Edward McWhinney, The Governor General and the Prime Ministers: The Making and Unmaking of Governments.

• Author: Urbaniak, Tom
• Position: Book review

Edward McWhinney, The Governor General and the Prime Ministers: The Making and Unmaking of Governments (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2005), 193 pp.

The title understates the book's objective. Edward McWhinney, professor and former MP, attempts to summarize the powers and duties of the Canadian Governor General and provincial lieutenant governors. He draws on federal and provincial precedents, as well as case studies from other Commonwealth countries. For a subject that can be dense and esoteric, McWhinney's writing style manages to be crisp and engaging. The book is weakened, however, by factual omissions and some dubious conclusions.

McWhinney deserves praise for the breadth of cases and for demonstrating that constitutional conventions are not straitjackets but are to be considered in the light of Lord Sankey's famous "living tree." The office-holder should have due regard to precedents but must be creative in responding to the circumstances. India's republican head of state, for example, has generally been successful in safeguarding British-style parliamentary government while adapting it to national conditions. This has entailed a delicate but sometimes active presidential role in navigating through minority-Parliament situations, a skill that has been noticed by Canada's vice-regal officeholders.

In extreme circumstances, the reserve powers may even include stepping in as the only legitimate remaining public authority. Here McWhinney aptly refers to Grenada's political convulsions of the early 1980s. There, the surviving and courageous Governor General managed to serve as a bridge to the reconstructed constitutional government. But the norm is restraint. The governor must avoid, as the author puts it, "gratuitous political bloodletting." The subtle and low-key approach of British Columbia Lieutenant Governor David Lain in 1991, on the eve of an election and in the face of a rebellion within the governing Social Credit party serves as a textbook case. Some of the Socred caucus members were trying to make representations to His Honour. Lam's minimalist and very cautious involvement helped indirectly to facilitate an intra-party resolution to the problem.

The book is weakest where McWhinney, with his impressive experience as a student of law and history, should be strongest. He omits or misconstrues some facts and precedents essential to trying to discern the constitutional conventions applicable to the vice-regal offices. He asserts, for example, without qualification that the reservation-and-disallowance powers of the lieutenant governors are no longer worth contemplating. He neglects to mention that a recent short-serving Quebec...