Parliamentary tradition and the legacy of 1812.

AuthorO'Brien, Gary W.

This year, for the bicentennial of the War of 1812, many Canadians will be celebrating Canada's military tradition. Our parliamentary traditions go back more than two hundred years and we tend to take them for granted. Had the outcome of the war with the United States been different, we may have had another governance system. The parliamentary debt that is owed for those who fought in that struggle should never be forgotten. This article suggests we should spend a bit of time reflecting on our parliamentary traditions as well as our military ones.

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Our parliamentary tradition developed from two basic sources: the backwoods legislature of Upper Canada whose first sitting on September 17, 1792 near Niagara Falls was held, according to historian W.C. Croften, "under a tree, a large stone serving for the Clerk's Table," and the much larger provincial parliament of Lower Canada which met in Quebec City in a seventeenth century church. At least five major characteristics of the modern Canadian Parliament can be traced to the procedures and practices that these assemblies developed before 1812.

The first notable feature is that our legislative practice has never been a replica of English procedures. Once their chambers were established, the Members had desks, not benches, and voted by roll-call divisions as opposed to entering lobbies with tellers counting the votes. Norman French was never used in royal assent ceremonies. There is no evidence that the Speakers were wigged. When the Americans burned York (Toronto)'s Parliament Buildings in 1813, they took the wig suspended over the Speaker's Chair as a scalp. It is often thought to be the Speaker's wig. It was more likely the periwig of a judge since the chamber was used as a courthouse when the assembly was not sitting and in April 1813 when the invasion took place, it was not. Unlike procedure at Westminster, the emphasis was on rapid decision-making, stripped of multiplicity of questions and elaborate ceremonies.

The Canadian Parliament is a model to the world in conducting its proceedings in two languages and this practice began at the very opening of the First Session of the Lower Canadian Legislature in 1792. The initial Speech from the Throne was delivered in English but was accompanied by a French translation read by one of the Commissioners appointed to administer the oath to members. French-speaking members insisted that the first bill introduced in the assembly be in both...

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