The Governor General on the line

Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson has spoken with Prime Minister Paul Martin and consulted constitutional experts this week as Parliament descends into chaos. "The Governor General is monitoring the situation very closely," said an official... Clarkson has been thrust into the midst of a political storm with the opposition calling on her to take control of what they call an unworkable Parliament... "We've now demonstrated three days in a row (that) the government does not have the confidence of the House," [Stephen] Harper said. "It could go on until the government or the Governor General is forced to admit that the government has lost its mandate to govern the country." Although she can't force an election, the Governor General can advise the prime minister to dissolve Parliament and call a vote. He doesn't have to follow her advice... A senior government official said the prime minister won't be taking any direction from Clarkson. "The Governor General receives advice from her first minister. She doesn't tender it," the official said.

Both the story and the "senior government official" are wrong. The Governor General most certainly has the right to advise her first minister. As Bagehot famously put it, under the British constitution (of which we are the inheritors) the sovereign has three rights: "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn." Ordinarily, it is true, the prime minister is not bound to follow her advice, but that is a different statement. And while it is also ordinarily true that she is bound to take his, that is not true of one matter in particular: who should be her first minister. If the Governor General is of the opinion that the current prime minister does not command the confidence of the House of Commons, she has the absolute right to dismiss him and to call upon someone else, or to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. It is not the prime minister, acting on the Governor General's advice, who dissolves Parliament: it is the Governor General, usually on the prime minister's advice but not always. Byng's refusal of King's request for dissolution was entirely correct in law, even if it later provided King with a campaign issue. The Governor General will naturally be inclined to give the prime minister every benefit of the doubt. So long as she is assured he will do the constitutional thing and seek the confidence of the House at the first opportunity -- as he is obliged to do, if not to resign outright, after a defeat such as the government suffered on Tuesday -- she need not immediately dismiss him. But he is already in dereliction of that duty, as the Opposition have been reminding us, and every day he delays only makes matters worse. At present we have no government, at least not one whose right to govern is broadly recognized, and yet the prime minister proposes we should remain in this state of constitutional limbo for another week, with no guarantees that the situtation will be resolved even then. That must be of concern to Her Excellency, and if the prime minister does not relent -- Harper has lately proposed Monday as a compromise date -- will demand her intervention. MORE: PoliticsWatch has more, including a primer on the Whitlam Dismissal. MORER: An encyclopedic review of the G-G's powers at ThePolitic. UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long. A revised version of the CP story is now online. Key grafs:

The Governor General has the authority to dissolve Parliament and order an election - or consider whether the Oppostion is capable of forming a government - if she deems the House has lost confidence in the ruling government. She can also advise the prime minister. But democractic convention stipulates that the government should first test the confidence of the House...

Much better.