Fun fact – if you make a careful examination of the Canadian constitution, nowhere will you find listed the rights, duties, and powers of the prime minister.
That’s because, in Canadian constitutional law, no such position exists.
This is a fact that could open up any number of possibilities for the way we’re governed, if anyone were brave enough to just try.
To understand how we have put a person with an imaginary, informal title in charge of the federal government, we have to go back to Shakespeare’s day, when the Stuart monarchs took over England following the death of Elizabeth I.
The Stuarts subscribed to a belief in the “divine right of kings.” King Charles I particularly liked this idea, but his Parliament didn’t, so they cut off his head. The fighting before and after this incident are often known as the English Civil Wars.
Charles I’s son, James II, also managed to get on everyone’s bad side, but he was lucky enough to survive. He was, however, kicked out of the country in a sort of coup/Dutch invasion and replaced by his own sister and her husband.
This second incident, the Glorious Revolution (winners write the history books, etc.) is often seen as the real point at which elected British Parliaments gained supremacy over royalty, and from then on they took more and more power until the kings were mere figureheads.
But prime ministers did not emerge overnight. The first British PM, Robert Walpole, never officially went by that title during his long period in power in the 1720s-40s. His main official title was as First Lord of the Treasury. As the key politician in the Whig faction, he had the most power in the House of Commons.
This is the system we’ve inherited – anyone who can command the “confidence of the House,” i.e. can get a majority of MPs to vote for them when the chips are down, is the PM.
But there’s nothing saying it has to be one person.
You can imagine, say, two or three co-leaders traipsing off to meet the Governor-General and all being co-PMs.
Or a series of party members could pass the torch amongst themselves. A new PM every week, why not?
Or, in a staggeringly egalitarian political party, free of ego and infighting, a situation in which all members of the majority party agree on their path by consensus, and no one person holds the title at all.
Well, that last one strains credulity. But you get the idea.
The office of PM exists because of convention. But that title has accreted power and prestige for centuries.
It’s become central to our elections – each party tries to present their leader as “the next prime minister.” We debate whether the prospective PMs are guys we’d drink a beer with, or buy a used car from.
What we should talk about more often is whether we actually need a PM. Whether all the fighting both between parties and among the members of the majority party for the top job are the only ways to decide things.
