Canada's Democracy Delusion: How Power Slipped From Citizens to Insiders
Parliament looks like debate, but it’s theatre. The real decisions are made behind closed doors by unelected advisers.
It’s unusual for voices from opposite ends of Canada’s political spectrum to issue the same warning. Andrew Coyne—a CBC mainstay and veteran establishment journalist—has often defended positions I’ve strongly opposed, from the Freedom Convoy crackdown to the government’s handling of COVID. Yet despite those differences, his recent analysis and mine converge on the same unsettling truth: Canada’s democracy is not what it seems.
The representative Canadians believe they are electing—the legislator who speaks and votes on their behalf—has largely become a fiction. In practice, the system operates in a rigid, top-down fashion that bears little resemblance to the civics-class ideal. The gap between perception and reality has never been wider. That is the real dissonance at the core of Canadian politics. And when people who rarely agree begin to trace the same cracks in the foundation, it becomes clear that what’s being defended as “our democracy” is less a shared possession of citizens than a private preserve of insiders. Or, as George Carlin put it, it’s a big club—and you’re not in it.
The Myth We’re Sold vs. The Reality We Live
Ask the average Canadian what an MP does, and you’ll get a civics-textbook answer: represent the riding’s interests in Ottawa, legislate, scrutinize spending, and hold the government to account. In Westminster language, that’s the core of “responsible government.”
Now look at how Parliament actually behaves. In the 42nd Parliament (2015–2019), MPs voted with their party a staggering 99.6% of the time. The most “rebellious” MP dissented on a mere 3.4% of divisions. Coyne contrasts this with the United Kingdom, where routine backbench rebellion is far more common; and with the United States, where party-line voting around 95% is cited as evidence of extreme polarization. By those standards, Canada’s numbers aren’t just disciplined—they’re unanimous theatre.
It gets worse. In Tragedy in the Commons, a Samara Centre project of exit interviews with former MPs, the participants struggled to define their own job. Many described themselves as ambassadors, social workers, teachers, or communicators. Very few called themselves what the role demands: legislators. Fewer still talked about the three historic functions of a Member of Parliament—make law, oversee the public purse, and determine confidence in the government.
Put bluntly: the public thinks it’s electing lawmakers and watchdogs; the system is producing party delegates and salespeople.
Governing From the Centre: How Power Actually Works
Coyne’s thesis can be boiled down to a simple paradox. As the scale and complexity of government has expanded, authority hasn’t been delegated outward to ministers, committees, and Parliament. It’s been consolidated inward—into the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and a tight orbit of unelected advisers, aided by the Privy Council Office.
In theory, Cabinet is where policy is contested, refined, and decided. In practice, Cabinet has become a message room. The key files are shaped in the PMO, and ministers sell the outcome. The classical “first among equals” model—primus inter pares—has given way to what Coyne calls primus sine paribus: first without equal.
The centralization isn’t just cultural; it’s structural. Over time, the PMO has asserted control over ministerial staffing—especially chiefs of staff. While MPs hire their own office staff (constituency and Hill), ministers’ exempt staff are often vetted or placed with PMO oversight. That matters. In any organization, personnel is policy. If the people closest to a minister ultimately answer to the centre, the minister’s effective autonomy is narrowed before the policy memo even hits the desk.
Layer onto this the astonishing breadth of appointment powers vested in the prime minister: the Governor General; the Senate; the Supreme Court and federal judiciary; heads of the RCMP, CSIS, the Canadian Armed Forces; the clerk of the Privy Council and deputy ministers; the Bank of Canada governor; the CBC chair; CEOs of Crown corporations; ambassadors; and an alphabet of agencies and boards. Advisory panels exist for some of these roles, and recent governments have experimented with more formalized processes—but they are typically non-binding and reversible. Over a long enough tenure, the system calibrates itself to the preferences of one office.
None of this requires cartoon-villain intent. Incentives do the work. If your reappointment or next posting depends on being “sound” in the eyes of the centre, you will be sound. If backbenchers know cabinet is large and constantly reshuffled, they will keep their heads down. If committees lack the budget, data access, and drafting capacity to challenge departments, they will perform accountability without delivering it. The machinery hums, even when the operators change.
The Revolving Door: A Case Study in Unelected Power
If you want a face for this system, meet Gerald Butts. He served as Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary—the most powerful unelected position in Ottawa—until the SNC-Lavalin affair triggered his resignation in 2019. He then re-emerged as a vice-chairman at Eurasia Group, a major global risk consultancy. Around that time, Diana Fox Carney—Mark Carney’s wife—was also a senior adviser at the firm, and public releases noted she worked closely with Butts.
