James W.J. Bowden's Blog
6 FOLLOWERS
A blog (primarily) on Canadian and Commonwealth political history and institutions. I started this blog in 2011, originally as a means of making the Manual of Official Procedure of the Government of Canada publicly available online. My area of academic expertise lies in Canadian political institutions, especially the Crown, political executive, and conventions of Responsible Government.
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
14h ago
The trope that Canada should avoid becoming “the 51st state” has never made much sense to me. While the Americans would surely not allow Prince Edward Island to carry on as a separate polity (and certainly not under such an ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
2w ago
An American Connection Over the last thirteen years, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that Parliamentum attracts a surprising number of readers from the United States, about one-quarter to one-third of the total depending on the year. I occasionally ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
1M ago
Houston Breached the Last Redoubt Nova Scotia long resisted the trend of fixed-date elections in Canada and stood for years as the last redoubt of the ten provinces to rely solely on section 4(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982, which ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
1M ago
Journalists need to earn the trust of their viewers and readers. They could start by reporting on the basic foundations of Responsible Government in Canada correctly. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick have recently held general elections in accordance with ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
1M ago
The Current Fixed-Date Elections Law Before the House of Commons lies a bill to amend the fixed-date elections law in sections 56.1 and 56.2 of the Canada Elections Act. It continues in the long tradition of tinkering and ad hockery ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
1M ago
Introduction Justin Trudeau stood defiant on 24 October 2024 and declared four days before the deadline that he would stay on as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister in defiance of about one-fifth of Liberal MPs: “We’re going ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
1M ago
Even after suffering the worst defeat in electoral history in 2011, the Liberals had managed to cling onto their redoubt of Toronto—St. Paul’s and their core support of urban Torontonians who would surely never abandon them. A Conservative had not ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
2M ago
Pulling the Thread That Unravels the Tapestry Like many interesting stories, this begins with a mistake and a clerical error. My colleague David Brock and I wrote an article for the Saskatchewan Law Review called “Beyond the Writ: The Expansion and Ambiguity of the Caretaker Convention in the 21st Century,” which came out in May ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
4M ago
Introduction: Readjusting Federal Electoral Boundaries Section 51(1) of the Constitution Act, 1867 requires that the number of MPs per province be recalculated after each decennial census and, consequently, that the electoral boundaries of ridings within each province be readjusted every ten years ..read more
James W.J. Bowden's Blog
5M ago
Introduction Britons went to the polls on 4 July 2024 and ended up giving Labour a massive majority of 411 out of 650 MPs. By the next morning, outgoing Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had already tendered his resignation to His Majesty King Charles III, and the King appointed Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the ..read more