External Shocks and Westminster Executive Governance: New Brunswick's All-Party Cabinet Committee on COVID-19.

• Date: 22 September 2020
• Author: Lewis, J.P.

This research note compares the responses of Canadian provincial cabinet governments to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic health crisis with a focus on New Brunswick's unique and somewhat exceptional formation of an allparty cabinet committee on COVID-19 in March 2020. The article reviews the responses of provincial cabinets to the pandemic with special attention to their relationship to opposition parties and leaders. While the Savoie thesis has dominated Canadian understanding of cabinet governance, we suggest that centralization of power is only one likely feature and not the dominant feature of cabinet government. With our findings of the current cases, we argue that the defining characteristic of cabinet government in Westminster systems is its "flexibility of method" (1) and "capacity for change". (2) The article concludes that the New Brunswick response, without further qualitative study, remains a mystery, as the political climate in the province leading up to the pandemic possessed all the traits of a highly partisan, electorally volatile institutional environment.

Background

The idea of a dynamic and flexible Westminsterstyle cabinet is not a new observation; depictions of the institution as defined by these characteristics are found in early Canadian cabinet research. Bill Matheson, in his noted 1976 book The Prime Minister and Cabinet, argued that the cabinet system had a "capacity for change". (3) Decades before him, in 1946, former Clerk of the Privy Council Arnold Heeney observed that Canadian cabinet had a "flexibility of method". (4) This perception of cabinet as a dynamic political decision-making body has been lost to the focus on centralization as the defining institutional feature. Cabinet is a highly malleable and fluid institution; the evolution of cabinet governance is a collision of institutional path dependency, personal political style, and unavoidable external shocks. Any pattern or trend of centralization or decentralization of power and decision-making can be accelerated, reduced or paused. Yes, first ministers as political actors are unrivaled in power within the Westminster system. Still, the possibility of institutional reform is the attraction of cabinet to first minsters.

While academics have routinely focused on first ministers' style and approach to cabinet governance, (5) there is a notable gap to further pursue the late Christopher Dunn's work (6) on the institutionalized cabinet and the ever-evolving processes and structures of cabinet committee arrangements. As federal and provincial cabinets have increased in size, cabinet committees have become the core decision-making bodies in our system and require more study. (7) Powerful standing central cabinet committees modeled after Pierre Trudeau's Priorities and Planning Committee are normally the focus of research on cabinet committees. Yet, ad-hoc, issue-based, and consequential cabinet committees modelled after Robert Borden's War Cabinet Committee have become a common coordinating tool for first ministers. Some notable contemporary federal examples include Brian Mulroney's Canadian Unity and Constitutional Negotiations committee (19911993), Jean Chretien's National Unity committee (1995) and more recently, Justin Trudeau's committee on Canada-United States relations. An obvious feature within these cabinet committees is that they are composed of members from a sole party. Coalition cabinets or cabinet committees that include opposition members are of the rarest kind in Canadian politics. Confederation and World War I were two notable times that opposition members were sworn into the Privy Council to serve in the government. In both cases, transformative events brought about dramatic institutional design change. The COVID-19 crisis has brought one Canadian province, New Brunswick, to this new and historic governing bargain. The following section will briefly review other provincial responses across Canada before moving to the New Brunswick case in more detail.

How Canadian provincial cabinets responded to the COVID-19

The first days of COVID-19 reaching Canada collided with provincial budget season and quickly turned to most legislatures suspending sittings. Provincial legislatures and governments navigated these developments in varying ways. Most provincial cabinets maintained a routine cabinet government during the COVID-19 crisis. Some have invited opposition members to all-party legislative or cabinet level committees but only New Brunswick has sworn the opposition members into their COVID-19 cabinet committee.

Quebec, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Nova Scotia have demonstrated a more congenial path, at least in the early days of the crisis (8). In both Alberta and Manitoba, the opposition was less than cooperative in supporting the budget and the governments were less than collegial in their legislative truce (9). For the purposes of this article, we will be more closely examining the responses of British Columbia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island--all of which have minority governments and each of which produced a different governing arrangement, indicating a flexibility of the cabinet system. The table below outlines the legislative and electoral situation in each of these provinces:

The degree of cooperation in each of these provinces has been just as unpredictable as the pandemic, in part due to the high election speculation on both coasts in the lead-up to the COVID-19 crisis. On the east coast, the survival of the governments in New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador were particularly threatened. In all these cases, the necessity to manage the COVID-19 crisis allowed the government to avoid spring elections. The supply and confidence agreement in British Columbia and agreement between the governing Progressive Conservatives and the People's Alliance in New Brunswick both ended by late summer as the respective premiers went to lieutenant-governors to ask for elections. However, the latter province's all-party cabinet committee arguably negated the need for such an agreement. General public satisfaction with...