The Dorchester Review has just published my piece detailing how Thomas D’Arcy McGee advocated between 1858 and 1864 establishing a new branch of the Royal House of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha in the Kingdom of Canada, with a separate line of succession, as a vice-royalty.
PROC decided to study the Retroactive Prorogation Rationale (Sessional Paper 8560-432-1261-01_e) in 2020 after all. Committees tend not to update the official transcripts (Evidence) until two weeks later, so I misinterpreted and missed some of these developments last month by going off the Minutes alone.
On Thursday, 10 December, PROC invited four university professors – Kathy Brock, Philippe Lagassé, Barbara Messamore, and Daniel Turp – to appear remotely as witnesses and speak to the first Retroactive Prorogation Rationale released under the new Standing Order 32(7). PROC has not made the official Evidence public yet, so I’m taking this dialogue from Parl Vu and translating remarks from French into English where necessary.
The Dorchester Review will soon publish my piece on Thomas D’Arcy McGee and the Kingdom of Canada. In anticipation of that article, I would like to share with you the section that I had to cut early on in the drafting. But like the deleted scene of a film that went through post-production, it is complete with respect to the rest of the upcoming article; it should even mostly stand on its own, too.
Sometimes I forgot to follow up on these developments right away, and the obscura and minutia on which I normally focus here on Parliamentum usually goes unreported in the press, too. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) has taken steps to bury the Trudeau government’s Retroactive Prorogation Rationale, tabled and referred to PROC under the new Standing Order 32(7), and delay any study on it at all until at least January 2021 – and probably never. The whole idea of forcing the government to table a rationale for the previous prorogation retroactively in the next session never lent itself to anything productive or substantive, but I would have been curious to see what, if anything, PROC did in response.
In my previous post, I recounted how the House of Commons had added in Standing Order 32(7) in June 2017, on the initiative of the Trudeau government and its parliamentary majority at the time, which now obliges the government of the day to table a report outlining the rationale for the previous prorogation. I remarked that, depending on how you count “sitting day,” the deadline for tabling this document would have occurred on either 27 or 28 October. The new Standing Order says:
Not later than 20 sitting days after the beginning of the second or subsequent session of a Parliament, a minister of the Crown shall lay upon the table a document outlining the reasons for the latest prorogation. This document shall be deemed referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs immediately after it is presented in the House.[1]
The Leader of the Government in the House of Commons dutifully tabled the document on 28 October as Sessional Paper 8560-432-1261-01,[2] revealing entitled Report to Parliament: August 2020 Prorogation – COVID-19 pandemic. I have uploaded it here to Parliamentum for your reference.
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