Outline of the Book
Tom Flanagan’s Pivot or Pirouette? The 1993 Canadian General Election is the first in a new series on “Turning Point Elections” edited by Gerald Baier and R. Kenneth Carty and published by the University of British Columbia Press. John C. Courtney wrote the second book on the elections of 1957 and 1958, Revival and Change, and the third book King and Chaos: The 1935 Canadian General Election by David MacKenzie just came out two weeks ago.
Introduction
Startling revelations that foreign adversaries saw Canada a weak link in the Western alliance rippled through Ottawa after secret intelligence came to light implicating a sitting member of the House of Commons as a double agent who violated the Official Secrets Act by passing on classified information to a foreign communist power. Initially, these claims caught Official Ottawa off guard. But the claims were true, and the MP implicated ultimately faced prosecution and expulsion from the House of Commons.
Since 2015 or so, a segment of Canadian academics, the Privy Council Office in Ottawa and the various Executive Council Offices of the provinces, as well as the media, have decided to propagate a new, expansive, and mostly unfounded interpretation of the Caretaker Convention which holds that incumbent governments can do virtually nothing during an election. Prince Edward Island has joined the ranks of this movement as part of Premier King’s unscheduled but not exactly early election. He advised the Lieutenant Governor to dissolve the 66th General Assembly on 6 March 2023 3 years, 11 months, and 8 days after the previous general election, instead of adhering to the fixed-date election scheduled by statute for Monday, 2 October 2023 – a date which would have forced the current assembly to last closer to four and half years instead of four.
The Government of Prince Edward Island issued a public notice the following day on 7 March 2023 in what reads like a summary from guidelines on the caretaker convention probably produced by the Executive Council Office in Charlottetown:
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