"Doug Ford fires PC Caucus Chair" says the Toronto Star headline,
Why doesn't the PC Caucus fire Doug Ford instead? You know they have the power. The caucus fails to show up just once for a Ford' government legislative bill, and the guy is toast -- that's the essence of parliamentary accountability.
Meanwhile Althia Raj documents the bullying tendency of Prime Minister Carney, whose billionaire-CEO mindset is more deeply engrained than his parliamentary understandings as he deals with a caucus afraid to apply its authority to him.
“He yells,” said one MP who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution from the Prime Minister’s Office. “He punches down at caucus all the time.”
But the bit of the TorStar file on parliamentary ignorance that really sticks is one from Christopher Hume. Hume is an architecture critic and a friend of cities, but on parliament and the constitution, he's as deluded as, well, as everyone else in this amnesiac political culture of ours.
Because Canada’s bizarrely conceived constitution reduces cities to mere creatures of the provinces, the premier can interfere to his heart’s content.” (Toronto Star, May 30, 2026.)Actually the constitution doesn't. That phrase about cities as creatures is not the constitution. It's from a Supreme Court of Canada opinion of 1993. It's a legal fiction. The BNA Act, which is more democratic than most of us today, gives the provinces the responsibility to create municipal governments. It was the SCC's ignorance of constitutional history that gave them the right to tyrannize the cities.
It's bedrock in Canada's constitutional history: once you create a level of government accountable to voters and authorized to tax and spend on their behalf, then you are stealing their money when you meddle in its affairs. That was the basis of Canadian self-government in the 1840s and the basis on which Macdonald's misuse of disallowance powers against the provinces were struck down.
Jeez, Robert Baldwin understood the principle a couple of decades before Confederation. This is Michael S. Cross describing Baldwin's Municipal Act of 1849:
For Baldwin it was a rational division of power that required municipalities to accept responsibility for their own progress…. A measure of local autonomy gave elected township councils unlimited taxing and debt authority. (Cross, Robert Baldwin, p283.)
Some years later, as co-premier of the United Canadas, Baldwin retired from parliament and from politics the moment he lost the support of his parliamentary caucus.
His caucus would not have tolerated any other choice.
