On procedure and politics

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined

On giving way

In the Canadian House of Commons, during any debate, each Member of Parliament (MP) who rises to speak does so uninterrupted for a pre-determined length of time, normally 10 or 20 minutes. During that time, a Member may only interrupt another Member for very specific, procedural reasons, for example, to: call attention to a point [...]

Reasons for not voting in the May 2011 election

Declining voter turnout is a problem confronting many democracies. In the most recent federal general election in Canada (May 2011), voter turnout was 61%, which is only marginally better than the turnout for the previous election in 2008, 58.8%. A study by Statistics Canada finds that of the 7.5 million eligible voters who did not [...]

Ministerial responsibility

Ministerial responsibility takes two forms — collective cabinet responsibility (or ‘cabinet solidarity’) and individual ministerial responsibility. Both concepts are governed by conventions inherited from Westminster and both are central to the working of responsible government. Cabinet is collectively responsible to the people, through the Parliament, for determining and implementing policies for national government. Broadly, it [...]

Quote of the day

Whatever our personal views, we should frankly recognize that these proposals were put before the country at the recent General Election and that the people of this country, with full knowledge of these proposals, returned the Labour Party to power. The Government may, therefore, I think, fairly claim that they have a mandate to introduce [...]

Quote of the day

Canada so often searches for a way to define itself but it is, as Andrew Cohen wrote, “a nation of amnesiacs“, who year after year in surveys and polls are shown to know little of our history. Instead, we seek to perpetuate the myths of our collective story that are neither necessarily true nor false, [...]

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