Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis

✍ Scribed by Peter H. Russell (editor); Lorne Sossin (editor)

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 219
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

With a foreword by former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis brings together journalists, political scientists, and leading constitutional experts to analyse the parliamentary crisis of November 2008 and to discuss the nature of Canada's democracy.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Foreword
Introduction
PART ONE. The Events and Their Background
1. The ‘Crisis’: A Narrative
2. A Crisis Not Made in a Day
PART TWO. The Governor General’s Decision to Prorogue
3. To Prorogue or Not to Prorogue: Did the Governor General Make the Right Decision?
4. The Governor General’s Suspension of Parliament: Duty Done or a Perilous Precedent?
5. Prime Minister Harper’s Parliamentary ‘Time Out’: A Constitutional Revolution in the Making?
PART THREE. Constitutional Conventions
6. Why the Governor General Matters
7. When Silence Isn’t Golden: Constitutional Conventions, Constitutional Culture, and the Governor General
8. Of Representation, Democracy, and Legal Principles: Thinking about the Impensé
PART FOUR. Coalitions and Parliamentary Government
9. Coalition Government: When It Happens, How It Works
10. Learning to Live with Minority Parliaments
11. The Coalition That Wasn’t: A Lost Reform Opportunity
PART FIVE. Tensions in Canada’s Democratic Culture
12. Western Canada and the ‘Illegitimacy’ of the Liberal-NDP Coalition Government
13. Parliamentary Democracy versus Faux Populist Democracy
14. Ultimately, the System Worked
Contributors
Index