Parliamentary Bookshelf: Reviews.

• Date: 22 June 2020
• Author: McCormick, Floyd

Parliamentary Practice in British Columbia, Fifth Edition. Editor: Kate Ryan-Lloyd, Acting Clerk of the Legislative Assembly. Assistant Editors: Artour Sogomonian, Procedural Clerk; Susan Sourial, Clerk Assistant, Committees and Interparliamentary Relations; and Ron Wall, Manager, Committee Research Services.

It is an ancient adage that one should not judge a book by its cover. In the case of the fifth edition of Parliamentary Practice in British Columbia (hereafter referred to as PP5), the cover does provide a clue as to content. Not because of its look but because of its size. PP5 is a large format book that reveals, upon reading, large ambitions.

For PP5, editor Kate Ryan-Lloyd (now Clerk of the BC Legislative Assembly) and her team built on the ground-breaking work of E. George MacMinn, the long-serving and much-admired former Clerk who authored the first four editions. But while Ryan-Lloyd acknowledges her debt to MacMinn, she has also constructed a very different work.

In the preface to the third edition (published in 1997), MacMinn writes that a new edition was required (after 10 years) because "if a parliamentary authority is to remain useful to a Legislative Assembly, it must be current" (iii).

The organization and content of the first four editions shows books intended as a reference work for parliamentary practitioners. Like Beauchesne's Parliamentary Rules & Forms of the...