Currently the PM doesn’t have a seat in the house. If he visited the house, he’d have to go to the visitor’s gallery.

It’s an interesting situation. The PM is the leader of the federal liberal party, but he’s not a member of parliament. But, does he need to be? Is the PM sitting in the house of commons just a tradition that nobody has challenged yet? Could the PM delegate things inside the house of commons to their deputy-PM and then do things like give speeches, attend diplomatic functions, etc.?

The US has a very different system where the president isn’t part of the legislative branch at all. But, typically presidents don’t twiddle their thumbs waiting for something to do. Being the head of state keeps most presidents busy. It makes me wonder if technically Carney could choose not to run for office, and just spend his time doing head-of-state things rather than legislative things.

  • charles
    2·
    1 day ago

    Another thing to consider is that the PM being in the house of commons effectively elevates the leader of the opposition to being a near equal to the PM. If the PM weren’t even there, would anybody pay attention to what the leader of the opposition was saying?

    I think that’s a very interesting thought, I hadn’t considered the impacts on the opposition if the PM wasn’t in the house when I wrote my previous reply.

    I definitely agree with you that there’s pros and cons to either systems and it comes down a lot more to how its implemented than anything else. I also agree that this is not the best time to be experimenting with new systems/tweaks to the system and I wish there was a way for us (as a society) to better assess how a system might work without risking so much.