OTTAWA—Stephen Harper will become the “caretaker” prime minister of Canada as soon as Parliament is dissolved by an election call, but the precise, new limits on his powers are top secret.

There are some obvious signs of Harper’s cut-down authority already: the government cancelled the public-service ads that normally roll out after the budget and PMO spokespersons have been saying it’s “unlikely” the Prime Minister will attend the royal wedding at the end of April.

Somewhere within Langevin Block in Ottawa, where Harper has been going to work each day, there is an actual handbook setting out the terms of a caretaker government, which some constitutional and public-policy experts are urging to be made public.

Canadians “should know what limits there are on government during this period,” says Peter Russell, one of Canada’s leading constitutional scholars, who only learned recently that the Privy Council Office keeps these “caretaker conventions,” as they’re called, a secret.

Russell and other constitutional and government experts are calling for the government to show Canadians the rules, as the country seems headed inevitably toward an election.

“It’s not frightening,” Russell says. “The normal work of government can go on, and if there’s a terrible emergency or something, there are ways of dealing with that.”

Harper will still technically be the Prime Minister of Canada, and his ministers keep their titles and some duties too, but most of their powers after the looming election call can best described as “minimalist.”

“You do minimalist government—you do only what’s necessary,” says Alex Himelfarb, who was in charge of the public service when Harper came to power, after serving in that job under prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. Himelfarb stayed on as Clerk of the Privy Council for Harper’s first few months in power.

Two basic principles are at work in caretaker government, Himelfarb says:

“Do not do anything that would give you political advantage by virtue of being the government and do not make commitments that will constrain the government that is eventually elected.”

Russell said that this second principle has been called “reversibility” — a caretaker prime minister, as Harper will be during the election campaign, can’t do anything that will tie the hands of a possible successor.

Harper’s previous government was accused of doing precisely this during the 2008 campaign, with a $1.9-billion announcement of money for housing and homelessness — which did not appear to have been approved in any budget. Conservatives insisted it wasn’t new money, but the opposition protested that the Prime Minister was using his office for political gain.

Former prime minister Paul Martin also may have stretched the caretaker principles when he took part in a G8 meeting in the midst of the 2004 election. Attending the meeting was probably within the rules, but Martin’s commitment of more aid money to Africa at that meeting was a promise that a successor would have to follow — and thus arguably out of bounds.

But no one can tell for sure, because the guidelines are kept under lock and key by the Privy Council Office, and not widely known even within government.

The existence of the caretaker’s guidelines only became more widely known a couple of months ago, when Russell organized a workshop in Toronto, dedicated to setting down some guidelines for how to proceed in the case of an unclear election result.

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Though Russell and other participants in the workshop had been studying Canadian government for a long time, it was the first that many had heard of an actual “Manual of Official Procedure of the Government of Canada,” which dates back to 1968, the same year that Pierre Trudeau came to office.

Harper’s communications director, Dimitri Soudas, said he’s never seen the manual, but the PMO is aware that powers are more constrained during an election campaign. Soudas said there will be no new announcements, no government advertising and strict walls between Conservatives’ political activity and public-service jobs.

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