not because of any personal qualities. His affective and interpersonal attributes reinforced the sense of the distinctness of the prime minister: King, as discussed, was not an inherently sociable or warm person. He kept himself apart from both his cabinet colleagues and his personal staff, as Donaldson repeatedly noted. There is a sharp contrast here between Macdonald the „earthy‟ politician and King the spiritualist who seemed to be more interested in the hands of the clock than the people around him. Although King was just as much a partisan as Macdonald, they had differing beliefs on the role of the party. The latter was deeply connected to his party through the practice of patronage and personal involvement in all aspects of the party, and thus he was, perhaps above everything, a party leader. King, by contrast, saw the Liberal party as the natural home of the moderate and reasonable portion of the populace, and so the party was, to him, the vehicle for the consensus and harmony he sought. Macdonald as a party leader was intimately connected and concerned with the growth and strength of the party from the local level up, since party-building also meant building loyalty. King did not have that same preoccupation; instead, he saw the Liberal party as a sort of „consociational‟ arena in which regional party leaders were the significant actors. As described earlier, this allowed the prime minister to differentiate himself from other governance institutions, particularly cabinet and ministers, because he could be seen as representing the common or public good or the consensus position, and not particular regional or sectoral interests. As Matheson suggests, “[t]he first effect of the representation principle has been to enhance the role of the Prime Minister,for he, and he alone, becomes the only truly national figure in the cabinet” (1976: 27). At the same time, because of his preferred methods of political leadership, he was at times reliant on strong regional cabinet ministers to the point where it diminished the autonomy of the prime ministerial institution.

Macdonald and Laurier could, through force of personality, often „get their own way‟; King was less able to do so, although he certainly found other, more subtle ways of achieving his goals. Figure 5: The Prime Ministerial Institution under King

Similar themes are evident in terms of the level of discourse or scale of governance in the King prime ministership. The institutional change wrought by King was that of moving the prime ministership from being elite-centred to being more closely tied to public opinion and more focused on playing the conciliatory role between different regions and factions of the country. His deep beliefs in the maintenance of harmony and national unity drove him to be ever mindful of public sentiment, as manifested most clearly in the plebiscite on conscription in 1942. King‟s political leadership is marked by a constant attention to the interests of regional and sectoral factions. As mentioned, he saw Canada as a political partnership among these interests, and it was his foremost duty to maintain the equilibrium. This could be thought of in terms of means and ends: whereas previous prime ministers had been conciliators and consensus-builders as a means to building a nation in its early stages, King saw this role almost as an end in itself. In this, he had great respect for the public voice, stemming from his liberal belief in the „reasonableness‟ of broad-minded people to agree and find common ground. His discourse, then, was always in terms of finding acceptable positions to as many regions of the country and as many Canadians as possible, and he governed not through elite-dominated politics per se, as Macdonald and previous prime ministers had, but through cabinet and the party caucus, as proxies for the various constituent parts of the Canadian political association. As Neatby suggests, King “provided national leadership” not by espousing a vision of progress and nationalism in the vein of Macdonald and Laurier, but by “creating a Liberal party that reflected the diverse regional, economic, and ethnic interests of the country” (2007: 296).

The prime ministership under Mackenzie King was moving closer to the democentric mode of the modern prime ministership, and away from the elite-centred politics of earlier decades. Under King, the prime ministerial institution no longer could sustain the lofty symbolism it achieved under, especially, Macdonald and Laurier. It is somewhat trivial but still interesting that all but two of the previous prime ministers had been knighted by the Crown; both Macdonald and Laurier were „aristocratic‟ figures, not by birth but by their personality and achievement. King was altogether a „smaller‟ figure; his personality and leadership style were such that they inspired little affection amongst the Canadian people; instead, he maintained the leader-follower relationship by his image of a competent and stable, if dull, politician who could be trusted to balance competing interests so as to produce consensus. King had little charisma and was a dry and often vapid public speaker; witness the empty elaborations on liberalism given above. Unlike Macdonald and Laurier, it is difficult to imagine Canadians thinking of King in „heroic‟ or „mythical‟ terms. As Neatby suggests, King‟s political leadership had ambitions which were not especially conducive to „myth-making‟; rather, it was one of “facilitat[ing] Canada‟s development by avoiding or minimizing confrontations and by providing political steadiness in tumultuous times” (2007: 296). 3.4: Pierre Trudeau: Leadership in Modern Times Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the fifteenth prime minister of Canada, is possibly the most inscrutable of leaders in Canadian political history, an idiosyncratic figure whose capacity to at once charm and frustrate both his fellow political elite and the Canadian public is unrivalled. His legacy is as controversial as the man himself. Bliss considers Trudeau as one of the three great nation-builders in Canadian history (2004: 246), and Gwyn remarks that “today‟s Canada” is ultimately a creation and reflection of who, elsewhere, he calls the “Northern Magus” (1998: 25). Yet, his policies and personality could infuriate and move Canadians to detest him, or else be disappointed in what he could not achieve: witness the National Energy Policy, the repatriation of the Constitution without Quebec‟s support and the hardline federalism that he showed both during and after his prime ministership, the gross mismanagement, to some, of the economy. Despite his titanic role in Canadian political history, the poll, cited earlier, to determine the “Best Prime Minister of the Last 50 Years” ranks him in a virtual tie for third with Louis St. Laurent, and his actual scores place fifth (the overall score credits him for being a „transformational‟ leader). Unsurprisingly, his lowest score is on his handling of the economy and the fiscal framework, achieving only a 4.7 out of 10, outpacing Diefenbaker by only a tenth and trailing his protégé, Jean Chretien, by almost three points

(MacDonald 2003). The disillusioned sentiment is captured in Desmond Morton‟s assessment that “Philosopher princes make better literary heroes than practical leaders” (11). Trudeau was a great paradox. This is the thrust of Anthony Westell‟s insightful commentary on the first term of the Trudeau government (1972). He remarks that there was an “extraordinary gap between his style and his content” which was “unbridgeable” (2). His style as portrayed to the Canadian public, especially in those more heady days before political reality set in, was that of the freewheeling, insouciant dilettante; he “[was] an erstwhile socialist who cared what French intellectuals wrote, wore shoes without socks and jackets without ties and still looked elegant, drove the perfect Mercedes 300SL convertible, and flirted boldly with women a generation younger” (English 2009: 2). Though Minister of Justice prior to winning the Liberal leadership in 1968, he was neither a career politician nor a civil servant, in contrast with most of his prime ministerial peers, such as King and Macdonald. Serving a meagre three-year apprenticeship before becoming leader and prime minister, Trudeau‟s ascendancy was built on not much more than his charisma and a sense that he was intellectual; certainly, he had neither experience nor familiarity (Coutts 1998: 145). As Bliss remarks, “[n]o one else had ever come in from the cold so fast” (1998: 11). Trudeau‟s style was a marked contrast to the staid leadership of “the Diefenbaker-Pearson generation of fuddy- duddy politicians” (Bliss 2004: 250). At the same time, the „content‟ of the new prime minister was anything but flamboyant, and his charisma appeared to stem solely from the „newness‟ and change he seemed to represent. In fact, Pierre Trudeau, the “first Prime Minister to have come to the office with an explicit philosophy of policy making”, held as antithetical the kind of emotional and ideological political leadership which is often associated with charismatic leaders. (Matheson 1976: 169). “Let us be coolly intelligent”, he implored Canadians in his famed argument for a „functional‟ politics (Trudeau 1996: 28). The rationalistic content, however, fundamentally conflicted with the passionate style, and the latter undermined the former in many ways, from disillusionment with what some considered a passive conservatism to the failure of one of Trudeau‟s great projects, “participatory democracy” (Coutts 1998: 145). Trudeau‟s prime ministership was the beginning of the modern prime ministership, one which was more complex, more differentiated from other political institutions, more engaged in mass communication and the nominal „participation‟ of citizens in governance, and increasingly symbolic of less and less. Bliss writes that the Trudeau era was “a study in the limits of government” (2004: 273). This could well be applied to the prime ministership itself; Taras and Pal, for instance, suggest that the prime minister is now a „stranded leader‟, caught between “government

