Ignorance is no excuse

“I didn’t know . . . about the Chinese spying on our MPs . . . about moving Bernard to medium security . . . about . . .”

This has become the mantra of the Prime Minister and several federal cabinet ministers over the past few years, and you know what? I believe them. I even believe the Prime Minister, mostly, that he didn’t know either. But that does not relieve any of them of their responsibility to know and it certainly does not relieve the Prime Minister.

So how could this happen? Among the interesting possibilities is the current practice of removing the power from ministers to hire their own chiefs of staff. Instead, ministers are allotted individuals hired by the PMO where they are told that they report first, and owe allegiance only to, the PMO – not to the Prime Minister, but to his office, where his chief of staff, Katie Telford, has her hot little hands on the reins of power.

Reporting to Katie is a cadre of what we used to call “twinkies,” 20-something-year-olds, who hold the keys to incoming information. They get the emails and the mail. And the telephone calls. They decide what to answer, what to pass on or hold tight to themselves. We are told the PMO gets 500 emails a day as if this were an overwhelming number. It is not; the average businessperson gets 120 emails a day. Google deals with a lot of them, but wise managers still check the “trash” to make sure nothing ends up there that is important.

So why would important information from Corrections or from CSIS or the RCMP not be flagged as Important or even Top Secret? I am sure it is. And I am pretty sure but not convinced it is read. But why doesn’t it get to the minister or the Prime Minster? Or even to Katie?

There are a couple of possibilities. The first is that the reader is not doing his or her job. They may scan the information and not consider it important or take it seriously or worse, don’t read it at all.

Secondly, they may read it and decide not to share the information with their minister. Or they share it with Katie, who decides it is trivial and does not pass it on. Or she may do so in an offhand manner such as. “Oh yeah, there were some CSIS notes that MP so and so is being targeted by the Chinese.” lt may not register with the PM because there are items that may interest him much more in the briefing that morning. Or she may just decide herself not to pass it on. Nor does she alert the minister. Or she may have passed the information to the minister through his Chief of Staff, who may have decided to keep it to himself.

Why would they do this?

“Information is power” is the title of the political staff’s operational manual. It doesn’t take more than that one meeting with the PMO saying, “You report to this office, not to the minister . . .” for most of the staffers to realize that they have just been handed a big piece of cheese. Suddenly they are in a position to know more and sooner than their supposed boss. It’s a heady feeling.

If they don’t understand the significance of this power when they first arrive, they soon learn it from their peers. A former minister who lost the election in 2021 says that staff deliberately kept her in the dark. She even overheard one of them counselling a recruit that Information is Power and to dole it out carefully.

This “emasculates” the minister in the sense that it removes a great deal of their power. Now everyone knows more than they do. Their deputy minister also reports to the PMO through the Clerk of the Privy Council, their boss. The minister’s is reduced to a talking head. No wonder they have to read their speaking notes.

I have been told by several sources that caucus meetings in this government are a farce. If ministers are contacted by constituents and have a burning issue to address, often that opportunity to bring the question up occurs only at caucus. But no, MPs don’t stand and address the PM, as we used to, or even go and speak to him privately as the meeting carries on.

Instead, they are instructed to submit the question in advance. It is then vetted and rewritten by the PMO who hands it back to the Minister or member to read along with a scripted answer.

Did I mention that staff attend caucus meetings? That was a distinct no-no in the Mulroney government. Caucus was for members only, a place where you could say what you wanted, criticize the PM, ask questions, or disagree with a policy. Wise ministers listened because this was the word from the constituents, and it was feedback that often kept them out of trouble. It also kept the Prime Minister in touch with the mood of his members and allowed him to quell incipient internal rebellions while keeping abreast of direct information as much as possible, not through intermediaries, but directly from the members themselves.

Today, however, managing the message has also contributed to no message at all, not just at the national caucus of the governing party but at the local level. If you call a minister’s office or even the office of a member or try to email you may be met with a blank wall. And I hate to say it, but this disease has spread across all parties where the response may be an automated email thanking you, bah, blah, blah. Phone calls are not answered.

This does not apply to every message. There is a secret path to the member or minister in the form of a private email which goes directly to them but that address is seldom shared. Although one would think that important agencies would use this channel to get straight to the minister, this does not appear to have happened, presumably because the messengers were told that their first line of communication is the PMO.

It is interesting to note that even some members of the legacy media are beginning to question this top-down information management system. They can see that this information funnel is causing serious damage to the way the government is run. Indeed, former Special Rapporteur on Chinese Interference David Johnston referenced this obliquely in his report, saying there were issues with communications. He said, “the machinery of government needs significant improvements because the flow of intelligence information within government is haphazard and disorganized.”

NOTE: The same hiring practice is in place at the Legislature. It should be changed. Ministers need to be held responsible and that is hard to do if there are intermediaries in place who have more access to the premier that they do. – Editor