Lloyd Doerkson -- at least I think that's him
Walter Bagehot (1826-77) had many terrible views about government and democracy. He thought it perfectly appropriate that Britain be governed by a voting bloc called "the ten thousand" -- a group that very much included him, though it excluded the vast majority of Britons. He was blithely certain that the rest just were not fit to hold the right to vote let alone to govern.
So I'm not an uncritical reader of his book The English Constitution, published in the year of Canadian confederation. From 150 years on, he's pretty wierd sometimes,
Yet every time I browse in the book I find something sharply relevant to parliamentary democracy as we practise it in the 21st century.
He notes, for instance, that in a parliamentary system "the determining efficacy in matters political resides in the people -- not necessarily in the whole people ... but in a chosen people," by which he means the legislature and particularly the cabinet.
One great thing about this, he argues, is that "at a sudden emergency this people can choose a leader for the occasion." At the time of the Crimean War, he observes, Britain turned out a very successful peacetime government in favour of a war cabinet. "We turned out the Quaker and put in the pugilist."
This he compares to the American republic's reliance on fixed terms for its president, senators, and congressmen, all of whom are immune to being removed in mid-term, no matter how urgent the need for a change. He notes the extraordinary case of Abraham Lincoln, who turned out to be exactly the right person to lead the Union through the Civil War -- but whose skills were largely unknown when he was elected, so that he might have been the worst possible war president and they would still have been stuck with him for four years (if the Union survived that long). And after Lincoln, they were stuck with Andrew Johnson, who pretty much was the worst possible choice.
Because in a parliamentary system leaders can be ousted and replaced at any time by legislators and particularly cabinet ministers, Bagehot goes on, "The notion of employing a man of unknown smallness at a crisis of unknown greatness is to our minds simply ludicrous."
I happened to be reading this page just as a man of unknown smallness called Lorne Doerkson (I first wrote "Lloyd Dirksoen," so unfamiliar is he) became premier of British Columbia. And as Danielle Smith, having had her policies and projects spectacularly rejected and having been shown to be manifestly too small to govern Alberta, governs serenely on, right through the crisis of her own making.
It reminds me how totally, and with no one even noticing (since no one would ever dream of comparing our parliaments to those of 150 years ago), we in Canada have completely inverted the parliamentary system, so that cabinet ministers and legislators have absolutely no authority over their own leaders. And how those who do select new premiers and prime ministers in Canada now almost always choose the unknown man.
I doubt Premier Doerkson will every be compared to Lincoln.
