Paper presented to the conference of the Canadian Political Science Association June 1-3 2010, Montreal The Centre Cannot Hold: Pierre Trudeau, the War Measures Act, and the Nature of Prime Ministerial Power H.D. Munroe1,2 Abstract: The notion that the Prime Minister of Canada has become an autocracy is common in popular discourse. Some, such as Savoie, suggest that Pierre Trudeau marked the beginnings of this trend. Bakvis, and to a lesser extent Aucoin, hold alternate views of Prime Ministerial power in which Trudeau represents continuity rather than change. This paper draws on archival research and interviews with former cabinet ministers to explore the nature of Prime Ministerial power at a pivotal moment in Trudeau’s first term: The invocation of the War Measures Act in October of 1970. The analysis finds that Trudeau was far less autocratic than is generally believed, that the empirical foundations of Savoie’s argument may need re-examining, and that federalism is a significant constraint on the exercise of Prime Ministerial power. The extent and nature of the power of the Prime Minister is a topic of perennial discussion in Canadian politics (Matheson, 1976; Schindeler, cited in Hockin, 1977; Aucoin, 1986; Savoie, 1999a; Savoie, 1999b; Bakvis, 2001), particularly in popular discourse, where the tropes of the Prime Minister as autocrat or Canada as “elected dictatorship” have enjoyed enduring popularity (Hockin, 1977; Bakvis, 2001; Savoie, 2008: 49). Unsurprisingly, the academy has produced more nuanced understandings of the nature of Prime Ministerial power - but even here there is hardly consensus. Savoie’s work (1999a; 1999b; 2008) portrays a Prime Minister who effectively personifies executive power at the expense of cabinet, while Bakvis (2001) holds that while Prime Ministers have always had more power than the notion of ‘first among equals’ implies, the idea of Prime Minister as autocrat exaggerates the power of the office. Aucoin (1986), meanwhile, suggests that the organizational machinery through which Prime Ministers wield their power reflects their individual styles of management and approaches to politics, rather than the other way around. The significance of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s ascendancy to the office of Prime Minister in 1968 is a point of contention between these three images of Prime Ministerial power. Trudeau, depending on one’s 1 Ph.D. Candidate at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary. 2 The author wishes to thank Kaija Belfry, Ph.D. Candidate in Canadian Politics at the University of British Columbia, for advice, insight, and comments on this paper; thanks are also due to the Hon. Marc Lalonde and other participants in this research for sharing their experiences, and to Mr. Lalonde for authorizing access to the Personal and Political Documents series of the Trudeau fonds. The Centre Cannot Hold - H.D. Munroe perspective, was either the architect of Prime Ministerial autocracy, or merely another powerful Prime Minister in a series of powerful Prime Ministers. That Trudeau made significant changes to the central machinery of government in the early years of his stint as Prime Minister is widely acknowledged (Matheson, 1976: 87- 98, 236-237; Hockin, 1977: 2; Radwanski, 1978: 145-147; Aucoin, 1986: 9; Savoie, 1999a: 9; Savoie, 1999b: 695). What is less clear is the practical effect that these changes have had on the power of the Prime Minister. This paper proposes to examine how the “machine that Pierre built” (Radwanski, 1978: 145) functioned in practice during a crucial decision early in the Trudeau years, specifically the decision to invoke the War Measures Act in October 1970. What does this decision tell us about the nature of Prime Ministerial power in Canada, and about the three images of Prime Ministerial power developed by Aucoin, Savoie, and Bakvis? This paper draws on archival records and interviews with former members of Trudeau’s cabinet and Prime Ministers’ Office to analyze this landmark decision. This analysis reveals that the power of the Prime Minister is more constrained than is commonly thought, particularly by the nature of federalism. It also shows that cabinet played a much greater role in the decision than is generally believed for the Trudeau years. If Canada is governed from the centre (Savoie, 1999a), then, in the events of October 1970, the centre could not hold. Three Images of Prime Ministerial Power There is considerable agreement between Savoie and Bakvis, and to a lesser extent Aucoin, on the visible features of Prime Ministerial power. All three works take as a starting point the premise that Canadian parliamentary democracy is executive-centric; in other words, that power is located more in cabinet than in parliament (Matheson, 1976: 1, 79; Hockin, 1977: 4; Franks, 1987: 6, 11). Savoie and Bakvis concur on the significance of the powers of appointment that accrue to the Prime Minister, and all three scholars agree that