Revelations about the finance department’s awarding of ad contracts during the 1990s without following the “appropriate guidelines”, is bound to soon raise the issue of ministerial responsibility over the actions of his department. So I thought I’d have a brief look at the topic. This being a blog entry and not something I’m being paid for, of course, I’m not going to write much about it, and therefore it should not be considered an exhaustive study of the topic, unless you consider that I might get exhausted from writing it (sorry about the run-on sentence).


There are 2 major schools of thought when it comes to the topic of ministerial responsibility. The first believes holds that “Legally, each minister is responsible for all official actions by his or her department.” ( definition quoted from MSN Encarta. Link)

The second school of thought is that responsibility for the actions of a government department is held by the chief executive, and that the chief executive is accountable to the minister for the performance of the department. Thus, the minister is not directly accountable for anything that happens within the department.
Translation: When a minister doesn’t wish to get fired, he can blame his underlings like a cheap coward.

The following link is to a British article on governmental departmental responsibility:
Link

It’s a bit long, and so I’ll just sum it up with 3 quotes from it:


The convention of ministerial responsibility, the mechanism through which constitutional accountability is delivered, requires that ministers are accountable to Parliament for their own actions and those of their department and most interpretations of the convention focus on causal responsibility. (Mike’s note: causal responsibility=blame)

…They also require ministers, as part of the elected government, to be part of the accountability process, rather than detached from it.

However, this raises questions about what a minister ‘could be expected to know’ and has resulted in attempts by ministers to minimise expectations and distance themselves from culpability through the employment of the policy/operations division, which implies that ministers cannot be expected to know anything about operational matters, and the responsibility/accountability distinction, which implies that they therefore cannot be blamed for any operational error or for a series of errors.

***
OK, so the point was, umm, the point was that if Paul Martin wants to escape blame for his department's improper handling of ad contracts, he might in fact get away with it.
But that would only prove that he was a sucky cabinet minister, and suggests he is going to be a sucky Prime Minister (using only technical terms of course).

For the most up-to-date information on what's going on in the Paul Martin government, visit the Warren Kinsella website.