pauldrye

😍 Awww, whooo's the cutest little menacing new predator? Is it you? Is it you? It is! 😍

It's not a precedent -- this has already happened several times. John Turner was PM in 1984 without having a seat. Mackenzie King won an election and became PM all while not being an MP in 1926. He was even a seat-less PM for a couple of months again in 1945.

Prior to the convention of standing for election soon after becoming PM being a hard-and-fast thing, John A. McDonald was in a similar position at Confederation in 1867, and so were two more 19th-century PMs, Abbott and Bowell.

Given the way that the Conservatives blew several conventions out of the water last time they were in power (proroguing Parliament inappropriately, and refusing to allow a coalition second crack at forming a government after an election) I agree it would be a good idea to make this a law. But ringing an alarm bell over Carney specifically is a bit too much. The Liberals are already talking about which back-bencher will resign and Carney run: somewhere in the West Island of Montreal looks like a likely candidate as they are super-safe Liberal seats.

You probably should not be surprised to learn that the US does not entirely recognize the appellation. If the wine was marketed as "Champagne" prior to 2006, they may use the name in the United States.

I haven't been able to confirm precisely, but the Midori browser appears to be from Spain or at least Europe. Their website only comes in English/Español and the only events they have listed as attending have been in Germany. It's Gecko-based, so it's "Firefox-ish". It also takes Firefox add-ins, which is nice.

I've been using it for a couple weeks now and it's been working fine. Spotify hiccups on it, but that's the only site I go to regularly that doesn't like it.

So far so good, though I haven't really stressed it out with anything complicated yet. I write game books and things, but that's been in Office 365 and (lately) LibreOffice.

There's not a lot, but if you're willing to look at "Not American" rather than "Canadian" there's a few.

Daily software, I've been using Switzerland's kSuite 's free tier for about a week, for emails and a Google Docs/Sheets replacement. It's been fine so far.

They have Kenya listed as an Asian country.

For Ontario readers, Farm Boy's store brand cereals are made in Canada.

No, they do -- it's just not a codified constitution like almost all other countries have.

Uncodified constitution

Proponents of the idea believe that a constitution that has evolved bit by bit over a long period of time and across a bunch of different charters and unwritten agreements/customs is stronger that one that's done all in one shot. You'll see the unflattering metaphor that "a tree is stronger than a weed", which seems a bit unfair but it's reasonable point -- if not one that's beyond argument or anything.

Commonwealth countries are politically conservative, small "c" and not big "C", as the general attitude is "if it ain't broke don't fix it, even if it's objectively kind of stupid". There was a good reason for every one of the decisions that led to today, don't &^%$ with it, just in case.

The key word in "constitutional monarchy" is "constitutional", not "monarchy". The monarch must follow the parliament's requests, and not doing so is unconstitutional. Parliament is sovereign, at least in all of the countries that derive their monarchy from the UK's.

Outside of the UK there wouldn't be a fight anyway: in all the Commonwealth countries (except the ones that have since gone fully republican), the monarch has a representative called "the governor general" who is selected by the Parliament and recommended to the monarch at which point see above. The monarch has to take the advice of who is to be their governor-general. Issues basically never get to the monarch for them to mess anything up. The loyal-to-his-country deputy gets first crack at everything the monarch does in theory and has no reason to go against Parliament. If somehow the g-g or the king did speak out, it'd be a legal mess but everyone would ignore them. Practically we'd either get ourselves a new monarch or just say to hell with it and become a republic.

To answer your specific question then, yes, it's pro forma. The monarch's role is to be the embodiment of all legislative, judicial, and executive power, in a fairly close analog to what the American Constitution is. But the Constitution can't exercise any of those powers and the monarch can't either. It's just a historical oddity that they can walk and talk, unlike a piece of paper.

Nice find! They had me at "the Devil's Balls".