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The question has an answer: The state’s role is to establish the general rules that apply to all, which then produce outcomes on their own whatever they may be. One of the core propositions of the Western ideal of the rule of law is that everyone, even the government, is subject to the same laws and standards, which the government is not to arbitrarily finagle every time a new political problem arises. In the Canadian legal universe, the rule of law lives alongside instrumentalist social policy, but they are actually incompatible. Brian Tamanaha, a professor at Washington University School of Law, writes that while both the rule of law and instrumentalism are taken for granted, “it is seldom recognized that the combination of these two ideas is a unique historical development of relatively recent provenance and that, in certain crucial respects, they are a mismatched pair.”

What is to prevail? In the recent Munk Debate in Toronto, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Donald Trump, outlined the three pillars of the Trump doctrine: economic nationalism, America-first international relations, and deconstruction of the administrative state. It is the last of these three that irks public-service insiders the most, for it places in question the legitimacy of their endeavours. The ideological dispute is not just about the content of government policy but also whether we need so much of it or any of it. That question applies equally to Canada as it does to the United States.