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On the other hand, I have been amusing myself by building a travel blog at the website wordmoore.ca. The site, called "Gone to Bali" has already launched, and I hope to be posting photos and notes on its blog section quite regularly while we are on the road. Feel free to follow along there if you are interested. If it asks for a password, enter three letters: "w," "p," and one exclamation mark.
David Smith, longtime political scientist at the University of Saskatchewan and student of constitutional and parliamentary history, died early in 2023.
I confess I was not much convinced by much of what David Smith wrote on Canadian parliamentary system. In the Literary Review of Canada, I wrote an, um, sceptical review of his book The People's House of Commons, in which he argues that our parliamentary system can only function if we all accept our subordination to the crown. I wrote:
He declares that “sovereignty in Canada rests in the crown and not the people,” that “the heart of the constitution … is monarchy,” that we live under a “monarchical constitution that makes no provision for the people” and that “there is no base for popular constituent power.”
I said fairly bluntly why I did not agree, and that prompted him to write an dismissive reply that ran as a letter to the editor (still available at the article link above).
But sometime later we were both at a conference, and he made a point of seeking me out. We sat in the hotel lobby and discussed constitutional and parliamentary questions at some length -- without either of us ever raising the elephant in the room. It was very friendly and stimulating, and I enjoyed his company. Clearly neither of us was the kind of crank our published exchange might have suggested.
The Smith obit was accompanied in the newspaper I saw by a recent obituary of Peter Seixas (1947-2022) who died in October. Professor Seixas was an authority on historical thinking and historical consciousness at the University of British Columbia, and directed a large and much praised pan-Canadian Historical Thinking Project.
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| What's so dull about this? |
By contrast, the drama that’s attached to what might be called the “race for the mace” in Canada — the election of a Speaker for the House of Commons — pales in comparison.
Like we'd enjoy having something like the American are enduring?
The article does so on, however, to acknowledge that the job is completely different. In fact, allowing for the differences between the US system and parliamentary democracies, the American Speaker is roughly equivalent to a prime minister -- one who has established they have the support of a majority of the elected house and therefore holds authority to dominate proceedings and make policy recommendations.
Seen in that light, the long wrangle to select a Speaker in Washington is maybe not as bizarre, dangerous, humiliating, and intolerable as much coverage is making it out to be. It's just a matter of determining what the majority of members want to do. In parliamentary systems, this kind of drama often happens when no party holds a majority after an election. Negotiations have to take place to determine who will form a government and what concessions they will pay to gain the support of sufficient numbers from rival caucuses of members.
The American problem is merely (in parliamentary perspective) that there is not yet a majority coalition in the House. The Democrats are unwilling to ally with the Republicans. But some of those elected as Republicans are also unwilling to ally with most of the other Republicans. Eventually the dissident Republicans will come around, or some of the Republicans will have to support a Democrat speaker, or some of the Democrats will have to support a Republican speaker.
The only real problem the American House has is that there is no provision in the American constitution similar to the standard solution to deadlock in parliamentary democracies: dissolving the House and consulting the voters in fresh elections. The American people are stuck with these guys for two years.
Photo: Toronto Star
Update, January 9: So the deadlock broke. Now they have a Speaker, but he is weakened by reliance on an unstable majority coalition. In parliamentary systems, minority governments are often similarly unstable, but with the safety valve that they can collapse and the voters get to make a new legislature. The American system doesn't have that, so difficulty in legislating anything could last a couple of years.
HNN has a funny story of a history professor who decided the whole process of deleting his account from Twitter (139 followers) was too much trouble. So he posted a few tweets calling Elon Musk "poopy pants" and "bologna face." and attaching @elonmusk to them. Now Twitter has permanently suspended his account, and he doesn't have to.