“Ministerial responsibility is almost necessarily linked to the resignation of a minister, and that’s just not the case,” said Prof. David E. Smith, a senior policy fellow at the University of Regina who has written on the subject. “Resignation is something of a red herring.”
Ministerial responsibility isn’t just about forcing a minister out of his post, it’s about getting answers, noted political scientist Kenneth Kernaghan, professor emeritus at Brock University in a research paper he wrote for the government on the topic.
“When public servants make an error, the minister is expected to explain to Parliament what went wrong,” he wrote.
As the number of people sick with E. coli after eating contaminated beef from XL Foods reached 12 late last week, Mr. Ritz’s (Battlefords-Lloydminster, Sask.) critics said they are not satisfied with his handling of the biggest beef recall in Canadian history, with more than 1,800 products affected.
“The minister has been an abject failure,” said NDP agriculture critic Malcolm Allen (Welland, Ont.) in an interview with The Hill Times.
“Because of his failure on … not informing Canadians, not acting appropriately and quickly enough to warn Canadians and then eventually to close the plant, like he did for the U.S.,” he explained.
He and Liberal agriculture critic Frank Valeriote (Guelph, Ont.) pointed to Mr. Ritz’s poor handling of the file in the early days of the contamination. They also noted Mr. Ritz’s absence from the House of Commons during Question Period and the lack of an emergency Commons debate on the topic, as national concern about the contamination spread, and a press conference that devolved into an argument between the media and the minister’s press secretary during the first week of October.
Mr. Ritz was not in the House on Oct. 1, Oct. 2, and Oct. 3, but was there on Oct. 4 and Oct. 5.
At the minister’s first press conference on the issue on Oct. 3 at a CFIA laboratory in Calgary, Alta., he answered a number of questions, but when the meeting was turned over to CFIA President George Da Pont, a press secretary cut off the session abruptly seemingly to avoid answering tough questions.
Crisis management expert Allan Bonner, author of An Ounce of Prevention: Navigating Your Way Through Damage Control and Crisis Response, said that often, managers at the centre of a crisis makes the mistake of not addressing a crisis publicly until they have all the information. Instead, they should recognize that the situation is still unfolding and release what they know in a logical way to the public.
“You don’t want the public to have to go rooting around, searching for information that you can provide them. It is almost impossible to over-communicate in a crisis when the crisis has become public,” he said.
Mr. Smith said the lack of information was “an opportunity lost” for the government and the minister to communicate their competency.
“There is always kind of a reciprocal action going on in these matters. A minister answering questions is important for the opposition, but it’s also important for the government and for the minister to indicate to the opposition and to the wider public that they are in command of whatever the issue is. To the degree that they’re silent, that leads to all kinds of speculation and innuendo,” he said.
In early October, a month after contaminated beef was first detected at XL Foods in Alberta, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency put up a detailed timeline on its website outlining how it has responded to the situation.
On Oct. 4, Mr. Ritz returned to Question Period. He answered 18 questions on the beef situation that day, and 20 questions the next day in Question Period. Mr. Ritz also held his second press conference, on Oct. 4, along with CFIA officials, this time in Ottawa. CFIA and Public Health held four technical briefings during this time: on Sept. 28, Oct. 5, Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.
At the teleconference technical briefing on Oct. 11, the CFIA announced XL had complied with a clean-up plan and would be allowed to resume limited production under CFIA’s watch.
“Where his leadership falls, and how it’s measured, really is how you manage the breaks in the system. When it breaks down, quite honestly, people expect honesty, they expect clear statements. In this case that the system broke, they expect ministers to take ownership of the dilemma and not run from it, and explain to them how it broke and how it will be fixed. What they don’t want, frankly, are talking points,” said Mr. Valeriote.
The opposition parties were quick to debunk a statistic that Mr. Ritz and government officials had been pointing to as a sign of its commitment to food safety.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) and others have repeatedly pointed to 700 new inspectors that have been hired since the Conservatives came into power in 2006.
But unions and the opposition have noted that only a fraction of these inspectors, 170 are in meat inspection, and that those inspectors are assigned to inspecting processed meats cuts.
Both Mr. Allen and Mr. Valeriote both said that Mr. Ritz and the CFIA reacted too slowly to warn Canadians about the tainted beef and to stop production.
On Sept. 13, after finding contaminated beef at the border, the U.S. asked the CFIA to revoke XL’s licence to export. Three days later, the CFIA warned Canadians about the potentially hazardous meat. Nearly two weeks later, on Sept. 27, the CFIA closed operations at the plant.