on all sides” and being the de facto head of state while having none of the “pageantry and mystique” of, say, the American presidency, and thus has retreated ever more behind an institutional wall (1988: xv). Political Beliefs of Pierre Trudeau Trudeau was the first true intellectual to become the prime minister of Canada; though Mackenzie King was nominally more educated, having earned a Ph.D. while Trudeau had studied for the degree but did not finish. Coutts, in fact, asserts that Trudeau‟s greatest political asset was his wide-ranging intellect and curiosity (1998: 146). He had travelled widely, especially in the late 1940s, and had had an eclectic set of careers, largely made possible by his inherited wealth and made necessary by his psychological needs (of which, see below). He had thought and written about politics and political philosophy; as mentioned, he was the first prime minister to come into office with fundamental theoretical assumptions about how politics should work and how policy should be made, and in so public a fashion. At times, writes Bliss, “the philosopher-king seemed to be chairing a seminar on the first principles of government”, rather than, presumably, engaging in actual and active political leadership (2004: 255). Perhaps the most fundamental of the principles of Trudeau‟s political philosophy was his commitment to rationalism in politics, well exemplified by his slogan “la raison avant la passion”: “reason over passion”. Rational policy-making is described by Dobuzinskis (1977) in terms of two ends: “improving the efficiency or the effectiveness of government operations” (212). The former refers to the optimization of the use of resources in implementing programs, the latter to the optimizing of programs themselves in order to achieve goals. Rationalism, then, is opposed both to the sort of incremental, „muddling through‟ approach to policy making, and an emotional or instinctual policy process. Trudeau had long “distrusted sentiment in decision-making and placed his confidence in elaborate systems of analysis” (Westell 1972: 219). His belief in rationalism is most notably articulated in “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason”, a paper written in 1964, in which he places his hope in technology and scientific investigation to solve social problems. “[A]t the level of individual action, emotions and dreams will still play a part”, he writes, “[b]ut magic… has long since ceased to play an important role in the normal governing of states” (1968: 202-203). Specifically speaking of the “coming collision” of nationalism, he suggests that “cold, unemotional rationality can still save the ship” (203). Rational policy-making, to Trudeau, meant a kind of non-ideological, technocratic style which informed his entire approach to the prime ministership.

This belief in rationalism manifested in almost every aspect of Trudeau‟s governance, especially in the earlier years. Immediately upon becoming prime minister, he initiated an extensive review of programs and planning exercise, and again after the 1974 election (Bliss 2004: 261). His preference for ordered and efficient policy-making also had its effect on Cabinet, both in terms of structure and style. Donald S. Macdonald, a member of cabinet from 1968 to 1977, refers to the “controlled and intellectual approach” Trudeau instilled in cabinet discussion, in contrast to the cabinet under Pearson, which was far more disorganized and involved far less paperwork and documentation (1998: 164-165). Structurally, the great innovation of the Trudeau prime ministership was to entrench and formalize the role of Cabinet Committees in governance. Although the Priorities and Planning Committee had been established under Pearson, it was under Trudeau that it became the overarching entity, “the Cabinet‟s coordinator”, with “ministers obliged to follow the priorities it set” (English 2009: 42). This was meant to bring a greater coherence and more goal- oriented policy delivery, but appraisals have been largely negative. John Turner, as minister of Finance, complained to Gordon Robertson that he couldn‟t handle his portfolio “with twenty-three God-damned ministers of Finance”, and both Robertson and Trudeau himself realized that systems analysis which strove for some ideal of rational policy-making had not achieved much (English 2009: 43). Coutts cites as one of the two major failings of Trudeau that he “spent far too much time re- examining entire systems” without real results, but for the squandering of resources and energy (1998: 153). In his memoirs, Trudeau admits that the planning exercise after the 1974 election may have been a mistake, allowing the momentum of victory to dissipate and disappointing a public which expected action, not more studies (1993: 185). I would argue that, at some point, such a preoccupation with rationality in governance threatens to replace political leadership with institutionalization: not an acceptable trade-off. Certainly, Turner‟s complaint is, in a sense, what the process was meant to achieve, in that the departmental cabinet model was intentionally abandoned in favour of the more institutionalized cabinet system (see section 2.2). It was a response to the sense that the era of welfare-state government, of service-delivery politics, had overwhelmed the capacities of governments or leadership institutions still stuck in the patterns of the previous decades. Nevertheless, it had deleterious effects on cabinet government and significant, if not necessarily unwelcome, effects on the prime ministerial institution itself. Schultz, in 1977, writes that the last decade had seen “a continuing effort to make the Prime Minister a more effective “chief executive”” (229). This had two motivations: the desire for rationality and Trudeau‟s own “famous obsession with creating counterweights” (1993: 184).

Trudeau believed that, in the years since Mackenzie King, in the „Golden Age of the Mandarin‟, the civil service had become too powerful, and wished to restore decision-making power to elected officials. This meant increasing the capacities of the prime ministerial institution in terms of policy analysis and information. Greater prime ministerial effectiveness demanded, in Matheson‟s words, “greater resources for the decision-maker and greater control by him over the whole policy-making environment” (Matheson 1976: 169). Rationality required optimizing both the quantity and quality of information available. So, both the PMO, the Prime Minister‟s Office, and the PCO, the Privy Council Office, increased in size and strength. The PMO, for example, more than doubled in size from Pearson to Trudeau by 1970 (Westell 1972: 115). Lalonde gives an in-depth account of the PMO‟s growth and functions, and suggests two primary reasons for this expansion (1971: 519-520). The first is simple growth in the „services‟ required of the prime minister: mail, travel, speeches, etc. This is straightforward. The second reason, however, stems from preference rather than necessity: “the deliberate creation of new functions to service the prime minister”. An example is the regional desk offices set up within the PMO, meant to extend the reach of the prime ministerial institution directly in the various regions of Canada (as well as its counterpart in the PCO, the Federal-Provincial Relations Office). Regional representation was and is, of course, ostensibly one of the main purposes of Members of Parliament or, especially, Cabinet members. That representational role, however, was substantially reduced on both counts. At times, officers within the PMO expressed sharp disdain for MPs; the Chief Desk Officer, Pierre Levasseur, said that “many Members were so complacent that 90 percent of their job could be done by business machines” (Westell 1972: 118). This was also seen as a solution to Trudeau‟s lack of party standing or a power base within the party arising from years of political experience (Radwanski 1978: 193). Indeed, Trudeau‟s lack of experience fit entirely within his conception of rational-functional politics: Donaldson quotes him as stating that “[t]he further we advance into the modern age… the less important experience will become. It‟s much more important to have the necessary adaptability with which to face and solve new problems” (1994: 241). Previous prime ministers, as is evident with Macdonald and King, were deeply rooted „party men‟, and the representational roles were filled by party stalwarts whom the prime minister could trust. At least in the earlier years, though present throughout his prime ministership, Trudeau‟s belief that “a political party was simply an instrument to implement his agenda” was apparent (Coutts 1998: 154). He had little respect for parties, as such, and prior to entering Parliament had been a harsh critic of the „cynicism‟ of parties and their „mindless‟ election machines. The

