James Bowden's Blog

Robin Sears, a New Democrat now of the Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a look-alike of Franklin D. Roosevelt, has joined with Susan Delacourt, Chantal Hebert, and Andrew Coyne in musing about or overtly calling for an early dissolution and snap election. It’s telling that Sears doesn’t even mention the fixed-date election law at all in his column; he presumes its constitutional and political irrelevance — and quite reasonably so.

Canadian columnists have come a long way in ten years.

Similar Posts: 

• When Snap Elections Are Good and Just
• Fixed-date Elections
• Jacob Rees-Mogg and Jeremy Corbyn Expose the Futility of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act
• The Mandate Problem and Fixed-Date Election Laws
• Fixed-Date Election Foibles in the Provinces
• What Is It About Dissolution That Everyone Finds So Confusing?

Introduction

Journalists who cover politics often suffer from crippling boredom in the summer months when Parliament sits not and no longer provides them with a steady stream of headline fodder.

Susan Delacourt and Andrew Coyne in June 2018 started raising the spectre of an early dissolution, and Chantal Hebert in August 2018 started suggesting that Prime Minister Trudeau ignore the fixed-date election provision contained in the Canada Elections Act, which schedules the next federal general election for October 2019, and instead opt for an early election this year.[1] Not to be outdone, Susan Delacourt wrote a second column on the same subject in August 2018.[2]

It is difficult to imagine the parliamentary press gallery having encouraged Prime Minister Harper to opt for an early election, when in 2008, several reporters promoted Duff Conacher’s and Errol Mendes’s assertion that “Harper broke his own law!” when he obtained an early dissolution ten years ago.[3] (Though a few journalists at the time did correctly point out that the fixed-date election law kept the established constitutional positions of the Governor General and Prime Minister intact).[4] But things have changed over the last decade to the point where at least three reporters actively encourage that Trudeau obtain an early dissolution purely out of political expediency.

Nevertheless, Delacourt, Coyne, and Hebert do raise a pertinent question: when is a snap election just and good? I will consider this below.

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I took this photo on a trip to Quebec City in 2008

Introduction

Judging by recent media reports, the answer depends upon the length of the writ and not necessarily on the date of the election itself, as the case of Quebec in 2018 and Canada in 2015 demonstrate.

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