“Mr. Ritz should have stepped in where the CFIA failed to,” said Mr. Valeriote.
Repeatedly Mr. Ritz has disputed the opposition parties’ characterization of events.
“The CFIA, based on science and timely access to information, began operating on Sept. 4 in the best interests of Canadian consumers. It continues to do that,” he said on Oct. 5.
“All of these decisions and actions are undertaken by the officials at the CFIA. It continues to work on science-based reasoning and timelines as information becomes available. My job as minister is to ensure that it has the capacity, both from a budgetary process and human resources, to get that important job done,” he said.
Mr. Allen said that he and his party are “hopeful that ministerial accountability exists in this government.”
If history is any indication, Mr. Smith said that Mr. Ritz’s resignation is unlikely.
“Ministers generally don’t resign. They may choose to do so, there may be such a brouhaha that they’re really kind of forced to do so, but, generally, that doesn’t happen,” he said.
Whether or not a minister resigns can depend on the strength of the government as a whole, wrote Prof. Kernaghan. With a majority government and an election years away, it’s unlikely that Mr. Ritz is going anywhere.
Because it’s so rare that ministers resign, “two frequent assertions about the doctrine of individual ministerial responsibility are: that it is the cornerstone of Canada’s parliamentary democracy, and that it is a myth,” wrote Prof. Kernaghan in his paper, Ministerial Responsibility: Interpretations, Implications, and Information Access.
This is incorrect, he wrote, because ministerial accountability also lies in answerability, or getting ministers to explain what went wrong and how it will be resolved. This is generally more successful, he noted.
Mr. Valeriote said that calling for Mr. Ritz’s resignation may be an attempt to “score political points” by the NDP.
The Liberals are not calling for Mr. Ritz’s departure because it deflects from the real issue, he said.
“The real issue is what happened in that plant. Why did the CFIA not exercise its oversight authority in making sure that those things that were broken were fixed?” he said. The party has asked the auditor general to conduct an audit into Canada’s food safety.
Mr. Smith said that the opposition parties have a “very key role” in holding the minister accountable, and that Parliament, more than the media, should be the “centerpiece” of that push.
“This seems to me to be extremely important, both in principle, but in actual practice to explain to the public,” he said.
At the House Agriculture Committee, Mr. Valeriote introduced a motion on Oct. 2 to have CFIA officials, Mr. Ritz, Agriculture department bureaucrats and XL management and others appear and answer questions on what went wrong.
The motion was not passed. Since it was debated behind closed doors, Mr. Valeriote said he could not comment on why it was unsuccessful, but he noted the Conservative majority on the committee.
“The committee is very important because that allows Members of Parliament to pursue matters to some depth and to some extent. In the House, in things like Question Period, it’s quite limited. Nonetheless, Question Period is very important,” said Mr. Smith.
Mr. Bonner explained that in any inquiry into a crisis “you go up and you go back.” Mr. Bonner said that means the inquiry searches for the most senior people who are responsible and who knew what was going on, and how early they knew that there could be a problem.
Prof. Kernaghan wrote that while a minister has vicarious responsibility for every decision made by the department, it’s much more likely that he would resign in the event of a personal mistake or directly issuing a bad decision.
The Globe and Mail’s André Picard recently wrote that XL Foods Ltd., the CFIA, and Mr. Ritz, “have, individually and collectively, failed lamentably in the practice of Communications 101,” noting that it wasn’t until Oct. 4 when XL Foods posted a statement on an answering machine taking full responsibility for plant operations and the food it produces.
Said Mr. Picard: “When you’re poisoning people, even unintentionally, a voice message three weeks into the outbreak doesn’t cut it, nor do ministerial blandishments, nor do CFIA press releases whining that ‘investigations into outbreaks of food-borne illness can be complex.’”
On Oct. 11, Brian Nilsson, head of XL Foods Inc., apologized unequivocally in an interview with Postmedia News and promised to “make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In 2008, tainted listeria luncheon meat produced by Maple Leaf Foods Inc. killed 22 people and sickened 35, but CEO Michael McCain reacted quickly, was transparent, and was available to the media. The federal government later commissioned a $5.3-million report into the crisis, led by Sheila Weatherill. That report recommended improving food safety; improving communication by the CFIA and the government; and found a “void in leadership.”
As for Mr. Ritz, whose tenure as minister survived his poor sense of humour and leadership during the deadly listeria outbreak of 2008, critics say it is too soon to tell his fate.
“Is he beyond redemption?” said Mr. Valeriote. “This isn’t over.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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