Well, the PMO is not going to shrivel and go away. We have—Patrice has used a useful phrase—a “political culture”. We have really as a country, of all the Westminster parliamentary countries, built it into our culture, as we have with political staffers for ministers. We've changed the political culture of our parliamentary democracy, and a lot of it has been fairly beneficial. I'm particularly supportive of political staffers helping ministers, and I think the PMO has lots of good work to do.
But there are a couple of things we can do. First of all, if the government is in a minority position, the tendency to push government members to do what, as they call them, boys—and might I say “boys and girls”—in short pants are telling them to do.... I think some of that will come off; I really do.
I'm not naive: there's still going to be a strong PMO, but I found it very distasteful. I watched some question time, and I again come back to that fine book Tragedy in the Commons and what experienced MPs told the Canadian public through it about their subservience to young people who had never run in politics. Their counsels weren't coming directly from the Prime Minister: the Prime Minister is too busy. They figured out what they thought would be the right answer at question time or the right thing for a cabinet minister to do if he were going to have a press scrum. I think there will be some relaxation of that.
The one legislative change, however, is to overcome a Supreme Court decision. The Supreme Court of Canada, in 2011 on a quiet June day when everybody was asleep, decided by eight judges to one that the Prime Minister's Office is not an institution of government and therefore is not under the Access to Information Act. Now, if ever an office was an office of government, it's the PMO. One judge, LeBel, a wonderful Quebec judge, wrote a ringing dissent.
This is a governmental institution; it should be open to access to information on such things as budget, the structure, the job descriptions of the people in it, the use of polling—what polling they do, and what is done with that polling.... We're not going to have private conversations, which must go on between the Prime Minister and his staff or her staff, but we should grow up and acknowledge, as the Supreme Court did not, that this is a public institution, and we should know as much about it as about any other institution of government. I've written much about that, but I'm afraid the rest of the country thinks that, like my idea of having a time by which Parliament must meet after an election, this is an academic idea that just goes floating away like a leaf on the river. I hope, however, that you've heard it.