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Originally Posted by Jamaican-Phoenix
Why do people always think the system needs such a massive shift?
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Probably because it does, once you start thinking it through.
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Here's a cost-effective and simple idea:
1. Declare our intention to become a Republic.
2. If we can create a Constitution without the support of all the provinces (Quebec), then we can create a Republic without the support of all the provinces.
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I'm sure that will go down well.
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3. Officially change documents to show that the Governor-General will henceforth be known as the President (or Secretary-General if people don't like President), and make it an electable position.
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It's at this step where all hell breaks lose.
All of the executive powers that the Prime Minister and Cabinet currently exercise are done under the rubric of the "Governor-in-Council", which is to say delegated from the Governor General and ultimately the monarch. The only thing stopping the Governor General from using them himself is convention, which is essentially based on the fact that his position and that of the monarch are unelected so the powers are instead exercised by someone who is accountable to Parliament (at least in theory, omnibus bills notwithstanding).
But make the 'Governor' in "Governor-in-Council" elected and suddenly that convention will cease to have much meaning, especially if directly elected by the public at large. You would then have a single individual with a mandate directly from the people versus a prime minister who has a mandate from Parliament, which is an indirect mandate. It would not take long to have a Prime Minister and President from two different parties, especially with the current first-past-the post system or a preferential ballot system, and/or if Parliamentary and Presidential elections are significantly spaced in time.
How do you get a budget passed in such circumstances? In the US, they just have to keep trying to work it out, so they end up with either deadlocks or lots of riders and pork barrelling. But here, without any other changes to the Constitution, the President would have the power to dissolve Parliament - one of the few powers still reserved to the Crown - and try for a more compliant Parliament in a general election. The Governor General also has the power to refuse to sign bills into law, a power that is never used right now but could well be by an elected President, and, again, unlike in the US, there is no possibility of Parliamentary override to a veto.
Another issue is with appointments. To some degree, the Prime Minister is restrained in making appointments to bodies like the Supreme Court by dint of the fact that he is doing so in the Queen's name: contemplating appointing a partisan hack to the SCC would be incredibly bad form and might result in a minor constitutional crisis in which the GG/monarch is put in the position of having to refuse to appoint the candidate. Since we generally like to avoid that kind of embarrassment all round, PMs generally don't offer up highly questionable candidates (though Liberal ones seem to like pushing it). But strip away the royal dimension acting as a restraint and the President - not the Prime Minister any longer, the President having resumed the powers of the Governor-in-Council - might well appoint whomever he pleases, and without the elaborate system of confirmation hearings that the Americans have we'd be guaranteed to have a Supreme Court even more politicized than the American one. That might sound odd given how politicized the American Supreme Court seems to us now, but consider that at least
some American Supreme Court justices have had to get confirmation from the party opposite the President who appointed them, whereas that would not be the case here.
An unreformed Senate would probably become even more inane than it already is.
Or take appointments of the Lieutenant Governors. Here's where some real opportunities for fedprov mischief present themselves. The Lieutenant Governors are appointed by the Governor General on the advice of the relevant Premier, but with a directly elected president up against an indirectly elected premier, such niceties of royalist convention could be shown the door. There's nothing to stop the President from appointing a bagman as Lieutenant Governor, especially if the province is run by a premier of another party or one whom is particularly disliked (think Harper and McGuinty). Since the Lieutenant Governor has the same powers to refuse to refuse assent and dissolve the legislature as well as make appointments... well, as I said, the opportunities for some real mischief present themselves.
The upshot is that you cannot simply pull out the monarch and the Governor General from the system and replace them with an elected head of state and hope all will continue as it has. You will have fundamentally changed the dynamic at the top of the system by changing the legitimacy of the players and ultimately their roles and relative powers. The eternal proposals to reform the Senate are often countered - not without some merit - on the grounds that an elected Senate would have more legitimacy and might start deadlocking the Commons all the while without resolving the level of representation issue, but do it with the head of state and the issues are much more far-reaching due to the nature of the powers involved.
If you want to abolish the monarchy, you have to first decide whether to have some kind of appointed head of state or an elected head of state. If appointed, some kind of selection mechanism likely to produce non-partisan incumbents has to be developed (see below for a possible example). If elected, decisions have to be taken on how they will be elected, when they will be elected, and what powers the head of state will have. In both cases, rules on succession also have to be established, and possibly rules for removal.
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4. Change all references from "The Crown" to "The State".
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You could have an "elective monarchy", sort of like the Vatican, which would not require this change. One idea I had some time ago was to create a "Crown Council" composed of all the Lieutenant Governors (or their successors, however named), constituted in the manner of a jury charged with selecting the next Governor General (or Lord Protector or Prince High Steward or whatever) and possibly Supreme Court justices. I came up with this idea as a way to kick the Prime Minister out of the Governor General selection business, but I quickly realized it could also work to replace the monarchy too without fundamentally changing the nature of the entire system since it would preserve the concept of the Crown and all the current restraints on the exercise of Crown powers. In turn, the Lieutenant Governors would be selected by a similar body composed of all the Senators of that province.
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