The Macdonald Commission

Abstract

Royal commissions have a mixture of roles. Sometimes the immediate cause is a scandal (the other McDonald Commission comes to mind) and the task of the commission is to get to the bottom of the matter, to buy time, and-it is hoped-suggest policy or legislation which will prevent such embarrassments in the future. At other times there is only the perceived need to study a problem and to produce advice. An important aspect of the second group of commissions of enquiry is the educational role which they play, both in the conduct of their hearings and in their published reports and supporting research studies. In this way they are part of the process of engineering consent so that the public and the political actors will come to accept what has already become the conventional wisdom among elites. While the large and somewhat unclear mandate of the Macdonald Commission was to engage in a sort of exercise in futurology, the march of events and their own perception of the exercise led them to build the main thrust of their Report on the necessity of a greatly enlarged and very special trading relationship with the United States. If this is seen as its purpose, the length of the Report-nearly 2,000 pages-will surely muffle its impact. The sheer size of the Commission may have had a lot to do with it. A commission of 13 is somehow ominous in itself, even though a group of the same size occupied a pre-eminent role in the foundation of Christianity. If they all contributed in some measure the end result was bound to be large and repetitious. That said, it must be admitted that the Commission was an extraordinarily able group, reasonably representative, and combining a wide range of political and administrative experience. Clearly their diligent public consultation and broad range of research provided them with a unique, though