By Pepper Parr
February 2nd, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
Doug Ford finally gets a break.
His marching orders to his Cabinet members can be kept secret.
A relieved Premier – he doesn’t have to tell us what he told hid henchmen what they have to do.
Supreme Court ruled his ministers’ mandate letters do not have to be made public.
“The mandate letters are protected from disclosure … The letters are revealing of the substance of cabinet deliberations,” the high court ruled Friday in a unanimous decision” said the Supreme Court decision.
Ford’s Progressive Conservative government had spent years fighting the release of the 2018 documents that give ministers their marching orders.
“We’ve been pretty clear — the premier’s been pretty clear — those are captured by cabinet confidentiality and we haven’t wavered from that position,” Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy had told reporters earlier this week.
However, we do know what some of the mandates were – the Greenbelt scandal made that public.
There will be more. The Ford government, or Ford Nation as Burlington MPP is calling the government these days.
While cabinet mandate letters have traditionally been kept private, former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne abandoned that practice in 2014.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau followed suit when he took power federally the following year.
I was curious as to why Trudeau would ever do something that would increase transparency, I went to some new fangled thing called the internet to find out.
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/february-2022/ministerial-mandate-letters-another-nail-in-the-coffin-of-cabinet-government/
by Eugene Lang:- “Trudeau’s dispatches contain a litany of specific and general directives to ministers in an approach that seems to be aimed as much as anything else at convincing interest groups and the media that the government is on top of all these many files. In other words, the letters are largely an exercise in public relations and stakeholder management, rather than serious statements of priorities or plans for governing.”