A few more dumb questions...

[JamesHackerMP]

I've already looked up most of this on Wikipedia, by the way, and I flipped through the 1867 constitution (or British North America) Act. OK, some of it at least....

1. Why is there a leader of the official opposition, but also an Opposition House Leader? (Can I assume that the governing party has the same redundancy? the PM and a "Government House Leader"?) What precisely is the difference between the two?

2. Why does the Constitution make no mention of a prime minister at all? I skimmed the thing, and it mentions the Queen, her GG, the privy council, and the Parliament, and some other stuff. Does Mr Trudeau not constitutionally exist? (like it's all convention?)

3. Which level of government is supposed to have the most power, the federal? or the provincial? I hinted at this before in a thread on MLW and they told me something I didn't understand, involving imports/exports between provinces.

4. What do you divide a province into? And what are their governments like? (how are they organized exactly?) (In the US it's usually "counties" a state is divided into---do you have those?)

 

Edited December 22, 2018 by JamesHackerMP

[eyeball]

19 minutes ago, JamesHackerMP said:

4. What do you divide a province into? And what are their governments like? (how are they organized exactly?) (In the US it's usually "counties" a state is divided into---do you have those?)

We have regional districts municipalities and in BC now, First Nation's territories.

I'd like to see more bioregionalism used myself.  I'd do away with provinces entirely myself, while weakening and decentralizing Ottawa's control over its regions unto area-based management/governance.

   

[Argus]

3 hours ago, JamesHackerMP said:

I've already looked up most of this on Wikipedia, by the way, and I flipped through the 1867 constitution (or British North America) Act. OK, some of it at least....

1. Why is there a leader of the official opposition, but also an Opposition House Leader? (Can I assume that the governing party has the same redundancy? the PM and a "Government House Leader"?) What precisely is the difference between the two?

2. Why does the Constitution make no mention of a prime minister at all? I skimmed the thing, and it mentions the Queen, her GG, the privy council, and the Parliament, and some other stuff. Does Mr Trudeau not constitutionally exist? (like it's all convention?)

3. Which level of government is supposed to have the most power, the federal? or the provincial? I hinted at this before in a thread on MLW and they told me something I didn't understand, involving imports/exports between provinces.

4. What do you divide a province into? And what are their governments like? (how are they organized exactly?) (In the US it's usually "counties" a state is divided into---do you have those?)

 

1. House Leader is more about the guy who organizes the agenda in the House of Commons. Ie, the strategy for passing bills (by government) and how they should be attacked and who should be standing up to do so (opposition)
2. The constitution is what the government can do. We don't have separate branches of government here which need further defining.. A PM has only the power and authority the House gives him. He is not elected in his own right. Whoever commands a majority of MPs in the House is prime minister. Which means the person in the role can change between elections. On his own, he is merely an MP. Only when he represents the will of the House is he anything more.
3  Technically the federal government. Roles and responsibilities are divided, but on a number of them the federal government can, in the name of some national need, override the provinces. The federal government could, for example, simply declare a pipeline in the national interest and there's nothing BC or any other province could do about it. Another good example is when BC decided it was tired of those damn Americans blowing things up off its coast in a military exercise area the US was using. It passed some law which said they had to stop and leave. The federal government simply expropriated the area and said "Nuh uh."
4. I don't know about elsewhere, but Ontario has counties, although, for governmental purposes they're often combined into 'regional' governments and 'regional' police forces. Ie , the regional municipality of leeds grenville  is called "The united counties of Leeds and Grenville". On the other hand, Niagara simply calls themselves the regional government and it has a regional police force. I think that's probably because they're bigger and they choose to call themselves a region. They're still formally a county, though.

 

Edited December 22, 2018 by Argus

[JamesHackerMP]

After reading some of the 1867 Act it seems that the role of the feds vs. provinces is more well-defined than it is in the States, (where it boils down to what's in the 10th amendment, which is ambiguous anyway).

[Queenmandy85]

1. What Argus said.

2. The Prime Minister exists by convention. Officially, like all ministers, the PM is appointed by the Queen, but by convention, this is carried out by the GG who, by convention, appoints the leader of the party with the most seats in the House of Commons. 