Fast-forward to 2025. As Mark Carney rose to lead the Liberal Party and form government, multiple reports described Butts as an influential informal adviser—helping guide campaign strategy and transition. That phrasing matters. It’s not a claim that he’s holding an office. It’s an observation about how power actually works: the centre is as much a network as a room, and influence often sits just outside formal lines on an org chart.
What does this illustrate? The most durable authority in Ottawa is frequently unelected and off-stage. It cycles between government and consultancy, between close counsel and public obscurity, but it never leaves the gravitational field of the centre. The same handful of people can shape an agenda, resign, regroup, and return with more connections and less scrutiny than before. Voters may change the cast of elected characters; the network persists.
This is not unique to any one party. It is a consequence of a design problem that invites centralization and rewards it. Switch out the names, and the pattern repeats.
Cabinet Bloat and Parliamentary Theatre
Consider cabinet size. When almost forty ministers sat around Justin Trudeau’s table, symbolism quickly outran substance. More ministers mean more titles, more regional or demographic boxes ticked, and more caucus members who might reasonably expect promotion if they behave. As Coyne notes, with nearly forty ministers and 153 government MPs, the average backbencher has roughly a one-in-four chance of sitting at the big table in a given term—and the true odds improve over a government’s lifespan as resignations and shuffles open new spots. Nothing disciplines like the promise of preferment.
Meanwhile, watch Question Period with fresh eyes. You’ll see message tracks, not arguments; lines to be repeated, not positions to be defended and refined. When mistakes happen—and they do in every government—the reflex is to run out the clock rather than to correct course. Committees, which should be the sober engine rooms of accountability, are too often partisan standoffs or exercises in procedural trench warfare. The result is a Parliament that looks busy to the cameras but isn’t equipped to force better policy.
When Law Meets the Centre: SNC-Lavalin and the Attorney General
If there is one episode that clarified the stakes, it was SNC-Lavalin. As former justice minister and attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould recounted, she faced sustained pressure from the prime minister and senior officials (such as Gerald Butts) to intervene in a criminal prosecution—pressure that violated the spirit of prosecutorial independence. The attorney general is supposed to be insulated from political meddling on specific cases for precisely this reason. Yet the logic of the centre—we decide, you comply—bled into an area where the law says it cannot go.
You don’t need to accept every detail of every account to grasp the lesson. The PMO’s muscle memory had grown so strong that even red-line roles were treated as files to be managed. When a system’s habit is central control, it will test every boundary until it meets one that pushes back harder.
The Finance Minister as “Rubber Stamp”
Another window into the system is Bill Morneau’s memoir, Where To from Here. Morneau writes that as finance minister he became “something between a figurehead and a rubber stamp.” Getting a meeting with the prime minister on budget matters—the finance minister’s core file—grew difficult. He was told to send notes to PMO staff for briefing. Whether you agree with Morneau’s politics is irrelevant here. The point is institutional: if the person nominally responsible for the country’s finances can’t get decisions made in the room where they’re supposed to be made, then the room is somewhere else.
Appointments: The Quiet Architecture of Control
Appointments are the quiet architecture of centralization. Canadians would be right to expect robust, transparent, and binding processes for roles that shape the rules of the game—the judiciary, the Senate, watchdogs, Crown corporations. In recent years we’ve seen advisory panels, shortlists, and public rationales. Those steps are better than pure leader’s prerogative. But if panels are non-binding and easily replaced, they become a gloss on the old model rather than a constraint.
Contrast this with the public outcry in other democracies when governments try to push even modestly at judicial appointments. In Canada, a prime minister can (and does) appoint or heavily influence appointments across the entire federal architecture with little sustained public scrutiny. We normalize what would be a constitutional emergency elsewhere because we think it has always been this way—and because our civic culture largely accepts the leader’s office as the place where things get done.
Why It Keeps Getting Worse
Three dynamics reinforce one another.
Incentives: MPs who behave get promoted; ministers who toe the line stay ministers; advisers who keep the centre happy get more sway.
Capacity: Parliament lacks the research muscle, drafting bandwidth, and independent data access to consistently challenge departments or the PMO on substance.