„counterweights‟ which were created „weighed‟ more than the original weights. In the quest for rationality in policy-making, Westell argues that the prime ministerial institution, in relation to other governance institutions, had gone from “indecision and inefficiency” to “excessive strength and direction” (1972: 107). Though, as I say, I make no normative claims about „presidentialization‟ or the prime minister as a “friendly dictatorship”, it is clear that one of the end results of the belief in rationalism was a more complex, more autonomous, more institutionalized prime ministership. A related aspect of Trudeau‟s political beliefs was his belief in the fundamental role of individuals, individual rights, and freedom. He believed that individuals were both the normatively and empirically basic units of political reality. Unlike Macdonald, Trudeau had the liberals‟ belief in self-perfection and the perfectibility of man, and felt that it was incumbent upon every individual to strive for mastery of oneself (Radwanski 1978: 122). To Macdonald, the purpose of the state was to ensure societal order and stability by tempering the irrational and baser instincts of human nature. To Trudeau, by contrast, the state was only a means to the end of individual fulfillment. This belief in individualism manifests itself in his approach to constitutional issues, in which his main interest was in the protection of individual rights, not federalism or jurisdictional issues. In fact, on the latter side, he was, similar to Macdonald, somewhat of a conservative. Criticizing proponents of constitutional reform in 1964, he suggests that reform is not a pressing matter and that “little is done to remedy the real disorders which plague the Canadian people, even though most of them could be righted under the present constitution” (1996: 214). He concludes by noting that “[a]mateur revolutionaries could do worse than take some advice” from the American declarers of independence, that “[p]rudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes” (216). He was, in other words, wary of constitutional reform for reform‟s sake, and suggesting that little actual harm arose from the constitutional status quo. When the 1980 referendum made it clear that some constitutional change was necessary, Trudeau insisted that any constitutional reform should delimit power of both the federal and provincial governments to intrude on the individual rights of Canadians. Trudeau told Jean Chretien after the referendum that he was determined on two goals: patriation and a charter of rights; as English notes, this was not what constitutional reform meant to others, including Claude Ryan (English 2009: 461). As Bliss puts it, to Trudeau, “[g]overnments were… political constructions whose aim should be to maximize human liberties, not to champion ethnic collectivities” (2004: 249). He believed in collective rights only so far as they maximized individual rights.

His belief in individualism also informed his views on and practice of political leadership. He viewed individuals as beings capable of rational action and self-fulfillment, and so he did not share or expect the psychological need for leadership on the part of the Canadian people. This hampered both his party and his public leadership. To his credit, Trudeau was intensely self-aware and self-scrutinizing, and in his memoirs he admits that, as profoundly held as his rationalist and individualistic beliefs were, politics “can‟t be conducted at such a rational level, devoid of all emotion. The voters wanted a leader to guide them, and I was giving them a professor” (1993: 158). Later, he remarks that “Liberal party members began to get the impression that they were members of a party without a leader” (161). This is, again, a manifestation of the „paradox‟ of Trudeau, that he was a charismatic leader who did not expect his followers to be docile or submissive. He expected reason from the public but elicited passion. If he expected individuals to be as autonomous as possible, though, he also expected them to participate politically. As Coutts trenchantly notes, Trudeau had similar political goals to those of previous leaders but differed on how to achieve those goals: Most federal leaders formed coalitions of strong regional representatives to act and speak for the local citizens. Mackenzie King, for example, depended on ministers like James Gardiner, C.D. Howe, James Ilsley, Ernest Lapointe, and Louis St. Laurent, to represent regional interests. By contrast, Trudeau thought that every citizen should have his own stake in the country‟s politics and play a role in his own right, not through an agent. (1998: 151-152) Trudeau talked of a „participatory democracy‟. Matheson characterizes this as “a government [being] so sensitive to the people (but without consulting them directly) that the people will obey because they want to obey, because they realize that their just demands are being met” (Matheson 1976: 175-176). Trudeau‟s own view of the concept was that more points of view would be heard, that a public discourse would take place about policy and political issues, and that citizens would be engaged in the political process. As he remarked in 1971, though, he believed that “to participate doesn‟t mean you‟re going to make the decision”, and emphasized his belief in the representative nature of the parliamentary system (Westell 1972: 128). There was a sort of vagueness to the entire notion that supports Coutts‟ contention that, “[t]hough Trudeau talked of „participatory democracy‟, he had little idea of how it would work” (1998: 146). I would argue that Trudeau‟s belief in the capacities and priorities of individuals was simply too optimistic; „participation‟ in the form of mass

parties and „citizens‟ movements‟ also seemed to clash with the technocratic systems approach to governance Trudeau favoured. Simply put, there was a contradiction. In the end, the project of making Canada more participatory amounted to nothing more than grants to interest groups, think tanks, conferences of experts, and so on, while, decision-making power increasingly concentrated within the political executive; as Westell argues, “the end result of the whole elaborate participatory machine might be to make the prime minister more powerful than ever” (1972: 113). Trudeau did not seem to realize a basic proposition of social power: that the dispersion of „participatory‟ power only goes so far as the dispersion of decision-making power. When participation is dispersed widely without dispersing real decision-making power, the concentrated and organized power will always be more effective than the dispersed power, and will thus increase in power. Indeed, Trudeau‟s notion of „counterweights‟ is threatened by such a dispersion of participation. Interpersonal and Affective Aspects Trudeau‟s affective attributes and interpersonal style also evince a tension between different elements. In general, though, his emotional and social personality mirrors the content of his political beliefs: as he implored and expected all individuals to be “coolly intelligent” in terms of policy and politics, so he lived. He was intensely self-disciplined and self-contained; he was also introverted and often candid to the point of bluntness. His predecessor, Lester Pearson, remarked that Trudeau had “ice-water” in his veins (Bliss 2004: 245). This is illustrated in two somewhat opposing ways: his courage and toughness in facing adversaries but also his personal “air of cool detachment” (Donaldson 1994: 240). Though he was, by all accounts, a leader of great intellect and charismatic attraction, he was also “curiously unassuming and even diffident about some aspects of his prime- ministerial role” (Radwanski 1978: 191). The increasing institutional isolation of the prime minister atop the „apex of power‟ is a consequence, in many ways, of Pierre Trudeau‟s conduct of the prime ministership. Both John A. Macdonald and Mackenzie King could be extroverts when they wanted to be, but were, to different degrees, driven to solitude in private life. Trudeau‟s most prominent affective or interpersonal attribute is his introversion both in public and in private. He was, as Bliss puts it “not a voluble, personable prime minister… often he was withdrawn, businesslike, abrupt to the point of arrogance, and unforgiving” (2004: 257). This was a combination of his political beliefs and his psychological personality. Trudeau was simply not the typical back-slapping, baby-kissing politician; he was a “strange combination” of a leader who was completely confident in his judgment

and intellect but diffident to the point of shyness when dealing with others (Radwanski 1978: 195). He was often ill at ease in social situations, lacking the politician‟s skills, and he both could not manage and had a “thorough dislike of small talk” (Coutts 1998: 147). This often bordered on the comical, as when Coutts recounts that “on many occasions, Trudeau simply walked away from a person who bored him or to whom he had nothing to say” (ibid). One can imagine, on such occasions, how the spurned must have felt. Trudeau could and loved to argue but was not a natural raconteur or entertainer; he was not one to tell jokes or humorous stories (149). He was not gregarious and he did not enjoy, and thus did not often partake in, socializing with colleagues. Macdonald contrasts this with Pearson, who had the diplomat‟s skill in personal dealing and had a “sunny personality with a quick humour” (1998: 174). His introversion and reserve existed in both the social and business realms; Ralph Coleman, an assistant press secretary and, later, press secretary, relates that in his nine years in the PMO he never lost his temper or showed any extreme emotion at all (Southam 2005: 42). Trudeau‟s personality, in this regard, is not a result of deep-seeded depression or anti-social tendencies, as introversion often is, but a conscious project of self-discipline and an individualism which strives to be independent of others. He believed in human perfectibility, and his life was a paean to that notion. His concept of personal fulfillment, though, meant self-discipline, not hedonism. Despite his colourful image, he was immensely self-contained and often seemingly aloof. He consciously created and sustained an “austere, almost ascetic” lifestyle; Bliss tells the story of Margaret Trudeau discovering her husband would “dry himself on the smallest and meanest towel he could find at 24 Sussex”, despite the well-stocked linen closet (2004: 247). English speculates that this was in part due to his father‟s death when Pierre was sixteen. The young Trudeau concluded that Charles Trudeau‟s early death was brought on by the social necessities of business – gambling, smoking, alcohol, parties, and the like – and so consciously turned away from such „vices‟ (DCB cite). His fervent need for to be an individual meant that he did not need nor did he expect personal kindnesses or sentiment from his colleagues. Radwanski suggests a certain lack of empathy in Trudeau‟s being “rational to a fault” (1978: 216); this was not intentional callousness, but, rather, a difficulty with being sympathetic to others (English 2009: 360). Trudeau writes in his memoirs that: Ever since my youth I had been a loner, very jealous of my freedom. I had carefully kept my distance from my colleagues, no matter who they were. Even among friends, for example during expeditions into the bush, I instinctively took the lead, where I would be alone. If my companions caught up with me I would slacken my pace

