Canadian multilateral intergovernmental institutions and the limits of institutional innovation

ABSTRACT

In 2003, the premiers of Canada’s ten provinces and three territories established the Council of the Federation (CoF) to strengthen interprovincial cooperation and exercise leadership on national issues. However, the purpose of COF in practice has not been the subject of systematic study. Against the backdrop of its predecessor, the Annual Premiers’ Conference, and the broader institutional and economic forces that contribute more generally to weak institutionalization of Canada’s multilateral intergovernmental forums, this paper considers the functioning of CoF in practice by analysing the nature of the joint positions of premiers expressed in communiqués it has issued to the end of Conservative government rule, 2015. This analysis reveals the spectrum of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ measures that CoF has undertaken, and the nature of integration of CoF with other multilateral intergovernmental forums. It concludes that CoF is not immune to the underlying forces contributing more generally to the weak institutionalization of multilateral intergovernmental councils.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• federalism
• intergovernmental relations
• Council of the Federation
• intergovernmental forums

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are three territories in northern Canada that do not have the constitutional status of a province and are subordinate to the central government; they only exercise powers delegated to them by the federal government. Over time, representatives of the territorial governments have become regular participants in multilateral intergovernmental forums (Alcantara, 2013). Despite their desire to be treated as governments equal to the Crown, in a nation-to-nation relationship, Indigenous communities are largely treated as stakeholders in intergovernmental relations among federal, provincial and territorial governments, and consulted on an ad hoc basis (Alcantara and Spicer, 2016).

2. The Council of Ministers of Education in Canada (CMEC) starkly contrasts the fluid, ad hoc, weakly institutionalized PT meetings of ministers of various policy sectors. Ministers meet at least once year, and CMEC is supported by a secretariat with 60 staff. An Agreed Memorandum governs CMEC, with funding shared between the federal and provincial governments 25/75%. However, the federal government has no seat at the table of ministers because education is exclusively provincial jurisdiction. CMEC has an executive of five provinces, and the chair rotates every two years. The secretariat houses, among other things, the Canadian Education Statistics Council, a partnership between CMEC and Statistics Canada (Wood, 2015; see also Wallner, 2014). CMEC is a sui generic case however, buoyed by both local and international expectations around obligations to monitor pupil progress (Graefe et al., 2013).

3. Some provinces have also begun to hold annual joint cabinet meetings with neighbouring provinces (Adam et al., 2015).

4. While ‘immigration’ is a constitutionally concurrent area of jurisdiction, it appears in the last column of Appendix 1 (CoF governments would like known their collective position on actions they want the federal government to take within federal jurisdiction) because the action they were requesting pertained to the federal aspect of immigration.