The Cabinet machinery

So how does the Cabinet decide? With Ministers in the Cabinet having the expertise and responsibilities of their departments behind them, with a non-stop flow of issues swirling about the country, and a Prime Minister with his or her vision of what the government should do and be, how does this body carry out its work?

Students should then be asked to brainstorm:

• How often would the Cabinet meet?

• Should all the Cabinet members play an equal role in all Cabinet issues?

• What process would you put in place to manage the Cabinet’s workload?

• What outside support would you provide the Cabinet so that it could manage its workload?

Once the brainstorm is complete, the class collectively reviews its findings and a consensus is sought on how the students’ Cabinet would operate.

Students should be randomly selected by counting off "1s" and "2s" and then assigned the following research projects on the machinery of Cabinet, with Project 1 for the 1s and Project 2 for the 2s.

• Project 1

Individually, students are to research the process by which the current Cabinet conducts its decision-making, paying specific attention to the Cabinet committee structure. In addition, what does the mandate, or areas of concern for each committee, reveal about the government’s thinking and approach to issues of the day? Last, the teacher may wish to extend this project by asking that the students research one other Canadian Ministry since the 1960s to determine if a similar Cabinet committee approach was in place then.

The current Cabinet’s decision making process is described on the Prime Minister’s web site:

• Project 2

Just as an individual Minister has the support of a department’s bureaucracy in carrying out his or her responsibilities, so too does the Prime Minister and the Cabinet as a whole. The Privy Council Office (PCO) plays this role.

Individually, students are to research the role of the Privy Council Office in supporting the Prime Minister and Cabinet. What does the PCO do to support the Prime Minister and Cabinet? Who leads the PCO and how has this position’s responsibilities changed over the years? In what ways is the PCO like any other government department? In what ways is it different?

The responsibilities of the Privy Council Office are described on its web site. (http://www.pco-bcp.gc.ca/default.asp?page=publications&
amp;Language=E&doc=respons/cover_e.htm)

Pairs of students should be assembled, comprising a "1" and a "2" student in each pair. Each student should provide a short debrief of his or her findings. Together, the students should review the questions and results of the brainstorm that the class worked on at the beginning of this activity.

In light of what they have learned in the course of their just completed research, each pair should return to the original brainstorm exercise and answer the questions again, i.e.:

• How often would the Cabinet meet?

• Should all the Cabinet members play an equal role in all Cabinet issues?

• What process would you put in place to manage the Cabinet’s workload?

• What outside support would you provide the Cabinet so that it could manage its workload?

The teacher should then do a quick review with the class as a whole, asking:

• How close was the class’s initial assessment of the way Cabinet works to the way it does, in fact, work?

• When asked the second time to imagine you were Prime Minister and to organise the work of the Cabinet, did your views change from those you held during the initial brainstorm? How so? Why?