Gomery's Blinders and Canadian Federalism

Gomery II: Fear of Blurring and Lack of Temperantia

GOMERYII: FEAR OF BLURRING AND LACK OF TEMPERANTIA Je comptaissur ses doigtset je me suis trompe. -Jim Corcoran (2005) INTRODUCTION Justice John Gomery's phase one report, Who Is Responsible? (Gomery I),filedin November2005, landed like a grenade. His phase two report, Restoring Accountability: Recommendations (Gomery II), filed in February 2006, generated more of a whimper than a bang. Reforming is not as entertaining as publicly blaming. Yet the repercussions of the ideas put forward in GomeryIIonthemode ofgoverning in Canada may well be significant,so they deserve some criticalattention. Pessimists anticipated that Gomery II would be limited to suggesting some adjustmentsto the machinery of government in order to improve it marginally; optimists saw the Gomery inquiry as a potential glasnost that would throw some light on poor governance processes and prepare a wished-for perestroika of Canadian federalism (Paquet 2005a). At the end of the day, the recommendations of Gomery II are neither as trivial as feared nor as inspiring as hoped for. A great weakness of the report is its failure to factor in the challengesofgovernancein aworld in whichpower,resources, and information are now widely distributed. While this 53 54 Gomery's Blinders and Canadian Federalism new reality has been recognized in some of the background research studies of the commission of inquiry (Roberts 2006), it is not a feature of the Gomery II report itself. In this kind of world, coordination and collaboration are crucial requirements, both at the political-administrative interface and horizontally among the different players. This occlusion has allowed a romanticized view of the public administration system to prevail.Amindset has taken hold in the report that has determined that firewalls have to be built everywhere, despite the existence of a world of governance that calls for continuous collaboration, social learning, and much blurring of roles (Thacher and Rein 2004). As a result, Gomery II is an amalgam of useful if general and banal recommendations, along with others that are seriously wrong-headed. This emerging world of collaboration must also be able to count on fail-safe mechanisms and crucial mavens who accumulate information and knowledge about many dimensionsofthegoverningprocess.Suchfeaturesareessential to ensure that the system does not fall prey to saboteurs and will be able, when needed, to generate innovative, reasonable, and negotiated arrangements that are likely to receive general support. As a result, it is crucial to maintain the conditions necessary for the government of the day to govern effectively and creatively.Gomery,in his second report, does not appear to have understood this point. A FOCUS ON BLAME Gomery I's diagnosis is built on the judge's personal choices about which evidence to accept and on his judgments about culpability (Gomery 2005, 3). Gomery II also focuses "on the need to pinpoint who is responsible when things go wrong, and who is to blame" (Gomery 2006, 9). To do so, Gomery II becomes obsessively preoccupied with defining the roles and responsibilities of the different political officials and senior Gomery II: Fear of Blurring and Lack of Temperantia 55 public servants (especiallydeputy ministers) precisely so that it is clear where the finger should be pointed when things go wrong. Gomery I is contentious because it appears not to provide a sufficiently rich and substantive base of evidence to persuasively support many of its conclusions, especially with respect to assigning blame and exoneration (Paquet 2006a). Gomery II is proving to be equally contentious because, in the context of complex and ever-changing social systems such as Canadian governance, interconnectedness and interactions are always present, and pinpointing responsibility may be not only difficult but also outright misguided. Things may have gone wrong not as a result of any one person's deeds or misdeeds but as the result of a constellation of innocuous elements or bad habits that have developed over time in a system (Dorner 1997). Indeed, Gomery's obsession with pinpointing blame and apportioning punishment (or enabling its apportionment) generated significant flaws in both reports. Gomery was additionally hampered inpreparing his second report (as he himself admits) by his lack of knowledge and experience in public administration. As a result, he decided to put in place a researchprogram as well as abroadconsultation initiative guided by an advisory committeeand tolean heavily on a special adviser, Donald Savoie, a public administration expert. The majority of the research team, and certainly the special adviser himself, are on the record as strong believers in the...