On Writing Well

Posted on 2022/09/01 by J.W.J. Bowden

Pierre Poilievre released a video this week on how he would table a Plain Language Bill to force the civil service to write better and make what it publishes easier to understand.

This will no doubt invite a lot of derision and criticism. For my part, I don’t like how Poilievre avoided the Oxford Comma. And if this odious Bureaucratese is an official language, then it has at least achieved the rank of proper noun and deserves a capital letter, for all its other faults. But Poilievre has a point, and his policy would mimic what the Cameron-Clegg ministry did in the United Kingdom in 2011-2012. The Government of British Columbia has also promised to write in English instead of Bureaucratese. The plague of Bureaucratese has, however, long since escaped the confines of the civil service and has infected all the knowledgeindustries.

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Posted in Random Thoughts | 2 Comments

Readjusting Electoral Districts in Federations: Malapportionment vs Gerrymandering

Posted on 2022/08/31 by J.W.J. Bowden

The decennial readjustment of the number of MP per province and establishing the boundaries of electoral districts for the federal House of Commons began in October 2021 and February 2022, respectively. Canadians often like to congratulate themselves for having eliminated gerrymandering from our political system, in contrast to the Americans who have honed it into a dark art. While we eliminated gerrymanding in Canada by delegating the task of re-establishing electoral districts to a series of independent federal electoral boundaries commissions in the 1960s, Parliament has deliberately maintained a significant malapportionment of MPs per province through three consecutive iterations of the Representation Formula have since 1985 which contain many exceptions to the principle of Representation by Population.

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Posted in Electoral Boundaries Readjustments | 2 Comments

Parliamentary Decorum and How Canadians Perceive Britons

Posted on 2022/07/15 by J.W.J. Bowden

Earlier this year, I noted that the current Speaker of the British House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, does not enforce the Standing Orders properly and allows members to address one another in the second person unchecked, with entire flocks of “yous” flying around the chamber. Sir Keir Starmer and other Labour shadow ministers often address Boris Johnson in the vocative sense as “Prime Minister,” – second-person-adjacent, let’s say – instead of referring to “the Prime Minister” firmly in the third person. Hoyle needs to start enforcing the proper rules after the Commons returns from its summer recess in September.

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My Latest Article in the Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law: How Governor General Lord Aberdeen Reinforced the Caretaker Convention and Dismissed Prime Minister Tupper from Office

Posted on 2022/07/14 by J.W.J. Bowden

I first uncovered the correspondence in which Governor General Lord Aberdeen dismissed Prime Minister Sir Charles Tupper from office in July 1896 all the way back in 2012 while conducting research on something else. The documents have proven more fruitful and given me more ideas than I could ever have imagined at the time. But the material does not end with the correspondence between Aberdeen and Tupper. The Debates in the House of Commons between Tupper, then in opposition, and the new Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier, provided another fascinating take on these questions.

This latest article draws together all my analyses on this crucial precedent from 1896 with respect to the Caretaker Convention, when Governors General can dismiss Prime Ministers, the manner in which Governors General appoint Prime Ministers, whether Prime Ministers should resign so that the Governor General can appoint the new Prime Minister before a new parliament meets or not, and, more broadly, the nature of constitutional conventions themselves.

Bowden, J.W.J. “The Origins of the Caretaker Convention: When Governor General Lord Aberdeen Dismissed Prime Minister Tupper in 1896.” Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law 16, no. 2 (2022): 391-444.

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Posted in Appointment of PM, Caretaker Convention & Government Formation, Confidence Convention, Constitutional Conventions, Crown (Powers and Office), Governor General, Governor's Discretion | 2 Comments

The Canada Day Specials

Posted on 2022/07/01 by J.W.J. Bowden

I’ve compiled a list of my articles and blogposts pertaining to the history of British North America, which you might find of interest this long weekend.

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Posted in Dominion Day, History of British North America | 1 Comment