Sir John George Bourinot: vistorian Canadian - his life, times and legacy.

Sir John George Bourinot: Vistorian Canadian-His Life, Times and Legacy, McGill-Queens University Press, 2001.

Throughout my over thirty years of procedural service to the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan, the Senate of Canada and the University of Saskatchewan, three parliamentary authorities have been my guides. Sir Erskine May, a Clerk of the House of Commons, Westminster, wrote Treatise on the Law, Privileges and Usage of Parliament, an authority on British parliamentary rules and precedents. Arthur Beachesne's Parliamentary Rules and Forms, is the Canadian version of May and has, until recently, been the authority used by the Canadian parliament and the provincial legislative assemblies. The third of the procedural triumvirate was Sir John George Bourinot with his Parliamentary Procedure and Practice in the Dominion of Canada, originally published in 1884. The fourth and last edition of Bourinot was published in 1916, but it is still a useful discussion of parliamentary principles. Bourinot offered the logic behind a particular procedure. He also wrote a procedural handbook for the layperson who was working with municipal councils or community meetings.

But who was John George Bourinot? Up until now, little was known of this parliamentary proceduralist and former Clerk of the House of Commons for 22 years? Margaret A. Banks, Professor Emeritus of Law and former law librarian at Western University has attempted to answer this question in her biography of Bourinot. The timing of this book is perfect, coming out less than a year after the publication of Marleau and Montpetit's House of Commons Procedure and Practice, which was the result of the "Bourinot project". Banks' book is well researched and documented with nearly one hundred pages of endnotes. However, a detailed bibliography would have been helpful to the student of procedure.

Bourinot was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and during his early working life, became a journalist. His newspaper articles and editorials shed some light on his thoughts and the times but Banks did have difficulty in knowing all that Bourinot wrote since, in those days, many letters or articles in the newspaper were unsigned or signed with a pen name and newspaper editorials were unsigned. Nevertheless Banks does an excellent job of ferreting out Bourinot's work.

Since Bourinot learned shorthand and reported on legislative debates for the newspaper, it was an easy transition to becoming a legislative...