until I was trailing far behind, once again alone. (1993: 160-161) On many accounts, Trudeau‟s political leadership suffered as a result of this psychological tendency. It also, I think, is reflected in the institutional patterns of his prime ministership. Introversion is not inherently a good or bad psychological trait, but for a political leader it carries particular import. Mitchell Sharp, for instance, suggests that “his lack of sensitivity to human relations” was a serious fault (Radwanski 1978: 213). He did not have the politician‟s willingness to persuade, to „tell people what to do‟, because he felt individuals should make up their own minds, and he rarely expressed appreciation for his staff. Those who were his closest supporters seemed to be attracted to Trudeau‟s charisma and intellect; they believed in his leadership qualities but were not especially loyal or dedicated to Trudeau as a person (Radwanski 1978: 220). In many ways, his psychological introversion, self-containment, and emotional reserve are commendable in their stoicism. Laswell‟s notion that public political leadership is, really, displaced private motivation, did not seem to fit Trudeau. He was not psychologically compelled to „seek love‟ or determine his self- worth by the affection of those around him or the public. However, it also deprived him of important modes of action in political leadership. Trudeau strived to be a rational and autonomous individual, and he expected others to be, but, as Radwanski notes, “people‟s emotional needs don‟t always correspond to the laws of rationality” (ibid); Trudeau realized this, but was not entirely successful in reconciling himself to the symbolic, affective role and power of political leadership. His legacy in terms of the prime ministership, then, is that of a substantially more complex, more insulated and autonomous institution which in time came to symbolize little but itself. Trudeau and the Modern Prime Ministership The causal relationships between Pierre Trudeau the individual and the prime ministerial institution are, I suggest, rather more evident than in the first two cases. This is, in part, because of the clearly more philosophical approach which Trudeau brought with him into the office. He had, as has been shown, relatively well articulated ideas about the prime ministerial role, governmental institutions, and the Canadian public in general. He also had particular personality traits which contributed to his conduct in the prime ministership. Figure 6 depicts the prime ministerial institution under Trudeau in terms of the four measures of institutional change suggested here.

Figure 6: The Prime Ministerial Institution under Trudeau

As is clear, the Canadian prime ministership under Trudeau became much more internally complex and more differentiated from other governance institutions. As with Macdonald and King, some of this is related to context; as Punnett notes, “to some extent the expansion of the PMO was a response to the increasing size and complexity of the machinery of government in the post-war period” (1977: 78). However, there are also visible connections with Trudeau‟s desire for rationalism in the policy-making process, his relative lack of connections with the party organization, and his personal insularity and individualism. He built himself institutional walls, in the form of the expanded PMO and PCO, in part because of a dislike of and sensitivity towards personal conflict; English (2007) notes that he may have avoided many political problems had he “been more open to criticism and less abrasive in personal relations” (451). Donald Savoie asserts the concept of „Court Government‟, in which political power was becoming concentrated “in the hands of the prime minister and a small group of carefully selected courtiers” (2005: 17). This style of governance, he continues, “established itself in Ottawa under Trudeau and, if anything, it grew stronger under both Mulroney and Chretien” (18). Whereas both Macdonald and King were attentive and deeply tied to other governance institutions – their parties and cabinets – the modern prime ministership seems to be increasingly autonomous from party organizations; the latter‟s role has essentially been reduced to election campaign vehicles. Even then, modern elections place increasingly greater focus on leaders rather than parties. This is, in part, a result of the „democentric‟ nature of the modern prime ministership as originating with Trudeau. “Since Trudeau”, Savoie asserts, “Canadian prime ministers have made themselves

into television personalities” with sophisticated and large communications and polling operations (2005: 22). As mentioned earlier, Lalonde‟s point about increased public expectations is well-taken: the public simply expects to see and hear their leaders more often and more directly than before. However, it is undoubtedly the case that Trudeau greatly accelerated the trend because of his personality; he brought „colour‟ to the prime ministership after the office had long been occupied by a succession of mostly competent but dull and stolid figures. Here again, the „paradox‟ of Trudeau is evident: he proclaimed that reason should trump passion, but he purposively cultivated the imagery of a bold and newly confident Canada: “the style was the man himself” (English 2007: 452). He carefully calibrated the symbolism of his prime ministership in iconoclastic moments or images: the St. Jean Baptiste Day Parade in 1968, the day before the general election, the outrageously foppish costume at the CFL‟s Grey Cup in 1970, the „gunslinger‟ portrait, and the non-spontaneous „pirouette‟ behind Queen Elizabeth‟s back in 1977. However, it is the „institutionalization‟ of the prime ministership in terms of its complexity and boundedness which has outlasted Trudeau‟s „flamboyant‟ personality in terms of the symbolic representation of the institution. I would suggest that, isolated within a „counter-bureaucracy‟ in the PMO and PCO, managed by strategists, consultants, and pollsters, the prime ministerial institution‟s capacity to arouse affect in the Canadian public and practice symbolic leadership has been diminished significantly. The legitimacy of the modern prime ministership as a leadership institution is primarily generated by the institutional context and not the personal, affective ties between leaders and followers. 3.5: Summary and Discussion Every prime minister is a unique case, and thus that drawing conclusions of the sort involved in this thesis necessarily involves simplification and generalization over attention to specificities (Bliss 2004: xiv). Nevertheless, I argue that the three prime ministers profiled, John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, and Pierre Trudeau, are archetypal figures whose manner of conducting the prime ministership set enduring patterns largely followed by subsequent occupants of the office. It is, of course, no coincidence that this triumvirate consists of the three longest-serving prime ministers in Canadian history, and it is, arguably, also the case that these are the most consequential of Canadian prime ministers in terms of their imprint on multiple levels of state and society, from the core executive to the Canadian party system to national identity and what Richard Gwyn calls “the idea of Canadianism” (1998). Bliss, for instance, asserts that these three prime ministers constitute the first rank in terms of “nation-changing, nation-building achievements” (2004: 246).

In section 1.1B, I suggested a framework for conceptualizing institutional change along four dimensions: internal complexity, „boundedness‟, level of discourse/ range of governance, and symbolic representation. This discussion summarizes the findings about each of these dimensions: Figure 7 depicts the arguments in graphic form. Figure 7: Institutional Change in the Canadian Prime Ministership

