Bowden, J.W.J. “The Greater Son of a Lesser Sire: The Executive Authority of the Crown of Canada versus the Crown of the United Kingdom.” Chapter 2 in Executive Power and The Royal Prerogative in the Commonwealth, edited by Samuel White and Matthew Stubbs, 9-31. University of Adelaide Press, 2025.

On 19 February 2025, I gave a presentation on “The Nature of the Crown of Canada’s Executive Authority” at a conference on Current Trends in Executive Power at the University of Adelaide in Adelaide, South Australia. More precisely, I presented via the tubes of the internet and the magic of Zoom instead of making the peregrination to Canada’s antipodal Commonwealth Realm of the south seas.

My panel included scholars from Australia, Zealand and Northern Ireland, yet I somehow managed to keep my echolalia at bay. Those of you who know me in real life will doubtless have witnessed me wrestle with this problem at times. This remains all the more remarkable in light of a tiny temporal mix up: I talked on the morning of Thursday, 20 February 2025 on Australian Central Time in Adelaide, which corresponded to the evening of Wednesday, 19 February on Eastern Time in Ottawa, but I had not finished my speaking notes until perilously close to the allotted time because I had thought that I was presenting on Thursday in Ottawa.

Despite my mistake, I still managed to put together a passable presentation and earn what seemed like a reassuring laugh from my audience after compareing myself to Josh Lyman and Toby Zeigler in that episode of The West Wing when they missed their trip back to Washington on Air Force One because only some of Indiana’s counties observe Daylight Saving Time. “TIMEZONES?!” The two Commonwealth Realms of Canada and Australia share a basic system of government but neither a climate nor a hemisphere; I had also trundled through two feet of snow in snowshoes earlier that day while Adelaide basked in 25 summery degrees that morning.

I remain most grateful to Samuel White, Professor of Law at the University of Adelaide, for having invited me not only to present at the initial conference but also to turn my presentation into a chapter in the resulting edited volume, Executive Power and the Royal Prerogative in the Commonwealth, which the University of Adelaide Press just published on 15 December 2025. I am pleased to appear alongside these other esteemed scholars from across the King’s Realms.

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