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Legislators, Bureaucrats, and Canadian Democracy: The Long and the Short of It

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Lee Sigelman  and
William G. Vanderbok
Lee Sigelman
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
William G. Vanderbok
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
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Abstract

The bureaucratization of the political process that characterizes twentieth century politics in many countries has not bypassed Canada—as evidenced by skyrocketing rates of government employment and expenditure and, even more dramatically, by the ever-expanding policy-making power of Canadian bureaucracy. One observer sees the civil service as occupying an increasingly strategic role in Canadian politics, a condition that

reflects in part the expanding role of modern government into highly technical areas, which tends to augment the discretion of permanent officials because legislators are obliged to delegate to them the administration of complex affairs, including the responsibility for drafting and adjudicating great amounts of sub-legislation required to “fill in the details” of the necessarily broad, organic statutes passed by Parliament. Some indication of the scale of such discretion is found in the fact that, during the period 1963–8, an annual average of 4,130 Orders-in-Council were passed in Ottawa, a substantial proportion of which provided for delegating authority to prescribe rules and regulations to ministers and their permanent advisers. By contrast, the number of laws passed annually by Canadian federal parliaments is rarely over one hundred.

Type
Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 1977 , pp. 615 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1977

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References

1 Overviews of these developments are presented in Hodgetts, J. E. and Dwivedi, O. P., “The Growth of Government Employment in Canada,” Canadian Public Administration 12 (1969), 224–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Byers, R. B., “Perceptions of Parliamentary Surveillance of the Executive: The Case of Canadian Defense Policy,” this Journal 5 (1972), 234–50.Google Scholar

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19 More specifically, the number of civil servants and legislators, respectively, interviewed at each site was: Ottawa, 90 and 142; Ontario, 49 and 50; British Columbia, 36 and 34; and Quebec, 39 and 43.

20 Long, “Bureaucracy and Constitutionalism,” 816.

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26 Presthus, Elites.

27 Kenneth J. Meier and Lloyd G. Nigro, “Representative Bureaucracy and Policy Preferences: A Study in the Attitudes of Federal Executives,” paper delivered at the 1975 meeting of the American Political Science Association.

28 Ibid.