Internal Complexity and Boundedness Because, as I noted earlier, there seems to be a strong correlation between the first two dimensions, I treat them together. Clearly, the prime ministerial institution in Canada has become both more internally complex and more well-bounded, especially since Trudeau. The internal complexity is obvious; quantitatively, the prime ministership has drastically increased in size and scope. In the first two prime ministerial eras, the prime ministership was almost a one-man show; as Westell suggests, “Prime Ministers managed to run things more or less out of their hip pockets until the Second World War” (Westell 1972: 107). Similarly, Donaldson remarks that “Mackenzie King… preferred to keep the nation‟s business in his head… until the complications of running the war effort forced him to increase the PMO staff to 30” (1994: 252). The number of staff in the PMO, treated as an extension of the prime ministership itself, gradually increased and their functions were changing. Since Trudeau, especially, the political and policy advice function of the PMO has come to be the predominant feature. The prime ministerial-PMO bloc has become, in the modern prime ministership, fully institutionalized; that is, acquiring value for its own sake. The „counter- bureaucracy‟ set up by Trudeau has resulted, Donaldson argues, in a Canada “run by the Prime Minister and his own personal power bloc” (1994: 252). The internal structures and processes are

formalized and regularized. The PMO, as well as the PCO, serve to increasingly insulate and isolate the prime ministerial institution from other governance institutions, making it more well-bounded, i.e., differentiated from its environment. Discourse/Governance The foregoing analysis indicates that there has been a gradual downward shift in the level of discourse or range of governance.. This accords with Michael Bliss‟ assertion of the „descent of Canadian politics‟ (1994: xiv), the idea that the centre of political discourse has gradually shifted from elites to the masses. However much we might bemoan the „democratic deficit‟ in contemporary Canadian government, this is only because a context of heightened expectations has developed with regard to how our political leaders relate to the people. By historical standards, the present mode of prime ministerial leadership is highly democratic, or at least „democentric‟. Macdonald practiced a personal style of politics among elites: party figures, cabinet ministers, parliament, etc. Indeed, it could be argued that Confederation itself was what S.F. Wise calls “a triumph of Upper Canadian imperialism”, attained “through negotiation and legislation rather than popular ratification” which was “entirely characteristic of the undemocratic and elitist Canadian political style” (Preece 1984: 482). Mackenzie King‟s prime ministership was marked by sustained emphasis on Cabinet-level governance, and King‟s primary avenue by which to discuss and decide policy was among ministers. As well, his primary focus of political communication was within this small range of political figures. However, King was extremely sensitive to public opinion and unceasingly strived to capture the public mood. Finally, Pierre Trudeau was the first modern prime minister because he was the first „electronic‟ leader; “in the age of TV and the jet”, Westell writes, “people would expect more direct contact with their national leader. Trudeau‟s intriguing personal style suddenly accelerated the trend” (1972: 114). The „democentric‟ character of the modern prime ministership manifests itself in the shift in focus of communications from elite-level actors to public appeals, the decline of the cabinet as a significant decision-making body or central arena for regional and sectoral representation, and the shifting nature of the prime minister‟s personal staff, which has become much more public-relations oriented. Symbolic Representation Here, too, a „downward‟ trend is evident in the evolution of the prime ministerial institution. Macdonald created a prime ministership which was seen in national symbolic terms. This was a function both of context and personality. As Hutchison writes, “[a] rudimentary State must live mainly on myths… Macdonald knew that, too, as an experienced maker of myths. He was mostly a

myth himself, the largest myth in Canada” (1964: 2-3). The establishment and maintenance of a newly-created political unit, especially one as vast and diverse, even in 1867, as Canada, tends to require such a leader, the preeminent example being the first President of the United States, George Washington. It is entirely possible that without Washington the US would not have survived its infancy; the same could be said of Macdonald. He was able to forge “a powerful identification between the man and the country (as it would later for Laurier and Trudeau, but not Mackenzie King)” (Bliss 2004: 25). As Bliss argues, the „mythical‟ prime ministership was continued in the tenure of Wilfrid Laurier, who embodied the nation as a rising and prosperous state, even if the 20th century did not quite belong to Canada, just as surely as Macdonald embodied the nascent one. Mackenzie King was not Laurier or Macdonald, and he could never capture the affection or bond with Canadians his predecessors had. Yet, as evidenced by his political and electoral success, Canadians trusted and admired King‟s political judgement and executive ability. Although his 1935 election slogan “King or Chaos” was rather hyperbolic, it neatly sums up the options that seemed to be presented to the Canadian people. Matheson writes that ““[t]o the public he was a simple man who inspired confidence, and to the cabinet he was the astute party leader and the indispensable man in the Canadian government” (1976: 156). King represented, in other words, the bland but trustworthy and competent „steady hand on the wheel‟ leader. Such political leadership may not inspire in the traditional sense, but it has, nonetheless, significant affective implications. Though Hutchison argues, for instance, that the Canadian people never liked King, and sometimes hated him, they “came to respect him as they respected no other leader, they relied on him as on the seasons”, and they “missed him as a comfortable piece of furniture” when he left the political stage (1952: 5). It is much less clear that the modern prime ministerial institution plays the same symbolic role or carries the same affective import as prime ministers of previous eras. Campbell states that “the Pearson era marked the end of non-charismatic figures quietly pursuing the national agenda through an innate sense of what the public wanted and savvy about how to get this out of the executive-bureaucratic apparatus” (2003: 133). If this is so, the Canadian public may have gotten more than they bargained for. Although in many ways Savoie‟s thesis about the concentration of power in the core executive is accurate, the process has been accompanied by a curious, almost opposing trend: that Canadian politics has become increasingly pluralistic and disjointed. This is the argument of Taras and Pal (1988), who suggest that: “Canadian leaders, especially prime ministers, are, as it were, stranded between a cabinet and presidential style of government, between their old

pre-eminence under the traditional Westminster system, and the new fragmentation which has apparently all but eliminated any clear centre of power” (xiv). The more institutionalized and democentric the prime ministership has become, it seems, the more it loses that ineffable quality of symbolic power. This has had negative consequences for the political system. As Bliss writes, “[n]obody deferred, to Brian Mulroney or any other politician after Trudeau. By the 1980s the democratic spirit, so thoroughly distrusted by Sir John A. and many of his successors, had spread so widely in Canada that the whole political class… was in danger of losing its legitimacy” (2004: 278-279). The Canadian people identified with Macdonald precisely because he was, and saw himself to be elite – because he was the first and the preeminent Canadian aristocrat. Advocates of democentric politics, of broadening the discourse and widening „participation‟ in governance, should understand that there is usually a cost – that „lowering the political hero to our level‟ reduces both the respect given to and the symbolic and affective powers of political leaders. Neil Nevitte famously suggested that a marked „decline of deference‟ had taken place in recent decades – Canadians increasingly no longer trusted government and political institutions to pursue the public good, and they were and are ever more cynical and disaffected. The obvious, and by now trite, diagnosis is that political participation needs to be increased, that citizens need to feel they are empowered and that their voices are heard. Of course, there is some validity to this. However, though the sentiment is not very much in fashion and is apt to be called „anti- democratic‟, it remains: that citizens must also be led, not simply governed. As the Canadian prime ministership has evolved, the nature of its political power has changed. In the first era, which Macdonald created and Laurier, as well as Borden, to a lesser degree, sustained, the prime minister exercised political power through personal, direct politicking among elites and through the party apparatus – party-building was nation-building. In the second era, the prime minister effected power by being the competent executive, fashioning compromises and conciliating among factions represented by regional power-brokers. In the modern era of the prime ministership, instigated primarily by Trudeau‟s administration, it seems the prime minister is simultaneously much closer to the people and much further away. Summary Macdonald‟s prime ministership was, in many ways, typical of the kind of leadership institution which often predominates in the nascent stages of a nation‟s political life. Indeed, as has been noted, some of the similarities to George Washington are quite notable: both presided over their respective founding conferences (London in 1866 and the Constitutional Convention in

