Justin Trudeau Had an Epiphany and Endorsed My Doctrine on Prorogation

Posted on 2025/01/06 by J.W.J. Bowden

CPAC cut off the rest of footage showing the rest of the papers blowing away before Trudeau emerged, but this portion at least remained visible as perhaps a bad omen equivalent to Rishi Sunak’s speech in the rain in 2024.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the Prime Minister gave to me his second tactical prorogation and endorsed what I had written in 2011.

Introduction

At around 10:45 on the morning of 6 January 2025 – the Feast of Epiphany and the Day of the Three Kings – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed that he had grappled with a personal epiphany of sorts over the weekend and announced that he had advised Her Excellency Mary Simon to prorogue the 1st session of the 44th Parliament until 24 March 2025 because he intended to resign as leader of the Liberal Party and as Prime Minister and wanted to give the Liberal Party time to hold a leadership election during the intersession.[1] The press had begun to report on 5 January that Trudeau would resign before meeting the Liberal caucus on Wednesday, 8 January,[2] because the Liberal parliamentary party’s regional caucuses for the Atlantic, Quebec, and Ontario had already all publicly announced over the holidays that Trudeau should resign.[3] The Liberals elected so few MPs west of Thunder Bay in 2021, but Ben Carr, MP for Winnipeg South Centre and chair of PROC, had also called upon Trudeau to resign.[4] All this turmoil followed Chrystia Freeland’s spectacular resignation as Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister on 16 December 2024, where she accused Trudeau in an open letter of pursuing “costly political gimmicks” in the face of President-elect Trump’s threats to impose tariffs against Canada.[5]

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Posted in Crown (Powers and Office), Prorogation | 3 Comments

My New Article on Canadian Sub-Imperialism in the Commonwealth Caribbean 

Posted on 2024/12/27 by J.W.J. Bowden

The Canadian Foreign Policy Journal pleasantly surprised me on 18 December by publishing the electronic version of my article “From Sea to Sea to the Caribbean Sea: Canadian Sub-Imperialism in the British West Indies and Commonwealth Caribbean, 1917-2014.” I had forgotten that Taylor and Francis’s journals tend to publish an article online separately before releasing it as part of its main issue in print and online later.

Now safely concealed within the fortress of Taylor and Francis, I can only provide a brief overview of the project.

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Posted in Caribbean Realms, Commonwealth Realms, Comparative, My Published Works | Leave a comment

Savoie ne sait pas: The Governor General of Canada Does Not Unadjourn the House of Commons

Posted on 2024/12/24 by J.W.J. Bowden

My copy of Governing from the Centre, which I read probably around 2010 or 2011.

The Governor General does not decide when the House of Commons or the Senate come out of an adjournment and resume sitting. The House of Commons and Senate vote to adjourn themselves and to resume sitting, but the Crown summons, prorogues, and dissolves Parliament on the Prime Minister’s advice. This really is not complicated.

Yet Donald Savoie just wrote this bizarre column for The Hill Times where he asks some rhetorical questions about when the Governor General should act on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition. The answer to that, in Canada, is never. Some of our other sister Realms, like Saint Kitts and Nevis, have codified in their constitutions that the Governor General appoints some Senators on the advice of the Prime Minister and others on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition, but no such provision exists here.[1]

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Posted in Crown (Powers and Office), Parliament, Prorogation, Speaker of the House of Commons | 3 Comments

All I Want for Christmas Is a Constitutional Crisis

Posted on 2024/12/23 by J.W.J. Bowden

The Most Chaotic Week in Ottawa Since February 1963

Chrystia Freeland resigned as Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister in spectacular fashion on Monday, 16 December 2024 mere hours before she would have delivered the Fall Economic Update in the House of Commons. She revealed that Trudeau had informed her the previous Friday that he intended to shuffle her out of the most powerful and important portfolio in cabinet and accused him of having pursued “costly political gimmicks” in the face of the serious threats posed by President-elect Donald Trump, who might impose tariffs of 25% on Canadian products coming in to the United States.[1] Trudeau appointed Dominic LeBlanc as the new Minister of Finance later that evening and then shuffled cabinet more broadly on Friday the 20th.[2]

Not since Douglas Harkness resigned as Minister of National Defence on 3 February 1963 over a profound irreconcilable disagreement with Prime Minister Diefenbaker on the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the question of allowing American nuclear warheads in Canada has a ministerial resignation on a question of policy shaken an incumbent government so badly and taken Parliament, the press, and the public by such surprise.[3] The House of Commons withdrew its confidence from the collapsing Diefenbaker ministry two days later on 5 February 1963 and forced an early election less that one year after the previous.[4] Unlike in 1963 when the ministerial chaos happened squarely in the middle of a regular late-winter sitting, the House of Commons had already scheduled itself to adjourn until late January 2025 as of Tuesday, 17 December 2024, which prevented the crisis from playing out in the same way.

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Posted in Crown (Powers and Office), Dissolution, Prorogation | 1 Comment

A Time When America Would Have Given Us Seven States

Posted on 2024/12/10 by J.W.J. Bowden

The trope that Canada should avoid becoming “the 51st state” has never made much sense to me. While the Americans would surely not allow Prince Edward Island to carry on as a separate polity (and certainly not under such an overtly royal name) and would perhaps even merge all three Maritime Provinces into a single state, they would also not disregard our federal structure entirely and merge eleven constitutionally entrenched polities into one. We forget that the United States of America is also a federation and that the US Constitution contains a division of powers between two orders of government just as our Constitution Act, 1867 does.

I base my view on historical precedent.

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Posted in History of British North America | Leave a comment