Comparative scheduling

This nifty little bar-graph shows what has happened in the four Canadian jursidictions which had elections last fall.


From top to bottom, they are Ontario, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Left to right is read chronologically, with the start of September at left, and the end of December at right. The vertical scale lines running through the graph are one week apart. (Go ahead, click on it; it won't bite.)

The yellow bars are the provincial and territorial election campaigns, culminating in the dark yellow stripe representing election day. Two of the elections were under way at the same time as the NL one; Saskatchewan's started the day after.

The green bars represent the period during which the newly-elected legislatures sat, after their fall elections were over and done with. (They didn't sit every day, of course, but the bars show where the fall sittings started and ended for the holiday break.)

The N.W.T. has to reconvene fairly early in any case, as under the consensus style of government, where there are no parties, the legislature meets to elect a new Premier.

At the end of October, giving excuses justifications as to why he wouldn't recall the House of Assembly, Premier Williams told reporters that it would require a Throne Speech, and "to turn around this fall and prepare another throne speech when we really haven't concluded half of what we set out to do in the year, I just think would be inappropriate, it would be unproductive, it would be just a repeat, a complete re-spin of what we said before."

Yet that didn't stop Ontario, which has a much bigger population and government than the one Danny's in charge of.

And yes, we aren't going to do like those nefarious Canadians, we are going to stand on our own and inaudible, yeah, yeah, yeah.

"I don't guide myself, or our government doesn't guide ourselves, by what Premier McGuinty does, or Prime Minister Harper does, or anyone else in the country does," he frothed at reporters. "We're running our own show down here, and we do it as we see fit, and I think we're doing a great job."

Williams Government Doing Great Job, Williams Says.

Our Dear Premier also used the excuse justification that his cabinet ministers — whatever the good of having cabinet ministers in a Duplessiste regime — needed to be briefed and whatnot, and that that nasty little House of Assembly business, y'know, that thing they were just elected to, would be a distraction:

To have my ministers right now in the House for three or four or five or six weeks, I think the departments would suffer as a result of that. I think it would not be giving them enough time to basically get a handle on the departments. And those departments are the day-to-day government departments that serve the people, and that's really what this is all about.

And yet again, another problem which didn't seem to crop up in the N.W.T., Ontario (where McGuinty only lost one cabinet member in his re-election the day after Danny's), or in Saskatchewan where a gosh-and-golly fresh new government was elected altogether.

So why wasn't there a fall sitting again?

And which provinces or territories will beat the House of Assembly back into session this winter (spring, summer)?