We could learn something from the days when royal commissions actually got things done

National Post, 24 March 2024

A peculiarly Canadian approach to policy-making outside of the partisan political framework

The obsequies this week for Brian Mulroney were an occasion to remember the substance of his record. Less attention has been paid to the method. Mulroney’s premiership was the last to make use of a peculiarly Canadian approach to policy-making: the royal commission.

Though not always styled “royal,” wide-ranging government commissions — holding hearings, taking testimony, travelling the country, funding scholarly research, doing historical examinations, making sweeping policy recommendations — have been a key part of Canadian governance since before Confederation. But it may have died with Mulroney’s exit from office.

The first such “commission” might be considered Lord Durham’s report after the rebellions of 1837-1838. It was characteristic of what would follow in that a single person held enormous sway over the results. Sometimes the commission was just one person, other times a pair (often the case when examining French-English relations). Even if there was a panel of commissioners, the head was the dominant figure.

Durham — most famous for observing that British North America included “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state” — advocated the union of Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) and the introduction of responsible government. At the time the Maritimes were not interested in union, but the Act of Union and the united Province of Canada set the colonies on the path to Confederation.

Responsible government was a creative recommendation for giving Parliament effective control in a constitutional monarchy. It took time to develop, but the Westminster democratic system of Crown-in-Parliament employed all over the world — including in Britain — owes a great deal to Durham’s recommendation of responsible government.

There have been dozens of commissions over the years, some apparently trivial — Commission on Weighing of Butter and Cheese (1912) — and others massively influential. Mackenzie King set up the Rowell-Sirois Commission in 1937 to deal with a question posed by the Depression in relation to “Dominion-Provincial” relations. How could the federal spending power be used to assist provinces who did not have the resources to deal with pressing social problems?

Other significant commissions would follow, on the arts, letters and sciences (Massey Commission 1949-51), bilingualism and biculturalism (Dunton-Laurendeau 1963-1970) and the status of women (Bird Commission 1967-1970). Borrowing a page from King, Pierre Trudeau created a royal commission during the recession of the early 1980s. The Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada was chaired by Donald Macdonald, one of Trudeau’s former finance ministers. It proved to be one of the most influential commissions in the history of Canadian economic policy.

Reporting in 1985, the Macdonald Commission recommended free trade with the United States. While Mulroney had been opposed to free trade earlier, the commission report changed his mind. It became his signature economic policy initiative and the dominant issue in the 1988 election.

In the aftermath of Meech Lake, Mulroney would unleash two commissions from sea to sea to attend to national unity. There was the Spicer Commission (Citizen’s Forum on Canada’s Future) and the Beaudoin-Edwards Committee. Ground was thus prepared for the Charlottetown Accord.

After the Oka Crisis in 1990, Mulroney set up the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, chaired by George Erasmus, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. Reporting in 1995, it provided a far-reaching vision for Aboriginal self-government and repeal of the Indian Act. Neither came to pass.

Up to and including Mulroney’s time, the grand commission was a distinctively, if not uniquely, Canadian way to conduct high-quality academic research, consult widely and consider policy options on vexing problems outside of the partisan political framework. In sector after sector, from the Constitution and fiscal policy to newspapers and fisheries, much of the architecture of federal policy was drafted by commissions. If the Senate was intended to be the chamber of sober, second thought, commissions were the forum for careful, detailed and reflective first thought.

What happened after Mulroney? Perhaps the rise of populism — Reform in the West, the Bloc Québécois in Quebec — meant less deference to the establishment grandees who run royal commissions. Perhaps the increasing centralization of all matters in the prime minister’s office meant less willingness to give genuine influence to those who cannot be controlled. Perhaps the urgency of 1990s policy — the fiscal crisis and the second sovereignty referendum — required more immediate action than commissions permit. Perhaps all of that.

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