3. The Feds have the most power, but the power balance is somewhat fluid. We have a traditional problem with national unity and the Feds have to get the provinces on board for things.(Pipelines, for instance).

4. Each Province is different. Some have counties, some have regional districts.

[cannuck]

In SK, "counties" are Rural Municipalities (RMs for short).  They are governed by council led by a Reeve.   Same in MB and AB as I recall.

[-TSS-]

Btw., didn't Canada, like the UK, also change its Election-law towards fixed-term parliaments or am I mistaken?

In the UK early elections are still possible but not decided solely by the PM but it requires 2/3 approval in parliament. 

At least IIRC Canada shortened the parliamentary term from five to four years. 

[Queenmandy85]

3 hours ago, -TSS- said:

Btw., didn't Canada, like the UK, also change its Election-law towards fixed-term parliaments or am I mistaken?

Yes. Prime Minister Harper brought that legislation in and then promptly broke it by calling a snap election. The real disadvantage is it greatly extends the unofficial election campaign.

[Argus]

4 hours ago, Queenmandy85 said:

Yes. Prime Minister Harper brought that legislation in and then promptly broke it by calling a snap election. The real disadvantage is it greatly extends the unofficial election campaign.

And as an ordinary law it can simply be removed by any government at any time for any reason.

[Dougie93]

The reason why the Canadian Prime Minister does not appear in the Canadian Constitution is that the Canadian Constitution is a continuance of existing British constitutional law, that is to say, the Canadian Constitution is layered on top of the already existing British constitution, the conventions which govern the office of the Prime Minister are the British conventions, at the time of the enacting of the Canadian Constitution in 1867, the British conventions were taken as a given, restating them would have been redundant.

[Dougie93]

Or to be even more concise, all of the British constitutional law still applies in Canada, Magna Carta, Common Law, English Bill of Rights, etc,  Canada has simply layered additional acts on top of that, most significantly an American style "written" Charter of Rights and Freedoms,  since 1982.

[Dougie93]

The way to think of it is thusly; rather than having a revolution and severing the constitutional ties with the British Crown, Canada evolved out of Britain in stages, (we were actually about to have a revolution and join the Americans when James Madison invaded and in the process created a "Canada" as a reaction) but just because Canada is not the United Kingdom, does not mean that it is not the British Crown, this is still the British Crown here, and the Constitution flows from the Crown not the government, the Crown simply exists above the level of national governance, to wit. the government is not actually all that significant in the grand scheme of things, or at least things important as per going over the top into no mans land.

My  country is  the House of Windsor, the Queen my Sovereign and Commander-in-Chief, never swore an oath to "Canada", tho I am bound to Her Majesty by a blood oath unto death as necessary.  England, Scotland, Wales, Ulster, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc, not the same government, but the House of Windsor all, and all under the British constitution, Canada being the only one which added a Canadian Bill of Rights on top, Australia, New Zealand for example are still governed by the British Constitution without a domestic Bill of Rights of their own.

More British than the British, more American than the Americans.  Suck it, Aussies.

[Dougie93]

The thing to understand about Canader, is that it was not really born on 1 July 1867, that's a post modern Canadian myth.  1 July 1867 is simply  Confederation, wherein the squabbling colonies here were forced to enter into a legislative union  in fear of an invasion by the bloody Fenians (American Irish Catholic Civil War veterans attempting to seize Canada to ransom it for Irish Freedom) because the British Crown would not, or  rather could not defend it from London. 

Canader was actually born on 13 September 1759, at Quebec,  when Hanover (The British Crown) seized it as a war prize, formally  transferred to Hanover (The British Crown) in the Treaty of Paris 1763,  prior to, it  was (Nouvelle) France.

The British Constitution as of 1763 was the baseline, then, as I said, the devolution progressed in stages, although 1 July 1867 wasn't all that significant at the time.  If you asked those "Canadians" what they were, they would have said they were "British". 

The 1 July which was much more significant, was 1 July 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, where the British broke their Empire once and for all time, rapid Canadian devolution from the United Kingdom accelerating in the wake of said military catastrophe, direct line to repatriation of the Constitution from Westminster to Ottawa in 1982.

Edited January 5, 2019 by Dougie93
grammar