Trudeau made significant changes to the central machinery of government - and even that the intended goal of these changes was to rationalize governance (Aucoin, 1986: 8; Savoie, 1999b). Where their perspectives diverge is in the interpretation of the practical effects that these visible features of Prime Ministerial power have had on cabinet governance, and on the impacts of federalism and federal-provincial relations on the exercise of this power. Savoie’s interpretation of Prime Ministerial power has two elements. The first is, as he puts it, that “Cabinet has joined Parliament as an institution being bypassed” (1999b: 635). The second is that Pierre Trudeau is the architect of this sea change in Canadian governance (1999a; 1999b). The result is that cabinet has been relegated to a mere ‘focus group’ for the Prime Minister (Savoie, 1999a: 3); this, combined with the tradition that the Prime Minister draws the consensus of cabinet (Malcolmson and Myers, 2005: 114), creates a situation where the Canadian Prime Minister can in principle exercise quasi- presidential power without the checks and balances of a presidential system of government (Savoie, 1999a: 105). Bakvis (2001), on the other hand, echoes the earlier work of Matheson (1976) in asserting that the Prime Minister of Canada is neither ‘first among equals’ nor an autocrat. From CPSA, June 1-3, 2010 2 The Centre Cannot Hold - H.D. Munroe this perspective, Trudeau is neither more nor less powerful than any other Prime Minister, and his changes to the machinery of government are not as significant as Savoie’s account suggests. Aucoin’s (1986) analysis of those changes provides an alternative explanation, namely that the personal leadership and political styles of individual Prime Ministers shapes the organization and functioning of the central apparatus in Ottawa, rather than being themselves shaped by a structural imperative arising from the centralized legacy of Trudeau. The first key point of difference between Savoie, Bakvis and Aucoin is thus differing views of the practical relationship between Prime Minister and cabinet, and the significance (or insignificance) of Trudeau’s changes to the central machinery that supports that relationship. Because there is consensus on the visible features of Prime Ministerial power - specifically that the Prime Minister does wield far-reaching powers of appointment, and that Trudeau did make significant and visible changes to the central apparatus of government - the analytical task of this paper is to investigate the less-visible impacts of those features: Did Trudeau’s changes fundamentally change how cabinet made decisions - from ‘first among equals’ to focus group? A reading of Savoie and of Bakvis’ work, also, reveals a second interesting area of investigation - that of the role that federal-provincial relations play in both driving power into the hands of the Prime Minister, and constraining the exercise of that power. Savoie’s (1999b) analysis of the causes of the centralization of power in Canada includes a discussion of how an increasing importance of federal-provincial relations - combined with the convention that provincial Premiers relate to the Prime Minister as equals, as at First Ministers’ meetings - has conspired to put more and more policy issues into the Prime Minister’s hands. The central conclusion of Bakvis’ (2001) treatment of the subject of Prime Ministerial power, on the other hand, is that federalism is the most significant check on the Prime Minister’s freedom of action. This is because so many policy spheres require some level of cooperation or at least coordination with provincial governments, a point that is also taken up by Franks (1987: 7, 13) under the rubric of “executive federalism” - the notion that a major role of the Prime Minister is to navigate federal-provincial relationships, and that these two levels of government are increasingly inter-related. Federalism, and the dynamics of federal-provincial relations that it creates, thus occupies a curious dual role that is equally worth investigating. In short, then, there are two areas that this paper’s analysis of the War Measures Act decision will try to illuminate. The first is the precise workings of the three-way relationship between the Prime Minister, the central agencies of government, and cabinet. Were the changes that Trudeau made a significant break from the past, and did they lay the foundations of Prime Ministerial autocracy - or did they simply reflect Trudeau’s style of management, and leave him no more able to steer the course of the nation than his predecessors? The second area for investigation is the relationship between the Prime Minister and the framework of federalism; this is particularly of interest in the case of the War Measures Act, where national unity and the relationship between the federal government and the province of Quebec were at the very heart of the issue. CPSA, June 1-3, 2010 3 The Centre Cannot Hold - H.D.