Philadelphia in 1787), both were seen as indispensable and both carried a natural air of dignity and distinction, and both set out and exemplified the patterns of conduct in their respective institutions. Of course, there are differences: Macdonald was an „earthy‟ politician, partisan, and „dishonest‟ (the CPR scandal, for one), Washington lofty, detached, scrupulously neutral. The prime ministership of Canada was an adaptation of both its predecessors in the province of Canada and the United Kingdom to the new political context; at the same time, Macdonald “created an office different from anything previously seen within the British Empire or without” (Donaldson 1994: 2). Governance and political discourse were nationally-oriented but centered on elites – political and social. The first prime ministerial era, as such, can also be characterized as having national, almost „mythical‟, symbolic import; by and large, this was a manifestation of the „aristocratic‟ qualities of both Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier. Both embodied the optimistic young Dominion in its formative and consolidative decades. King‟s conduct of the prime ministerial institution, his demeanor and his behavior conditioned by his operational beliefs about politics, set the stage for an executive model of the prime ministership, in which the prime minister was set apart from his colleagues, particularly cabinet ministers, by the brokerage role he carved for himself. This is not to say that „brokerage‟ was not a feature of the first prime ministerial era, as it certainly was. However, my contention is that the first prime ministerial era saw its greatest successes when brokerage could be transcended and national aspirations could supervene on particular ones. „Kingian‟ brokerage, so to speak, almost never sought to create national policies in this sense; rather, national policy was that which could best serve as a consensus position among the sectoral and regional interests, as determined by the prime minister. The prime ministerial role, then, shifted from one of „nation-building‟ to one of „nation-keeping‟, from symbolizing dynamism, optimism, and boldness to representing security, order, and stability. King is described as “a sensitive, clear-headed, political technician”, an administrator par excellence (Bliss 2004: 127). Louis St. Laurent, “Uncle Louis”, though he was much abler than King in capturing the personal affection of Canadians, could not recapture the same „national symbolic‟ affective role of the first prime ministerial era, which both Laurier and Macdonald played to perfection. Diefenbaker was an enigma, both in the prime ministerial story, and in Canadian political history. Too important to be considered „transitional‟, he nevertheless seems a unique case, a sort of „supernova‟ who came in with a bang and ended in an ignominious whimper. Pearson, again, as different as he was from King in personality, inherited and maintained the prime ministerial institution, as recreated by King.

Trudeau‟s prime ministership was the first modern prime ministership. This is rather obvious in terms simply of political style, Trudeau sweeping in as „from out of the cold‟, flashy, charismatic, and relatively young, and sweeping out the stodgy blandness of the previous era. This is not to say, though, that the entire extent of the democentric, institutionalized, and differentiated prime ministership was fully evident during the Trudeau prime ministership. The modern prime ministerial institution is an agglomeration of many factors, not least the tenures of the prime ministers who succeeded Trudeau; certain strands also predated his time. It is plainly the case, though, that Trudeau vastly increased the size and power of the „functional extension‟ of the prime ministerial institution, the Prime Minister‟s Office, as well as centralized control over the civil service by strengthening the Privy Council Office and, arguably, making the Clerk of the Privy Council „Deputy Minister to the Prime Minister‟. Trudeau also did much to move the prime ministerial institution towards the democentric pole; as Westell argues, “made substantial improvements in the machinery of democracy. He shored up Parliament, strengthened the executive, liberalized the Liberal Party, and opened himself to persuasion by public opinion” (1972: 136). Some of these features have changed in their salience, and more recent prime ministers have been more in the mold of King or Pearson than Trudeau or Mulroney in terms of temperament and political style31. However, the core features of the modern prime ministership, as largely instigated by Trudeau, remain, particularly in terms of institutionalization and differentiation. The posited periodization of the Canadian prime ministership is more tentative than the general causal picture of individuals and institutional change. There are, seemingly, glaring

31 For instance, Taras and Pal (1988) note that one of the distinctive features of the modern prime ministership is the relative inexperience of its occupants (xv). Trudeau, for instance, had be en a Member of Parliament only three years before becoming prime minister; Mulroney was elected leader of his party without any parliamentary experience, and became prime minister a year later. Joe Clark and Kim Campbell had lengthier pre- PM experience (seven and five years, respectively), though even these are barely comparable to those of Macdonald, say, who was first elected in 1844, or Laurier, first elected in 1874. This seems to fit with the general picture, since earlier prime ministerial eras would seem to require prime ministers to have broader and deeper party connections, and both governance and personal appeal were much more party-oriented than in the modern era of ‘leader-centered politics’. However, the last three prime ministers have reversed the trend somewhat: Chretien, of course, having been first elected in 1963 and holding numerous cabinet posts before becoming prime minister, but also Paul Martin, first elected in 1988 and serving as finance minister for longer than any other but one.

exceptions to the characteristics of each prime ministerial era within each era. R.B. Bennett, for instance, does not seem to fit the prime ministerial style set out by King; he had the personality of Meighen and the aristocratic style of Macdonald. However, one could think about each prime ministerial era as involving a set of prime ministerial roles and public expectations about those roles. To the extent that a particular prime minister does not seem to fit the asserted pattern of conduct in the office, it may be because she was simply unsuccessful at fulfilling the expectations which were already in place. Thus, I would surmise that, especially, Macdonald, King, and Trudeau were successful in creating and recreating the prime ministership, imbuing the institution with aspects of their individual psychological traits and beliefs, and in turn, setting expectations about the role of the prime minister in Canadian politics and society. Subsequent prime ministers have had to conduct themselves accordingly.

Conclusion

This thesis has argued for the salience of a specified causal mechanism, the „motive force‟ of individuals as psychological agents, in inducing institutional change. At the same time, I recognize the embeddedness of political leaders within an institutional context which also shows path- dependent features, here represented by the hypothesized periodization of Canadian political history in terms of „prime ministerial eras‟: periods in which prime ministerial styles conformed to a general pattern while leaving space for individual differences. I also recognize that many institutional features, particularly the more structural elements, are often more context than individual- dependent. If this thesis has contributed, in its own small way, to an understanding and acknowledgement of the role played by individuals in institutions and by political leaders in the national life of a country such as Canada, it will have been a satisfying accomplishment. Though many of the arguments presented here are contestable, I would not hesitate to assert that if the „presidentialization‟ thesis implies that only in recent decades has the prime ministerial institution taken on more personalistic attributes, then the foregoing analysis of the „prime ministerial difference‟ should provide a rejoinder. The Canadian prime ministership has always been a personal office, though the „personalization‟ has taken different forms. Individual prime ministers, given adequate opportunity and subject to constraints, are significant, though not exhaustive, elements of the causal story of institutional change.

100

Bibliography

Asendorpf, Jens B. “Personality: Traits and Situations”. Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. Philip J. Corr and Gerald Matthews. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 43-53.

Aucoin, Peter. “Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government: From Rational Management to Brokerage Politics”. Canadian Journal of Political Science Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 1986): 3-27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3228004

Bakvis, Herman. “Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canada: An Autocracy in Need of Reform?”. Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter 2001): 60-78.

Bakvis, Herman and Steven B. Wolinetz. “Canada: Executive Dominance and Presidentialization”. The Presidentialization of Politics, ed. Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005. 199-220.

Ballard, Elizabeth J. “Canadian Prime Ministers: Complexity in Political Crisis”. Canadian Psychology Vol. 24, No. 2 (April 1983): 125-129.

Ballard, Elizabeth J. and Peter Suedfeld. “Performance Ratings of Canadian Prime Ministers: Individual and Situational Factors”. Political Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 2 (June 1988): 291-302.

Barber, James D. The Presidential Character: Predicting performance in the White House. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Blick, Andrew and G.W. Jones. “The Power of the Prime Minister”. History and Policy. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-102.html

Bliss, Michael. “Guarding a Most Famous Stream: Trudeau and the Canadian Political Tradition”. Trudeau’s Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, ed. Andrew Cohen and J.L. Granatstein. Toronto: Random House, 1998. 9-20.

Bliss, Michael. Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Chretien. Toronto: HarperPerennial, 2004.

Blondel, Jean and Jean-Louis Thiebault. Political Leadership, Parties and Citizens: The Personalisation of Leadership. London; New York: Routledge, 2010.

Brazier, Rodney. Constitutional Reform. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Brown, Robert Craig. “Fishwives, Plutocrats, Sirens and Other Curious Creatures: Some

101

Questions about Political Leadership in Canada”. Prime Ministers and Premiers: Political Leadership and Public Policy in Canada, ed. Leslie Pal and David Taras. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1988. 27-34.

Calvert, Randall L. “Reputation and Legislative Leadership”. Public Choice Vol. 55 (Sep. 1987): 81-119. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30024793

Campbell, Colin. “The Prime Minister in Canada and the Rise of Personalized Leadership”. Leadership in Context, ed. Erwin C. Hargrove and John E. Owens. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 131-162.

