Graham Steele: Cabinet obsession unhealthy for democracy

There's one little word that sets to racing the heart of a politician.

Cabinet.

Being in cabinet is every politician's dream.

For too many, the dream becomes an obsession, like Tolkien's ring.

When that happens, the other important parts of an MLA's legislative dutieslike careful attention to laws, budgets, policy, and good government generallyare undervalued, and badly neglected.

That's part of the reason our legislature's a hot mess.

Least understood

Cabinet is the most ballyhooed yet least understood part of government.

You can look through the constitution and all the laws of Nova Scotia and you won't find the word "cabinet" anywhere.

Everything that goes on in cabinet is hush-hush. Ministers swear to uphold cabinet secrecy forever.

Almost everything to do with cabinet is done by convention, not law. Most of the rules aren't written anywhere.

This most holy of political bodies is a ghost.

Choosing ministers

By convention, the cabinet is chaired by the premier. The premier is the person who can command majority support in the House.

The premier doesn't even have to be an MLA. The last time we had a non-MLA premier in Nova Scotia was Russell MacLellan, for a few months in 1997.

Once we have a premier, he can name anyone he likes to cabinet.

The premier always chooses ministers from his own party, though he doesn't have to. The Ivany Report suggested a coalition government, which implies ministers from all parties.

Don't hold your breath waiting for that one. It's too mind-blowing an idea for our politicians to grasp.

Here's another mind-blowing idea: ministers don't even have to be MLAs.

In 1993, Premier Don Cameron appointed the unelected Gwen Haliburton and Debi Forsyth-Smith to his Cabinet.

Both ran and lost in the 1993 election, and we haven't had a non-MLA minister since

How Cabinet is chosen

Don't think for a moment that the cabinet is made up of the very best people in a government caucus.

When forming the cabinet, a premier has plenty to think about besides talent. Geography, gender, and ethnicity all count.

Seniority counts too, as does knitting together any party fissures, as do any political favours owed and collected.

So the cabinet, in the end, is not exactly designed for smart, efficient deliberation.

Cumbersome process

The cabinet process is cumbersome and slow.That ensures a certain amount of rigour in the policy recommendations that come forward, but it can also be a bottleneck.

The premier decides what's on the agenda. If he doesn't agree with something, it gets deep-sixed. If he does agree with it, his cabinet won't reject it. So cabinet, at most, tweaks details.

Very few ministers ever serve under more than one governmentKaren Casey being a prominent recent exceptionso it's hard to know for sure how one cabinet compares to another.

But I'm willing to bet that all modern cabinets are overwhelmed by the difficulty and variety of issues that come before them.Any minister who says they read every page of every cabinet document every week is pulling your leg.

The inner sanctum

The government of Nova Scotia is a huge, sprawling, $10-billion operation.Governing has to happen, but cabinet is the wrong place to do it.

Inevitably, then, the real decision-making has to happen somewhere else.

Maybe it's in the Premier's Office, or the Treasury and Policy Board, or with a few influential people in the local tavern.(Quick influence test: do you have the premier's personal mobile number?)

This is the biggest shock for new cabinet ministers. You've spent your political life being told that cabinet is the inner sanctum. Finally you get there. Then you realize there's an even more inner sanctum, and you're still not in it.

Pernicious focus

Our politicians' focus on cabinet is perniciousand unhealthy for our democracy.

Too many of them are intent on holding the position, and the political and social status that goes with it, rather than what they're going to achieve when they get there.

The desire to be in cabinet, or to stay in cabinet, is probably the single strongest factor keeping government MLAs quiet and pliable.

An MLA is only really free when they don't care whether they're in cabinet or not. Those MLAs may exist, but they're hard to find.