I was having a look at what Doug Ford was up to, and had a look at the list of bills.
This first one is odd, and I’ll bet that all Westminster-based parliaments do it.
It’s an act giving themselves the power to do more than only what the crown tells them to do. They don’t even have to vote on it, and first reading probably took less than half a minute. Very ceremonial, but it would be a laugh if that bill was accidentally voted down or otherwise closed. Tough to do because you’d probably need the Speaker of the House in on the joke.
Everyone would be sitting there doing fish impressions for five minutes before they pretended that it never happened.
eta:
An interesting side note is that, since the bill is purely symbolic these days, no one bothers printing up paper copies of the bill. And since they haven’t done so for years, no one really knows what the exact text of the bill actually was.
The Sovereign Citizen conspiracy types could have fun with that.
Strictly speaking it’s an Act introduced in order to assert and exercise their independence from the Crown and basically politely stick two fingers up at the Monarch to make the point “You don’t tell us what to do” - (before getting on with what the Monarch told them to do of course, this being Westminster style constitutional Monarchy).
The Act doesn’t actually give them any powers, the act of considering it is itself an exercise of powers they claim to have in any event.
As you found, the UK parliament has a specific Act which they theoretically ‘consider’ before considering the Queen’s Speech.
Ontario did away with the pretense of considering some centuries old bill by having an bill that expressly says “this is a bill to assert our right to consider this bill rather than your Speech”.
Nicely circular.
Well, as the wikipedia article notes, we have a fairly good idea.
Only of an old Victorian version, but I heard from the best authorities that Margaret Thatcher changed it to a contract to indenture the souls of everyone in the UK to Satan. Prove me wrong!
With Ontario, it’s a bit too stripped-down. The “throne speech” comes from the Premier’s office (Doug Ford), and the bill to consider instead of that is submitted by … Doug Ford. There’s far too much Doug Ford involved in that process.
Oh, that. Well, yes we all know about that. That of course is the real reason we crashed out of the ERM back in 1992; Satan exercised his call option.
All that stuff about George Soros was just a cover.
Soros, of course, is actually Peter Fanshawe-Twistleton-Feinnes (pronounced Wilkins), an Old Etonian MI6 operative in deep cover. He and Prince Philip cooked up the cover story after the Queen descended to Hell to plead with Satan in person and made the arrangements for the eventual sacrifice of the Princess of Wales as a symbolic proxy for the rest of the UK.
Sorry, got go to, some surprisingly burly chaps in rather nice suits have just popped round to tell me I’ve won an all expenses paid holiday in the Algarve and I’ve got to come with them right now. Apparently, it’s a once in a lifetime offer…
It would seem that applies to anything involving Doug Ford.
“… he’s a cunnin’ little devil, your Tibetan. Tunnelin’ straight through your begonias like it was nobody’s business. A cup of tea’ll shift him, with rancid yak butter for preference you should be able to get some at any good Garden Centre …”