Complacency: Canadians don’t experience immediate pain from centralization. Services still run (more or less). So long as the country feels stable, complaints about “process” sound abstract.
But the costs are real. When call-making is concentrated in a small circle, blind spots grow. Alternatives go untested. Errors scale. And because the decision-makers are unelected and insulated, feedback loops break. What you get instead are PR loops—carefully crafted lines, prepared clips, comms responses to comms responses—while the policy engine wheezes.
“Protect Our Democracy” (From Whom?)
This is where the rhetoric turns perverse. The people who benefit from the current arrangement tell you that we must “protect our democracy.” And we should protect it: equal franchise, free speech, fair elections, the rule of law. But watch closely how the phrase is used in Canadian politics. Too often it functions like a moat around the castle. “Protect our democracy” reads as “protect our control of these institutions from those who might demand they be shared.”
If “our” includes you, it should mean real representation and real accountability. It should mean MPs who legislate and scrutinize, not recite. It should mean ministers who decide and defend, not deploy talking points. It should mean appointments that operationalize independence rather than formalize dependence. It should mean courts and watchdogs that can push back, not panels that can be replaced.
The test is simple: can ordinary citizens meaningfully alter the course of government between elections by making their case through the institutions we have? If the answer is “only at the margins,” then the democratic deficit is not a slogan—it’s the operating system.
What a Fix Would Look Like (And Why We Don’t Have It)
If the problem is structural, the fix is structural too. It could look something like this:
Caucus power that actually exists: secret-ballot leadership reviews at set intervals; codified space for free votes on non-confidence matters; intra-party rules that limit punitive whipping.
Cabinet size caps: fewer ministers, clearer lines of responsibility, and public logs of cabinet deliberation processes (not content), so we can see that decision-making occurs where it should.
Ministerial staffing autonomy: ministers choose and are accountable for their chiefs of staff; PMO vetoes become narrow and published when exercised.
Binding appointment processes: statutory, multi-party panels with supermajority rules for shortlists; staggered, non-renewable terms for key roles; cooling-off periods between partisan jobs and appointments.
Committee muscle: larger research budgets; guaranteed access to program-level spending data; mandatory government responses to committee recommendations within fixed timelines.
Attorney General independence: split the justice minister and attorney general roles at the federal level, with clear non-interference protocols enforceable by sanction.
If that seems ambitious, ask yourself why. None of these proposals rewrites the Constitution. None abolishes Westminster. All of them are in line with the spirit of responsible government: let the executive govern, but make it answerable to the people’s representatives and to institutions with teeth.
We don’t have these reforms for two reasons: the centre won’t give up power voluntarily, and the public hasn’t demanded it loudly enough. The people most able to change the rules are the people the rules currently reward. And many Canadians, understandably busy living their lives, assume the system they learned in school is the one they live under. Until that illusion cracks, the incentives won’t.
Back to Coyne—and the Strange Comfort of Agreement
This brings me back to Coyne. He and I disagree on plenty. But on the central question—is Canada governed by a Parliament that holds an accountable executive, or by an executive court that performs Parliament?—we agree. His data and narrative, from party-line voting to cabinet bloat to the scope of appointment powers, are not partisan talking points. They’re institutional facts. You can prefer different policies, different leaders, different parties, and still see that the machine itself is failing to do what it says on the label.
The irony is that it shouldn’t require agreement across the spectrum to notice a design flaw. But perhaps that’s what it takes. When someone you often oppose and someone you often agree with both describe the same dysfunction, the argument is no longer left vs. right. It is rulers vs. rules. It is personalities vs. process. It is their “our democracy” vs. a genuinely common one.
The Plainest Possible Conclusion
Canada is quickly losing its reputation as a free, peaceful, and prosperous nation. That decline is subtle (to most), which is what makes it so dangerous. Centralization doesn’t come announced as a crisis—it creeps in disguised as routine politics, as “business as usual.” By the time people notice, much of the damage is already done.
The problem isn’t only that power has been swallowed by the Prime Minister’s Office. It’s that Canadians don’t see how thoroughly this has happened. We vote with the image of one system in mind, but are governed by another altogether: a rigid, top-down apparatus that turns Parliament into theatre, Cabinet into a communications arm, and citizens into an audience to be managed.
So when you hear the phrase “protect our democracy,” ask who “our” really refers to. The club will always try to stay exclusive. The point of democracy was never to burn down the clubhouse. It was to unlock the doors, post the rules, and ensure that the members—not the managers—decide how its run.