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Flexible and Structured Parliamentarism: From 1848 To Contemporary Party Government THOMAS A. HOCKIN Complaints about the "decline of Parliament" seldom identify that historical moment, that state of grace and perfection from which decline has occurred. It is difficult to trace a fall from grace if a parliamentary Garden of Eden is not identified . This paper will first identify one period in Canadian History in which Parliament was more flexible than it is today, contrast it with contemporary parliamentary reality and try to identify Parliament's residual potency. The achievement of responsible government in the provinces of Canada and Nova Scotia in 1848, in New Brunswick in 1849, ii;i Prince Edward Island in 1851 and in Newfoundland in 1855 changed political action and organization in British North America. The first new forms were varied and somewhat transitory. Not until Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Canada decided to try to negotiate a possible confederation agreement did political forces settle into something of a stable pattern. The instability of political alignments especially in the province of Canada in the period from 1848 to 1864 might be expected to have yielded little of enduring importance for the student of parliamentaryexecutive relations. Yet curiously enough, at about the same time in Westminster (from 1847 to 1867), the old configuration of political parties also came apart. The House of Commons regularly defeated governments. The so-called ''power'' of the lower house not only to select governments but to control them became not simply theory but fact. The potency of the lower house in Westminster - as in the province of 8 Canada -·to "control" executives flowed not simply from the constitution but from the new proliferation of political alignments and from the nature of political competition at the time. After 1867, however, in both Canada and Britain the House of Commons was dominated by a powerful Prime Minister backed by a sizeable majority in the House of Commons and the executive regained its pre-1848 capacity to dominate Parliament . It was at the sunset of this brief day of party disruption, fluidity and proliferation that Walter Bagehot wrote his The English Constitution. This influential work is in fact an outline, a clear paradigm for executive-parliamentary relations (and of loyal Opposition). It articulates what was possible, and perhaps understood as desirable, for executive-parliamentary relations after 1848 but which in fact lasted less than two decades in Westminster . Let us call his system a "flexible parliamentarism " because it is in vivid contrast to ''structured parliamentarism,'' I i.e., Parliament dominated and structured by parties. Bagehot outlined what he described as the functions of the British House of Commons: it must "legislate . well, teach the nation well, express the nation's will well, bring matters to the nation's attention well."2 But the "most important," "the main" function, is the "elective." Our House of Commons is a real choosing body; it elects the people it likes. And it dismisses whom it dislikes too. No matter that a few months since it was chosen to support Lord Aberdeen or Lord Palmerston; upon a sudden occasion it ousts the statesmen to whom it first adhered, and selects an opposite statesman whom it at first rejected.3 In fact other functions of the House - to teach, to legislate, to express, etc. - depended in Bagehot's view, on this "elective" function of the House. It is true that in Bagehot's theory the House may not risk changing government capriciously or too frequently. The House does give at least tacit reference to probable public opinion ; but certainly also there is much free will in the judgement of the Commons. Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 14, No. 2 (Ete 1979 Summer). The House only goes where it thinks in the end the nation will follow; but it takes its chance of the nation following or not following; it assumes the initiative and acts upon its discretion or its caprice....The whole life of English politics is the action and reaction between the Ministry and the Parliament.4 The Bagehot notion included then the key idea that the House would choose and dismiss governments between general elections. Bagehot did...

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