President Trump has not only killed thirty years of free trade between Canada and the United States but also set off a bizarre firestorm about the War of 1812, of all things. In what has been reported to be a tense conversation over the telephone with Prime Minister Trudeau, who questioned Trump’s bogus rationale of imposing a tariff on Canadian steel and aluminium on the grounds of “national security,” the President asked — and “I would suggest […] if you know the president, that was probably a facetious remark” — whether Canada had burned down the White House in 1814.
Perhaps we can excuse MacLauchlan for having maintained a politician’s coyness on the issue, because overlapping fixed-date election laws have made that question more convoluted.
Prince Edward Island adopted its fixed-date election law in 2008 as part of its Election Act, which schedules the province’s general elections for the first Monday in October every four years starting in October 2011. The second fixed-date election should therefore have taken place in October 2015 — but it did not.
New Brunswick sports the handsomest legislative assembly chamber in Canada, the walls adorned with portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte and the floor covered with that blue-green carpet
New Brunswick provides an interesting case study in novel interpretations of how parliamentary government works and now in matters of the separation of powers between the executive and legislature. Liberal Premier Brian Gallant recently announced that he, as Liberal leader, had suspended fellow Liberal MLA Chris Collins from the parliamentary party, an authority which he certainly possesses. However, Chris Collins also serves as the Speaker of the Assembly, and the Premier has called for his “suspension” from that post as well; whatever that means — perhaps a censure, or outright removal — remains unclear.
I’ve often wondered whether Montreal would have remained the capital of the Province of Canada if the Parliament there had survived the great civil strife and communal violence of the late 1840s — and if Montreal had remained the capital of the Province of Canada, it would also certainly have become the capital of the Dominion of Canada, too, on 1 July 1867. How Canadian history could have unfolded differently! The Province of Canada — and all future political historians who rely upon primary sources — suffered another terrible loss when the next Parliament in the next capital, Quebec City, also burned to the ground in 1854, though this time by accident rather than by arson.
But Pothier, Van Gijseghem, and their colleagues have done us all great service in uncovering some artefacts from the former Parliament of the Province of Canada and bringing our forgotten and buried history to the fore.
The “Democratic Deficit” first referred to a critique from the late 1970s on how the European Economic Community ran its Parliament vis-a-vis its executive-like Commission. Canadian scholars took up the term in the 1980s and applied it here.
In the Canadian context, the “Democratic Deficit” refers to the perceived lack of democratic accountability within the legislative process, due in large part to the role of the political executive enforcing party discipline, and it has also become bound up in discussions of executive federalism.