Canon, David T. “The Institutionalization of Leadership in the U. S. Congress”. Legislative Studies Quarterly Vol. 14, No. 3 (Aug. 1989): 415-443. http://www.jstor.org/stable/439887

Caprara, Gianvittorio and Michele Vecchione. “Personality and Politics”. Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. Philip J. Corr and Gerald Matthews. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 589-607.

Charteris-Black, Jonathan. The Communication of Leadership: The Design of Leadership Style. London: Routledge, 2007.

Clark, Joe. “The Canadian Prime Ministership”. Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter, 1981): 32-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27547650

Clemens, Elisabeth S. and James M. Cook. “Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change”. Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 25 (1999): 441-466. http://www.jstor.org/stable/223512

Cloninger, Susan. “Conceptual Issues in Personality Theory”. Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. Philip J. Corr and Gerald Matthews. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 3-26.

Courtney, John C. “Prime Ministerial Character: An Examination of Mackenzie King's Political Leadership”. Canadian Journal of Political Science Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 1976): 77-100. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230872

Coutts, Jim. “Trudeau in Power: A View from Inside the Prime Minister‟s Office”. Trudeau’s Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, ed. Andrew Cohen and J.L. Granatstein. Toronto: Random House, 1998. 143-160.

Creighton, Donald. John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician; The Old Chieftain. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998.

102

Dawson, R. MacGregor. “King, Meighen and Approaches to Political Leadership”. Apex of Power: the Prime Minister and political leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 141-145.

Dawson, R. MacGregor. William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Political Biography, 1874-1923. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1958.

Dion, Leon. “The Concept of Political Leadership: An Analysis”. Canadian Journal of Political Science Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 1968): 2-17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3231692

Dobuzinskis, Laurent. “Rational Policy-Making: Policy, Politics, and Political Science”. Apex of Power: the Prime Minister and political leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 211-228.

Donaldson, Gordon. The Prime Ministers of Canada. Toronto: Doubleday, 1994.

Dunn, Christopher, ed. The Handbook of Canadian Public Administration. Don Mills, ON: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002.

Edelman, Murray. The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1964.

Edinger, Lewis J. “Approaches to the Comparative Analysis of Political Leadership”. The Review of Politics Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn 1990): 509-523. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 1407521

Elcock, Howard. Political Leadership. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2001.

Elgie, Robert. “Models of Executive Politics: A Framework for the Study of Executive Power Relations in Parliamentary and Semi-presidential Regimes”. Political Studies Vol. 45, No. 2 (June 1997): 217-231. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119168973/ PDFSTART

Elgie, Robert. Political Leadership in Liberal Democracies. Houndmills, Basingstoke : Macmillan Press, 1995.

Elms, Alan C. Personality in Politics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

English, John. Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2009.

English, John. “Pierre Elliott Trudeau”. Canada’s Prime Ministers: Macdonald to Trudeau, ed. Ramsay Cook and Réal Bélanger. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2007. 415-452.

103

Esberey, J.E. Knight of the Holy Spirit: A Study of William Lyon Mackenzie King. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980.

Esberey, J.E. “Prime Ministerial Character: An Alternative View”. Canadian Journal of Political Science Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 1976): 101-106. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230873

Fletcher, Frederick J. “The Prime Minister as Public Persuader”. Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 86-111.

Fox, Paul W. “Psychology, Politics, and Hegetology”. Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol.13, No. 4 (Dec., 1980): 675-690. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230238

Grafstein, Robert. “Political Freedom and Political Action”. The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Sep. 1986): 464-479. http://www.jstor.org/stable/448342

Granatstein, J.L. “King and His Cabinet: The War Years”. Mackenzie King: Widening the Debate, ed. John English and J.O. Stubbs. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977. 173-190.

Green, Donald P. and Ian Shapiro. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1994.

Greif, Avner and David Laitin. “A Theory of Endogenous Institutional Change”. American Political Science Review Vol. 98, No. 4 (Nov. 2004): 633-652. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 4145329

Greenstein, Fred I. The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004.

Gwyn, Richard. “Trudeau: The Idea of Canadianism”. Trudeau’s Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, ed. Andrew Cohen and J.L. Granatstein. Toronto: Random House, 1998. 21-34.

Hargrove, Erwin C. and John E. Owens. “Introduction: Political Leadership in Context”. Leadership in Context, ed. Erwin C. Hargrove and John E. Owens. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 1-16.

Hennessy, Peter. The Prime Minister: the Office and its Holders since 1945. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

104

Hockin, Thomas. “The Prime Minister and Political Leadership: An Introduction to Some Restraints and Imperatives”. Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 2-21.

Hockin, Thomas, ed. “Three Canadian Prime Ministers Discuss the Office”. Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 248-270.

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. “On the Limits of Rational Choice Theory”. Working Paper. https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2299/691/1/S47.pdf

Howlett, Michael, Luc Bernier, Keith Brownsey and Christopher Dunn. “Modern Canadian Governance: Political-Adminstrative Styles and Executive Organization in Canada”. Executive Styles in Canada: Cabinet Structures and Leadership Practices in Canadian Government, ed. Luc Bernier, Keith Brownsey, and Michael Howlett. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2005. 3-16.

Houghton, David Patrick. Political Pychology: Situations, Individuals, and Cases. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Hutchison, Bruce. The Incredible Canadian. Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co, 1952.

Hutchison, Bruce. Mr. Prime Minister:1867-1964. Don Mills, ON: Longmans, 1964.

Ie, Kenny. “Simon Says or Tug of War? Strategic Games in the Leader-Follower Dynamic”. Term Paper for POLI 643: Rational Choice (at Concordia University), Winter 2009.

Johnson, J.K and Peter B. Waite. “Sir John Alexander Macdonald”. Canada’s Prime Ministers: Macdonald to Trudeau, ed. Ramsay Cook and Réal Bélanger. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2007. 1-50.

Jones, Bryan D. “Causation, Constraint, and Political Leadership”. Leadership and Politics, ed. Bryan D. Jones. Lawrence, KS: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1989. 3-14.

Jones, G.W. “The Study of Prime Ministers: A Framework for Analysis”. West European Politics,Vol. 14, No. 2 (1991): 1-8.

King, W.L. Mackenzie. Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/king/index-e.html

Kohli, Atul, Peter Evans, Peter J. Katzenstein, Adam Przeworski, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph,

105

James C. Scott, and Theda Skocpol. “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium”. World Politics vol. 48, no. 1 (1996): 1-49. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ world_politics/v048/48.1kohli.html

Lalonde, Marc. “The changing role of the Prime Minister‟s Office”. Canadian Public Administration, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec. 1971): 509-537.

Lasswell, Harold D. Power and Personality. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

Lau, Richard R. “Models of Decision-Making”. Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, eds. David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 19-59.

MacDermot, T.W.L. “The Political Ideas of John A. Macdonald”. The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep. 1933): 247-264.

MacDonald, L. Ian. “The Best Prime Minister of the Last 50 Years – Pearson, by a Landslide”. Policy Options (June-July 2003): 8-12. http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/jun03/macdonald2.pdf

Macdonald, Donald S. “The Trudeau Cabinet: A Memoir”. Trudeau’s Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, ed. Andrew Cohen and J.L. Granatstein. Toronto: Random House, 1998. 163-176.

Mallory, J.R. “Mackenzie King and the Origins of the Cabinet Secretariat”. Canadian Public Administration Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 1976): 254-266.

March, James G. and Johan P. Olsen. “Elaborating the „New Institutionalism‟”. The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, ed. R.A.W. Rhodes, Sarah A. Binder, and Bert A. Rockman. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. 3-22.

Marcus, George E. “The Psychology of Emotion and Politics”. Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 182-221.

Martin, Paul. “King: The View from the Backbench and the Cabinet Table”. Mackenzie King: Widening the Debate, ed. John English and J.O. Stubbs. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977. 30-39.

Matheny, Kenneth B. and Roy R. Kern. “Personality and Illness”. The concise Corsini encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science, ed. W. Edward Craighead and Charles B. Nemeroff. Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, c2004. 685-687.

106

Matheson, William A. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Toronto: Metheun, 1976.

