Is Our Governor General Up to the Job?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

“Since our Governor-General made her critical decision on prorogation 2½ weeks ago, there's been a sustained regal silence. Nary a word from the celestial Michaëlle Jean to explain it.”

So wrote Lawrence Martin, a columnist who can usually be relied upon to view politics through a fairly Liberal prism, in a Dec. 22 Globe and Mail commentary.

“We don't know what the PM told her, whether it was accurate, whether he torqued the separatist threat, whether he raised the possibility of legal recourse. We don't know whether her decision came with any strings attached or how she determined it was consistent with the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy,” contended Martin.

Canadians have not worried all that much about the role of our constitutional stand-in for the head of state, Queen Elizabth II. Even those who think the office archaic and a relic of colonial times have reassured themselves that, after all, it’s a job consisting mainly of ceremonial functions.

So in recent decades it became a patronage appointment, just another plum, like a seat in the Senate. Recent Governors General have been retired politicians and CBC personalities. Who really cared?

But we’ve now been reminded that in a Westminster system of parliamentary government, the Crown, in the person of the Governor General, can wield important reserve powers. It would have been within Jean’s right, legally, to have installed Stéphane Dion as prime minister, without benefit of another election.

And should Stephen Harper’s minority government fall next month, we might see a man who last October wasn’t in the running for the job – or even leader of his party – become our head of government.

Michael Ignatieff would be the beneficiary of behind-the-scenes decisions which we, the other 33 million Canadians, would not be privy to.

So Martin’s concerns are well-founded. Given that we’re in a period where minority governments are common and the Governor General’s discretionary powers are therefore large, he wants Jean to publically disclose the reasons for her action on Dec. 4.

But is it possible she herself can’t quite articulate the constitutional rationale behind her decision? Here's the real problem: our Governor General is an inexperienced former TV announcer placed in the job by a besotted former prime minister.

She herself may have had no idea what to do when Harper arrived asking her to suspend parliament, and may therefore have relied completely on unnamed “experts.” In effect, our constitutional monarchy has now become the equivalent of a regency, where a monarch too young to rule leaves governing to others.