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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

In practice it's mostly ceremonial. It's not ceremonial in the way that she could do it and it would happen, but is in the way that AFAIK they haven't in centuries, and starting it outside very exceptional circumstances would mean that power would be taken away quickly.

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As an example of an exceptional circumstance, in a Canada a few years back there was a minority government. The opposition parties banded together and formed a coalition with a plan to take over as a majority.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Canadian_p...

The Prime minister moved to keep power by requesting the Governor General (Queen's representative) prorogue parliament.

In this circumstance, the Governor General accepted the Prime Minister's request, which ended up rescuing the Conservative minority government. But I think most people agree that if she had decided otherwise, and allowed the majority coalition to take over, that would also have been an acceptable result. So this was, indirectly, the Queen making a ruling on a power struggle between a minority government and a majority opposition.

The Queen/GG were probably taking into account a very similar situation in Australia known as "The Dismissal" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...

Considering how controversial this is 50 years later I'd say they did a good job in Canada to be as apolitical as possible, because sacking a sitting Prime Minister is definitely picking a side.

The Governor General did what the Prime Minister asked her to do, which is what they always do. The GG does not act on the advice of parliament but rather on the advice of the Prime Minister.

If you presented an example where the Prime Minister told the Governor General to do one thing, and she did another, then I'd agree that counts as the Queen/GG exercising power.

The article I linked lists two such examples. More importantly, my point was that in this case, although the GG chose to do as asked, that was by no means a set outcome. If she had done otherwise, as happened in 1896 and 1926, that outcome would also have been considered reasonable, and most likely not resulted in a public outcry and overthrowing the monarchy.

I still think it was a bad call allowing Harper to get away with prorouging parliament twice and giving the cons time to paint a coalition government as somehow "unconstitutional" and "undemocratic".

It's MORE democratic if anything.

This is exactly what this article is about, turns out it's not uncommon, bills have been held up or changes added before assent was granted at the request of the monarchy over a thousand times in the present Queen's rein.

That's like 150 times a year? Every 2 days? How is that 'exceptional'?

I wouldn't be surprised if the Guardian has a week of damaging headline from this.

Today's was the Prince of Wales added an exemption shafting home owners on 'his' land, causing people's homes to become worthless so that he can collect extra rent. A clear abuse of power.

> I wouldn't be surprised if the Guardian has a week of damaging headline from this.

Indeed. Apparently they are releasing this as a series. I am very curious to see what they have next. Though I have no idea about how actually damaging this would be for the royal family.

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