In March, the media obtained an e-mail from the Prime Minister’s Office that told cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats that their communications were to be vetted by the same Prime Minister’s Office. Many noted that this is the kind of heavy-handedness the Conservatives often criticized in Jean Chretien’s PMO. We will take a slightly (but only slightly) more forgiving view. We understand that in a minority government situation, the prime minister wants to keep a tight rein and focus on the five priorities he thinks got the Conservatives elected. A little discipline is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is bad if the short leash ministers are given persists indefinitely (which it might) or if it is meant to silence what the media call the “embarrassing” social conservative views some members of cabinet and caucus hold (which is likely). In that case, the PMO’s heavy-handedness is an affront to the democratic principles that the party and the prime minister have supposedly espoused.
