What is the most useless cabinet position?
In the recent chatter about the summer cabinet shuffle relatively little commentary has been devoted to where these pols are being shuffled hither and yon. A great deal of time and energy has been spent observing how the careers of Ms Raitt, Mr Kenney and Mr Moore are proceeding nicely. Actually discussing what these ministers are doing at their offices seems a bit beside the point.
We'd rather talk about people than things. So much easier that way.
Perhaps if we looked too closely we might start asking questions. Like why a nation of 34 million needs 39 cabinet ministers? Abraham Lincoln was able to free the slaves, save the Union and encourage the settlement of the American West with a mere eight cabinet ministers. And this with a government run without computers, telephones or even typewriters. Just paper, ink and a few thousand miles of telegraph wires. The population of the whole of the United States in 1860, both North and South, was 31.4 million.
But in those days governments were confined to hum-drum matters, such as winning immensely bloody wars and subsidizing the occasional transcontinental railroad. Today the remit of the state is far more ambitious. Beyond maintaining public order and some key bits of infrastructure, the modern state takes it upon itself to educate, scold, monitor and regulate virtually every facet of modern life. Thus, in a sense, we need 39 wise men and women to govern over us. We would likely need 39,000 and there would still be work left undone.
Except such a feat is impossible. You cannot plan an economy, much less something even more complex such as a whole society, from a few office buildings in Ottawa. When those in charge are non-experts rotated in and out based on political expediency, the result is what Mises called planned chaos. Actual experts might even do worse. No one is really in charge of the Leviathan state. No matter how powerful Stephen Harper seems, he cannot fight against the full weight of bureaucratic inertia. He might, if he felt ambitious, give a few hard kicks.
Years ago I remember seeing a poster with a quote from Albert Einstein. It went along the lines that war cannot be civilized, it can only be abolished. The same logic applies to the modern Leviathan state. You cannot reform a socialized health system, you either try to survive its ravages or destroy it utterly. Human beings detest dramatic choices, so instead we limp along with a health care system that isn't all that good at providing health care, but isn't yet completely horrible. Of course the boomers are still just beginning to feel their first serious aches and pains. An ER at a large Toronto hospital already looks a bit like planned chaos. Give it another decade.
In their hearts, I suspect, the more intelligent deputy ministers and politicians know this. I suspect that Stephen Harper, arguably along with King and Trudeau the most intelligent men to have ever held the PM's office, knows that the whole thing is a bloody farce. Perhaps he reasons that better a farce run by a wise man than by a fool. It's not a logic I'm partial to, but I kind of understand.
Managing what is is bad enough. Managing people's expectations is far worse. When the state has been mother, father and father confessor since before the average Canadian was born, they cannot project an alternative. The logic of the welfare state is that no problem is too big or too small, no counterfeit right too absurd, that it cannot be legislated and bureaucratized into a never ending solution.
Kingsley Amis, the Angry Young Man who famously became a very grumpy old one, noted that: "If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop." Extending that a bit further we can say this: "If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's community." That would be another way of saying socialism. That's an ugly word that even the NDP dislikes to use. Socialism is something that happens to other people. We believe in social democracy. Not quite the same thing, but close enough as to made no real difference.
Thus we have a platoon of junior ministers, holding the Trudeau-era title of Minister of State, with responsibility for:
Small Business and Tourism, and Agriculture
Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario
Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency
Multiculturalism
Seniors
Sport
Finance
Social Development
Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario
Western Economic Diversification
Ask any halfway educated Canadian, say the typical university graduate, why exactly Canada needs a Minister of State for Sport and you will get no clear answer, not even a half decent guess. Apply the same question to a professor of political science and you will get no better response. Ask a senior bureaucrat you will get not response at all, except a stream platitudes each less discernible than the last. Yet all will swear that Canada needs a Minister of State for Sport. I mean, what have you got against Sport? Or Multiculturalism? Or Western Economic Diversification?
Since no decent consensus fearing Canadian objects to these things in and of themselves, they do not object to them being supervised, managed, regulated or subsidized by the government. Modern Canada's true and unquestioned stamp of approval on any facet of everyday life is government authorization. No action or thought is truly noble unless a government department has been consecrated in its name.
Blessed is the name of the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification.
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