SpankyMcFarland

Exceptional people can indeed succeed from other fields. However, I hope you would accept that prior expertise is an advantage, not a disadvantage to any minister. If you were creating a formula for success, it would be in there, along with many other factors. The minister will also face public interrogation in interviews, or should do (not often enough during the Harper years) and it is very easy to make a fool of yourself in that context if you have no background in something as complex as health care. Just take a look at some of the interviews given by previous ministers. As a minister, you are a promoter of your department, not just a manager.

This is only a fun forum here. So have fun. Don't take things so seriously. I would prefer a scientist in the role. I think that's a fairly direct answer.

Is prior knowledge of the work of a government department necessary to manage it well? No. Is it an advantage? To answer that, think about whether it might be a disadvantage - obviously not. So it is SOME advantage. We could probably appeal to our geeks to draw up some very rough formula where such expertise is non-zero. It depends on the dept but the closer you get to real science, the bigger the value such familiarity is. Has anybody watched that groovily long-haired Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz explain the nuclear deal with Iran? Once you get beyond the visual strangeness, you are in the company of somebody who cannot be floored by any query on the basics. Guys like Colbert etc. can come up with some pretty grown-up ideas that need to be answered on the spot to keep any credibility. Moniz is ready for anything. He looks so relaxed when dealing with with the stuff thrown at him. Expertise, my friends.

Maybe it's just my sunny ways marijuana for all approach to life but...could we possibly make an effort to be a little more generous, humorous and self-effacing on this website? When all is said and done, we are just random loons on the Net and we should do our utmost to welcome new opinions, especially if we don't agree with them. Compared to Irish and British sites I dip into, the animosities here seem to get very entrenched. Let's have a little more friendly banter between the teams. Try to make fun of yourselves first, mkay?

I am willing to trust a committee of MPs to oversee the activities of our security services and put their partisan biases aside while doing so. They, in turn, need to be trusted by the watchers to get access to detailed information on what is really going on. Otherwise, we will be up with a state within a state that is no longer answerable to the elected representatives of the people.

Is that an answer to my question? Ministers in Canada are often only vaguely acquainted with their portfolio. It's traditional in this country. Consider the new Minister a good example of that tendency.

I disagree. Both management expertise and knowledge of the subject are highly useful. Most great CEOs have both. Look at high tech. The vast majority of successful CEOs have not been blow-ins - they have been intimately involved in making products. The person in charge of GM has usually known quite a bit about making cars before they took the job. They had a few recent ones who didn't but Mary Barra's story is more typical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Barra Ditto car companies in Japan. And what expertise did Leona Agglukaq have for the job? A lack of knowledge will betray you constantly in press conferences. Even somebody as clever as Jason Kenney struck an odd note by talking about the front line in the conflict with ISIS when that sort of language has been bypassed long ago in the field.

That tendency will certainly persist. I'm prepared to give JT a term to see if he is any better.

Ten, twenty wrongs. People should be qualified for the jobs they hold. I'm not defending this person's qualifications but she surely ain't the first. Jane Philpott is the first MD ever to hold the MoH job in this country. That is quite the feat. Here's a list of recent incumbents. Much connection with health care I do not see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_of_Health_(Canada)

You don't need me to go back through all the clueless Ministers of Health we have had in this country etc. etc.

I think the Tories did well enough on the economy. We have had decent leadership for thirty years on such matters, trying to do the right thing, and our federal governments have been about as frugal as the electorate has allowed them to be. The last 'balanced budget' was a silly gimmick that most people saw through. Governments should show a little more respect for the intelligence of the electorate. A big problem is productivity. We can't blame the guys in Ottawa alone for our collective failure to do more to diversify beyond resources and manufacturing.

Harper chose not to renovate, which was silly. False economy. I would tend to favour knocking it down and having a competition to replace it. There must be loads of young Canadian architects who would love that chance.

I would be very surprised if no new facts at all are found by this inquiry.

I'd like to see this from every party but particularly from the party in power, now the Liberals. This is how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work.

Since when did Ministers have to be experts on their porfolios? There are so many counter examples to pick from. This MS treatment sounded dodgy to me from the start but was backed by a lot of doctors in Canada.

Harper kept such a tight hold on this ship of state, our parliament lost consciousness. A great grey cloud has lifted.

Chantal Hebert? She has always has something interesting to say, from a viewpoint I wouldn't come across too often. Can I be very superficial for a moment, though? That hobo look is a bit distracting. She could do with a major makeover. Even her hair parting is never quite right.

It's partly a question of quantity. What did 'the whole country' mean then? What did they know? Some rumours. They did notsee him staggering around, slurring his words, Lord knows what else and probably breaking somelaws in the bargain. The detail of what we have about everybody has massively increased, and our higher expectations also come from the fact that we think we deserve more now from our 'betters' than we used to.

The medium changes the game regarding deference. We can hear and read decisions as they are being made, every casual comment is reported, dissent is immediately picked up and magnified.How were politicians questioned about their decisions back then? They did not live under constant scrutiny as they do now. A drunken Prime Minister would not last long these days. There'd be a hundred stories in the media after a few days of that carry-on and an invitation to Jimmy Kimmel. Many of us today regard the monarchy as a quaint anachronism, too much trouble to dump. THAT opinion was not widely held in MacDonald's time.

I want to see debates like this within the Conservative Party: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/11985483/EU-referendum-David-Cameron-sets-out-his-demands-to-Europe-live.html

More puritanical perhaps today, but less deferential, and the examination is different. You would have to admit the media environment is very different now. Every inflection, every look is seized upon as signs of dissent. During WWII, Hitler and Stalin spontaneously adopted eeerily similar daily routines as the war ground on. Circumstances impose themselves on leaders. Trudeau is in for the fight of his life to transform governmental culture. I wish him all the best.

Unless Harper had an alternative plan, he was only postponing the inevitable. He hardly deserves credit for dumping the problem on somebody else's desk.

Ministers of the Empire did not have to respond in a 24/7 news cycle. They had a much easier time of it, really. These days, every minor inconsistency is seized upon and magnified, even more so than it was in Chretien's time. One sign of the challenge ahead - Bains discussing the census. He seemed to be still in campaign mode, unable to mention the penalties for not filing as the reporters barked the question at him again and again. I will be looking for independence of ministers, committees and MPs. In Britain today, parliamentary committees are still independent of government. I'd much rather see Trudeau try and fail than follow the Harper route. It will take a few years to see how he has done.

I'll personally sing you a song if anybody goes to jail for the census. If that happened, the happy victim would have instant fame as a martyr of the right for life and would have all sorts of lawyers wanting to help him with his ultimately successful Charter challenge. A lot of shady people have come out with the line about 'if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear'. It's a sinister claim. I am not a terrorist and yet I fear that privacy as we have understood it for centuries is rapidly disappearing. The information that corporations and governments have about us should be a cause of deep concern for all.

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thehouse/meet-your-new-government-1.3305229/donald-savoie-government-by-cabinet-will-be-a-major-challenge-1.3307747 It may be far harder now than it was in PT's time to allow Mnisters to plot their own course. Minor differences in policy are instantly detected and made into a major issue within minutes, rather than days to weeks, or never, in the good old days. That's where I want us to go but it is going to be a challenge.