electricland

Scalzi:

They had an election, and the Prime Minister said “nyah,” and then the other political parties said, “Oh, no you DIN’T” and then exploding space monkeys swarmed Ottawa and the Queen had to fly over to beat people and monkeys with her scepter and at the end of it all Quebec was put on the block? And traded for a fish? Or something?

Alex, the Yorkshire Ranter, commenting on Making Light, provides a systems engineering perspective on proroguation:

If the prime minister wants to call an election, he or she has to ask their local distributed queenship node for prorogation and therefore dissolution. Once (year - year_lastelection)== 5, the prorogation subroutine executes automatically.

Things get interesting, though, in the case of event-driven prorogation. The PM, and the Government, serve at the pleasure of their local queenship node and during the confidence of a majority in the lower house of Parliament. In the event they lose one of certain types of parliamentary votes (either an explicit vote of confidence, or one on the budget or on the use of already-committed public funds), this condition is no longer satisfied and signal NOCONFIDENCE is raised.

At this point it gets complicated! Not much after that is set down in the documentation for the Westminster API, and it is left up to the implementation.

The whole conversation is a blast, though.

Finally, the Yarn Harlot Explains It All (via a commentor on Scalzi's post, and also via

wiredferret):

Our current Prime Minister is Stephen Harper. He's a conservative, and he's been Prime Minister since his party won a minority government in February of 2006. The Honourable Prime Minister has taken an unusual approach to running said minority. Instead of operating in a co-operative spirit, the Prime Minister has been rather aggressive, and instead of moderating his motions to the point where the opposition might vote for them anyway, he has instead taken to attaching a confidence motion to just about everything. This means that every time the house votes, they can either vote with him, or force an election. All last year, this strategy worked beautifully. The opposing parties (particularly the Liberals, who were having leadership troubles) didn't want an election. Forcing the opposition to choose between forcing an election and agreeing with him rammed through a lot of legislation, but bred a lot of contempt. (Depending on whether you are a conservative or not, this strategy has alternately been called "being an aggressive parliamentarian who makes the most of the system" or "being a big fat bully".)