Last week in the same paper, Dan Gardner argued we need the queen because otherwise the federal government will get to appoint the lieutenant governors. But the feds always have named the lieutenant governors, and it "hasn't tipped the balance" -- as discussed in live-blog #11 on the 1864 Quebec conference.
October 27. Dan Gardner responds:
Your short blog post on my short blog post (which was reprinted in the Ottawa Citizen for some reason) misrepresents what I wrote. I know how L-Gs are appointed. It's a relic of the original vision of the constitution, in which the federal government was clearly the superior of the provinces.Dan blogs here.
I stuck with the formulation "constitutional symmetry" because, one, it's accurate, and two, it avoided a long detour into constitutional history.