Neatby, H. Blair. “Mackenzie King and the Historians”. Mackenzie King: Widening the Debate, ed. John English and J.O. Stubbs. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977. 1-14.

Neatby, H. Blair. “The Political Ideas of William Lyon Mackenzie King”. The Political Ideas of the Prime Ministers of Canada, ed. Marcel Hamelin. Ottawa: Univ. of Ottawa, 1969. 121- 138.

Neatby, H. Blair. The Politics of Chaos: Canada in the thirties. Toronto: MacMillan, 1972.

Neatby, H. Blair. “William Lyon Mackenzie King”. Canada’s Prime Ministers: Macdonald to Trudeau, ed. Ramsay Cook and Réal Bélanger. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2007. 251-298.

Neatby, H. Blair. William Lyon Mackenzie King: 1932-1939. The Prism of Unity. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976.

Nesbitt-Larking, Paul. “Complexes and Cognitive Complexity: Canadian Contributions to Political Psychology”. Canadian Journal of Political Science Vol. 36, No. 4 (Sep. 2003): 879-896. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3233215

Nesbitt-Larking, Paul. “Political Psychology in Canada”. Political Psychology Vol. 25, No. 1 (Feb. 2004): 97-114. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3792525

Noel, S.J.R. “The Prime Minister‟s Role in a Consociational Democracy”. Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 154-158.

Pervin, Lawrence A. “Personality”. Encyclopedia of psychology, vol. 6, ed. Alan E. Kazdin. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2000. 100-106.

Phenix, Patricia. Private Demons: The Tragic Personal Life of John A. Macdonald. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006.

Pickersgill, J.W. “Mackenzie King‟s Political Attitudes and Public Policies: A Personal Impression”. Mackenzie King: Widening the Debate, ed. John English and J.O. Stubbs. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977. 15-29.

Plamondon, Robert. Blue Thunder: The Truth about Conservatives from Macdonald to Harper. Toronto: Key Porter, 2009.

107

Pope, Joseph. Correspondence of Sir John Macdonald. Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.

Preece, Rod. “The Political Wisdom of Sir John A. Macdonald”. Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Sep. 1984): 459-486. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3227603

Presthus, Robert. Elite Accommodation in Canadian Politics. Toronto: MacMillan, 1973.

Punnett, R.M. The Prime Minister in Canadian Government and Politics. Toronto: MacMillan, 1977.

Radwanski, George. Trudeau. Toronto: MacMillan, 1978.

Ragsdale, Lyn and John J. Theis III. “The Institutionalization of the American Presidency, 1924-92”. American Journal of Political Science Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct. 1997): 1280-1318. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2960490

Reisenzein, Rainer and Hannelore Weber. “Personality and Emotion”. Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. Philip J. Corr and Gerald Matthews. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. 54-71.

Riker, William H. The Art of Political Manipulation. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986.

Robertson, Gordon. Memoirs of a Very Civil Servant. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2000.

Robins, Robert S. and Robert M. Dorn. “Stress and Political Leadership”. Politics and the Life Sciences Vol. 12, No. 1 (Feb. 1993): 3-17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4235902

Rose, Richard. “Prime Ministers in Parliamentary Democracies”. West European Politics, Vol. 14, no. 2 (1991): 9-24.

Rubenzer, Steven J., Thomas R. Faschingbauer, and Deniz S. Ones. “Assessments of America‟s Chief Executives: Insights from Biographers and Objective Personality Measures”. Political Leadership for the New Century: Personality and Behaviour among American Leaders, ed. Linda O. Valenty and Ofer Feldman. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.105-134.

Savoie, Donald. “The Federal Government: Revisiting Court Government in Canada”. Executive Styles in Canada: Cabinet Structures and Leadership Practices in Canadian Government, ed. Luc Bernier, Keith Brownsey, and Michael Howlett. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2005. 17-46.

Savoie, Donald. Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics. Toronto: Univ. Of Toronto Press, 1999.

108

Schindeler, Fred. “The Prime Minister and the Cabinet: History and Development”. Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 22-47.

Schultz, Richard. “Prime ministerial government, Central Agencies, and Operating Departments: Towards a more realistic analysis”. Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 229-236.

Scott, F.R. “W.L.M.K.”. The Eye of the Needle: Satire, Sorties, Sundries. Montreal: Contact Press, 1957. http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/scott_fr/poem5.htm

Simonton, Dean Keith. “Putting the Best Leaders in the White House: Personality, Policy, and Performance”. Political Psychology Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep. 1993): 537-548. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791713

Smith, Cynthia M. with Jack MacLeod. Sir John A.: An Anecdotal Life of John A. Macdonald. Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989.

Southam, Nancy, ed. Pierre: Colleagues and Friends talk about the Trudeau they knew. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005.

Stark, Frank. “The Prime Minister as Symbol: Unifier or Optimizer?”. Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Sep. 1973): 514-515. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3231319

Steinberg, Blema. Shame and Humiliation: Presidential Decision Making on Vietnam. Montreal: McGill-Queen‟s UP, 1996.

Strickland, Bonnie, ed. “Personality”. The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology. Detroit: Gale, 2001. 490-492.

Szablowski, George J. “The Optimal Policy-Making System: Implications for the Canadian Political Process”. Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 197-210.

Szablowski, George J. “The Prime Minister as Symbol: A Rejoinder”. Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Sep. 1973): 516-517. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3231320

Taras, David and Leslie A. Pal. “Introduction: The Changing Faces of Political Power in Canada”. Prime Ministers and Premiers: Political Leadership and Public Policy in Canada, ed. Leslie A. Pal and David Taras. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1988.

109

Thelen, Kathleen. “How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis”. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003. 208-240.

Thelen, Kathleen and Sven Steinmo. “Historical institutionalism in comparative politics”. Structuring Politics: Historical institutionalism in comparative analysis, ed. Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992. 1-32.

Thomas, Paul G. “Governing from the Centre: Reconceptualizing the Role of the PM and Cabinet”. Policy Options (Dec. 2003 - Jan. 2004): 79-85. http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/ dec03/thomas.pdf

Trudeau, Pierre. Against the Current: Selected Writings, 1939-1996, ed. Gerard Pelletier. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996.

Trudeau, Pierre. Federalism and the French Canadians. Toronto: Macmillan, 1968.

Trudeau, Pierre. Memoirs. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993.

Waite, Peter. “The Political Ideas of John A. Macdonald”. The Political Ideas of the Prime Ministers of Canada, ed. Marcel Hamelin. Ottawa: Univ. of Ottawa, 1969. 51-68.

Walker, Stephen G. “The Evolution of Operational Code Analysis”. Political Psychology, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June 1990): 403-418. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791696

Ward, Ian. The English Constitution: Myths and Realities. Oxford; Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2004.

Wardhaugh, Robert. “Considering Both Sides of the Ledger: J.W. Dafoe and Mackenzie King”. Mackenzie King: Citizenship and Community, ed. John English, Kenneth McLaughlin, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer. Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 2002. 80-98.

Watson, David. Mood and Temperament. New York: The Guilford Press, 2000.

Weller, Patrick. First Among Equals: Prime Ministers in Westminster Systems. Sydney; Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985.

Westell, Anthony. Paradox: Trudeau as Prime Minister. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

110

Westhues, Kenneth. “Sociology for a New Century: Mackenzie King‟s First Career”. Mackenzie King: Citizenship and Community, ed. John English, Kenneth McLaughlin, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer. Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 2002. 186-210.

Whitaker, Reg. The Government Party: Organizing and Financing the Liberal Party of Canada, 1930-58. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977.

White, Graham. Cabinets and First Ministers. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.

Winter, David G. “Personality and Political Behavior”. Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, eds. David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 110-145.

Winter, David G. “Things I‟ve Learned about Personality from Studying Political Leaders at a Distance”. Journal of Personality, Vol. 73 (2005): 557-584.

Wright, Gerald C.V. “Mackenzie King: Power over the Political Executive”. Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada, ed. Thomas Hockin. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1977.

111