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Talk:1983 British Columbia general election

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Constitutional Crisis mention?

[edit]

"One of the few vice-regal crises in Canadian constitutional history happened on April 1, 1983, when the mandate of the Social Credit Bill Bennett government ran out and the government's authority to sign cheques was nullified. It was not until April 7 that Lieutenant-Governor Bob Rogers summoned Bill Bennett to Government House, after which emergency warrants were issued to cover spending and legal mandates, contingent upon there being an election as soon as possible (30 full days after the day of the writ, i.e. May 5)."

That at least should be in the article; the subsequent Solidarity Crisis really arose from the Restraint Budget that was to come rather than to this interregnum, which quickly got forgotten in the chaos of the following summer and fall. It's a subtle constitutional issue the ordinary public isn't interested in or can't understand the implications of, like the other matter with Joy McPhail being denied a place on the Privy Council as Leader or the Opposition, which is implicit in the constitution; there's no mechanims to do anything about it, and it's not the kind of thing people vote about, so they get away with it. That being said, I didn't want to politicize the election article; but will the ultimate intent of the elections series here be to have some of the political context of the election, neutrally-written as possible, and some of its consequences, etc? Or are these entries just about the numbers and who won or lost?

If I have no objections within a day or two I'll move the paragraph in quotes above into the article; hopefully there's a discussion group about election pages; there is about electoral districts, but not about electoral pages...Skookum1 07:51, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]