Are first ministers' meetings cool again?

CBC

5 days ago

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When Mark Carney sits down with the premiers in Huntsville, Ont., on Tuesday, it will be the third time in four months that he and the premiers have met face-to-face. Going back to the waning days of Justin Trudeau's premiership, Canada's first ministers will have now sat down together a total of four times already this year.
That is, by recent standards, an unusual amount of time for the prime minister and the premiers to spend in each other's midst. In the last 35 years, such gatherings have been generally rare and, in fact, consciously avoided.
But it's possible that the day of the first ministers' conference has come (again). After years of relative estrangement, Canada's leaders may need to get reacquainted, not simply for their own sake, but to reinforce a country that is faced with new threats and a new era of instability.
Coming out of the shock of the pandemic and now amid both the profound disruption brought about by Trump's presidency and the emergence of new internal threats to Canada's federation, there have been calls to strengthen relations between the federal and provincial governments. Most concretely, that could include reviving the sort of summits that used to be commonplace.
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"We need systemic reform designed to foster trust, not just transaction," Jared Wesley, a political scientist at the University of Alberta, wrote in May. "This means re-introducing routine, rules-based intergovernmental relations, where leaders know they'll meet regularly, under shared agendas, with accountability built into the process​.
"That starts with institutionalizing first ministers' meetings, moving them from sporadic events to annual fixtures with jointly determined priorities."
In previous eras that would have been an unremarkable recommendation.
The rise and fall of the first ministers' meeting
According to a tally compiled by Alasdair Roberts, a Canadian professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, prime ministers and premiers met 25 times during the busy post-war period between 1945 and 1970. They then met 31 times between 1971 and 1992, a period highlighted by tumultuous negotiations over the Constitution.
But as Roberts documents in The Adaptable Country, his 2024 treatise on the need for institutional reform in Canada, the fraught and exhausting negotiations of the '70s and '80s gave such meetings a bad name. And there followed a succession of prime ministers who were, either personally or politically, disinclined to meet the premiers as a group.
Jean Chrétien met the premiers just four times in 10 years. Stephen Harper also convened the first ministers on just four occasions, two of which were dinner meetings. Trudeau came to office promising annual meetings, but ultimately convened only a handful (though he did hold regular video calls with the premiers during the pandemic).
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That different levels of government should communicate and collaborate as much as possible, particularly in a decentralized federation such as Canada, might seem fairly obvious. But the conventional political wisdom in Ottawa has come to be that, at least for prime ministers, meetings with the premiers as a group are to be avoided.
A prime minister who wants to pursue an initiative that requires provincial agreement is better off, the thinking goes, dictating terms and negotiating with provincial governments individually — as the Trudeau government, for instance, did on child care, health care and school nutrition programs.
Meanwhile, in the absence of regular meetings, the premiers have contented themselves with semi-regular demands that the prime minister meet with them to address some complaint about federal policy or demand for federal funding — thus reinforcing the accepted wisdom that the prime minister was better off avoiding them.
Do we need an annual Canada summit?
In The Adaptable Country, Roberts identifies three purposes to summits like first ministers' conferences.
First, and most obviously, such meetings can lead to agreements on policy. But, Roberts writes, "equally important is the goal of demonstrating solidarity."
"Leaders gather to show the world that they are committed to an alliance, even when they have sharp differences, and also to show they can talk civilly about those differences," he writes.
Relatedly, such meetings can also allow for sharing information and perspectives, improving understanding and promoting co-ordinated action.
Set against the long and torturous history of federal-provincial conflict in Canada — a tradition as old as the country itself — such expectations for first ministers' meetings might seem optimistic. But in making the case for an annual meeting of first ministers, Roberts points to the example of the G7. And while the future of that body has been called into question lately, Carney himself defended the value of those gatherings when he closed this year's summit in Kananaskis, Alta., last month.
"At a time when multilateralism is under great strain … that we got together, that we agreed on a number of areas … that's important, that's valuable," the prime minister said.
If the world benefits from such meetings — which have occurred every year since 1975, with the exception of 2020 — could Canada not benefit from its own regular summits?
If first ministers' conferences had come to be associated with acrimony, that might have had much to do with the subject matter — namely, the Constitution. And while avoiding such meetings might have been the politically expedient thing for a prime minister to do, there might be less freedom to aim for mere expediency these days.
That Carney will have met the premiers face-to-face three times already might suggest he is more inclined toward working through these kinds of gatherings. But all these meetings have been prompted by the need to respond to an immediate crisis — the American president's tariffs.
What Roberts envisions is an annual summit — including Indigenous leadership — that would focus not on hammering out agreements on specific initiatives, but would, like a G7, aim more broadly. It would help drive and focus a longer-term discussion about the direction of the country at a time of incredible change (a royal commission would be another option). Because what Canada is faced with now is not a short-term crisis — and Roberts fears the Carney government is still framing Canada's current situation as a temporary challenge.
"What we need is a conversation to get everybody on the same page, so far as we can, about what the country is going to look like a generation from now," he says. "I'm not thinking of that Canada summit as a mechanism for handling some agreement about, you know, interprovincial trade barriers. I'm talking about it as a planning event, something with the kind of scale and gravitas of the G7 because that will focus national attention on long-term priorities."
There is no shortage of big and serious things to talk about and figure out right now. And in the interests of figuring them out, the nation's leaders might do themselves — and the country — some good by simply sitting around the table on a regular basis to talk about them.