It’s fun getting new stuff, isn’t it? I feel certain some shiny new stainless steel mixing bowls to replace the shabby old chipped glass ones in my kitchen cabinet will improve my cooking considerably. And the chattering classes are all excited that Canada has a new federal cabinet. Can dazzling policy innovation be far behind?
Speaking of the Constitution, a key reason for this absurd proliferation of ministers is to absorb the legislature into the executive branch with perks ranging from extra salary to a chauffeur to “prestige,” at least inside the fishbowl, not to execute useful policy. And many others, like the supposed “Minister of Families, Children and Social Development,” exist to hand money to citizens to buy votes, also neither a key part of our constitutional heritage nor a desirable innovation. (Nor would the new “Minister of Canadian Heritage” be in favour of that heritage if she knew what it was.)
It’s also a bit of a giveaway that the most senior posts remained in the same hands: Deputy PM/Finance Minister, Foreign Affairs and, in this administration a crucial one, Environment and Climate Change. Also, Prime Minister. And it’s a difficult trick, after eight years in power, to present yourself as the face of change.
Now I do not wish to be naive or cause naivete, including about politics. It’s been an ugly mess since the invention of the slogan, partly because of the winner-take-all nature of government, in stark contrast to the market, creates incentives to engage in desperate tactical deceits. And also because of the largely unproductive bickering between Thomas Sowell’s “constrained” visionaries who think reality is tricky and comb the pages of history for rare, precious tried-and-true methods of creating a modicum of peace, order, and good government, and the “unconstrained” who think prosperity and peace the default state of human society, and comb through the ranks of their ideological foes for common, ugly, tried-and-convicted villains deriving material or psychological satisfaction from causing unnecessary suffering.
Justin Trudeau and his associates are overwhelmingly of the latter disposition, and their conviction that achieving great things depends on imagining them first too often shades into imagining them instead. If it were cynical, they’d embarrass a lot more easily. But it works like cynicism, and causes it, because it so often leads them to think image is everything.
Perhaps noticing this unhappy implication, she hastily tacked on that it was also “important for the Treasury Board to continue delivering on our policies.” But that “continue” undercuts everything, signalling that there’s no change of direction or even messaging, just the faces of the PM’s hapless subordinates.
As for me, I’m looking to put those mixing bowls somewhere prominent while I continue to, uh, microwave discount frozen quiche.