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There is a chance everything will blow up soon

There is a chance everything will blow up before that happens. A new legislature has to elect a Speaker to preside before it can do absolutely anything else. At certain times in Canada’s colonial history, the members of a newly elected legislature met and found themselves unable to elect a Speaker because parties or blocs were tied. In those cases, the Lieutenant-Governor dissolved the assembly and called an immediate do-over election.

That is certainly what will happen now if the B.C. assembly meets and the parties reach a total impasse over a Speaker. The members of the assembly are not even technically allowed to adjourn on the first day until a Speaker is found. You cannot force any member to serve as Speaker, you cannot go ahead without one, and you cannot pick a non-member to do the job. The Lieutenant-Governor would wait as long as possible to act, and would want assurances from her first minister and others that there was no way of breaking the deadlock, but if it happened, a new election would become the only solution.

This would give us marvellous drama. The New Democrat-Green bloc could obviously elect a Speaker from their own number, but that would leave the benches on either side in a 43-43 tie. In that case the Speaker has a casting vote, which he is supposed to use in a nonpartisan way. But Clark, as incumbent premier, has the right to meet the assembly as premier and test its confidence on a Throne Speech.

The New Democrat-Green bloc could obviously elect a Speaker from their own number, but that would leave the benches on either side in a 43-43 tie

There is said to be a convention for Westminster-model assemblies that specifies rules for a Speaker’s casting vote, but the language in which that convention is expressed seems to me to vary in important ways from case to case. In recent Canadian situations, the rule has been that a government should not be defeated on a casting vote. But this element of the rule has only been applied to governments that already established confidence and then lost their numerical edge under post-election circumstances.