Paul Wells is right to note that a government's power to make funding and staffing decisions which may go largely unnoticed makes for one of the ways in which it's most able to alter the fabric of Canadian society - and there's plenty of reason for concern about how the Harper Cons are using that power. So in figuring out how to reform our current system to protect against the likes of Stephen Harper, let's turn next to the question of staffing and appointments.
Needless to say, this area makes for one of the largest disappointments under Harper. On paper, the public appointments commission promised by the Cons and set up under the Accountability Act would seem to have been an effective means of ensuring that public service staffing would be carried out without a partisan slant. But any hope of positive change anytime soon was rlost when Harper announced that a party bagman would be his choice to chair the commission, then decided to throw a temper tantrum when the other parties didn't play along with the appointment - with the result that Canadians are on the hook for the cost of a nonexistent commission, while the Cons turn the public service as a whole into a partisan breeding ground.
Meanwhile, the Cons have similarly abused their appointment powers for other independent offices - rewarding unqualified party hacks for some roles which are supposed to involve actual independent oversight, while simply declining to make appointments to others. So it's worth wondering what can be done to ensure both that independent offices are actually filled, and that their inhabitants aren't appointed purely on a partisan basis.
Fortunately, there's at least some precedent for getting the opposition parties involved in key federal appointments: while the Cons chose not to bother in their most recent Supreme Court appointment, the earlier selection of Marshall Rothstein through a process featuring multipartisan steps appears to have been carried out without a hitch. So why not develop an adapted process to fill independent offices as well?
Ideally, that would involve a list of qualified candidates for each post developed by consensus among the parties in Parliament (or at least the approval of a majority of the parties for each candidate). From there, one would expect a few steps to narrow the field - likely involving a shortlist developed by the government, some elimination of candidates on an all-party or multiparty basis, then a final appointment by the PM.
For now, the opposition parties might be particularly well served to combine statutory proposals to entrench a multi-party process with some work among the opposition parties to develop consensus lists intended to help fill some of the key positions which are currently vacant or occupied only on an interim basis - including the chair of the Public Service Commission, the Information Commissioner, and the RCMP Complaint Commissioner as recent high-profile examples. Once the opposition parties presented their lists of qualified candidates, I'd think that at worst Harper would face pressure to make permanent appointments to the roles - and at best he might well be criticized as obstructing the proper functioning of government if he didn't work with the names provided to him.
Of course, at the end of the day the Prime Minister would maintain the power to make the final appointment even under the proposed changes. And the road to making even those limited amendments would be a long one: it would take a combination of statutory changes and some convention development to formally entrench a process along the lines of the above as the means of appointing independent officers, and Harper might well bristle at any suggestion that he should pay attention to anybody else's list of candidates. But a focus on ensuring that independent officers actually fit the title should at the very least put some serious pressure on the Cons - and may well produce some positive democratic reforms for a long time to come.
Update: Michael Ignatieff is making similar suggestions when it comes to appointing senators. I'd think the independent offices should be a higher priority, but there's no reason the idea couldn't work for both.
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