As a thought experiment, suppose cabinet mattered. Or at least, suppose we thought it should.
Suppose, that is, there were a number of serious issues facing the country — the economy, national security, climate change, social and economic inequality — of a kind that placed a premium on effective government action, and on cabinet as the central institution of that government.
In such circumstances we should insist not only that cabinet should perform, collectively, at the highest possible level, but that every member of it should be the best candidate for the job — that each should possess those qualities of judgment, experience, leadership, managerial competence, communications ability and so on that are required of a minister. That is, if cabinet mattered.
I realize I am describing a fantasy. Cabinet does not matter, and has not for some time, which is how we came to have a federal cabinet with 40 people in it. Even the notion that it should matter is very much a minority view. Rather, we expect cabinet to perform a rather different role from the one I have described. It does not govern: that is the job of the prime minister, and of the group of political staff he has around him, and of the bureaucracy beyond them. The cabinet’s job, rather, is to provide representation — to “reflect the country back to itself” — in a way that we used to expect of Parliament.
Indeed, better than Parliament. For whereas the composition of Parliament is ultimately for the voting public to decide, as an appointed body cabinet is infinitely customizable. Its makeup can be tailored to the precise designs of the prime minister, unburdened by any expectation as to the appointees’ individual judgment, experience etc but only that collectively ministers should exhibit the proper mix of genders, races, languages, regions and other elements needed to fulfil cabinet’s real function, that of representation.
So in a sense there is nothing new or controversial in the policy the Liberal Party of Canada has lately announced, that “a Liberal cabinet will have an equal number of women and men.” The idea that we would judge ministers as individuals, on the basis of their ability to govern the country — that train left the station long ago. Still, it has never previously been put so explicitly. The notion that cabinet should be appointed according to a fixed gender quota, 50-50 — that is new. Cabinets in the past might have been graded according to how diverse they were generally, but never before has it been policy to hit a specific target come what may.
That may have merely been hypocrisy. Although we had decided that cabinet did not matter, we still somehow expected that it should, at least a little. Thus there was until recently a hesitancy to come out explicitly for quotas of this kind, for fear this would imply a lack of commitment to — you should pardon the expression — merit.
The frankest expression of this denies the word has any meaning, except as a code for white male privilege. More often, it is elided: ask “why don’t we just hire the best person for the job,” and you will receive an answer such as “no one will be chosen who is not qualified.” What distinguishes the Liberal approach, perhaps, is the flat denial that there is any choice to be made between the two.
If merit is defined in traditional terms, this is obvious nonsense. Suppose, in a governing caucus of, say, 180 members, one-third are women (their current proportion of the House of Commons is 25 per cent). And suppose that the talents and experience to be desired in a cabinet minister are distributed equally between the sexes, such that a fifth of either — 12 women, 24 men — might be considered cabinet material. If nevertheless the cabinet must have an equal number of women and men, then in a cabinet of 36 six women who should not have been appointed will be, and six men who should have been appointed will not be. That may be many things, but it is not the merit principle.
The only way you can square that circle is if you redefine merit to mean diversity. As it is explained in the Liberal democratic reform plan, “government is more effective when decision-makers at the leadership level accurately represent Canada’s diversity.” Or as Kate Heartfield argues in the Ottawa Citizen: “Why does the life experience of being a woman not count as ‘merit’?” There are many different kinds of experience: a more diverse cabinet would be able to draw upon more of them.
Except… the Liberals aren’t proposing to require all of those different sorts of life experiences to be represented in cabinet. Just one: gender. This selectivity would seem hard to defend. Why a fixed quota for each sex, but not each race? Why not reserve a certain percentage of cabinet for aboriginal Canadians? Why not quotas by class, or disability? If a white, university-educated woman from Rosedale brings a different perspective, how is it that an Inuit fisherman from Iqaluit does not?
Well, you can’t solve every problem at once. Except setting a fixed quota of cabinet seats for women doesn’t just mean members of other diversity groups do not receive the same guarantees. It guarantees, rather, that there will be fewer of them — as a matter of arithmetic. Suppose the choice is between a white woman and a black man. Ordinarily either choice might be considered a win for diversity; but if there is a gender quota to be met, it is the former who must be chosen. Granted, the conflict in the present case could be resolved by appointing a black woman, but the greater the number of groups you are trying to divide cabinet into, the harder the arithmetic becomes.
In the end, what the Liberals will have achieved is not “merit through diversity.” A cabinet based on a single fixed quota will be committed to neither.
National Post
