e, followed in two sessions, of proposing an amendment,
condemnatory of the action of the lieutenant-governor, on the motion of
going into committee of supply, prevented the house from coming to a
decision squarely on the true constitutional issue--actually raised in
the senate in 1878--whether it was expedient for the parliament or
government of Canada to interfere in a matter of purely provincial
concern.

In 1891 another case of the dismissal of a ministry, having a majority
in the assembly, occurred in the province of Quebec, but the
intervention of parliament was not asked for the purpose of censuring
the lieutenant-governor for the exercise of his undoubted constitutional
power. It appears that, in 1891, the evidence taken before a committee
of the senate showed that gross irregularities had occurred in
connection with the disbursement of certain government subsidies which
had been voted by parliament for the construction of the Bay des
Chaleurs railway, and that members of the Quebec cabinet were
compromised in what was clearly a misappropriation of public money. In
view of these grave charges, Lieutenant-governor Angers forced his prime
minister, Mr. Honore Mercier, to agree to the appointment of a royal
commission to hold an investigation into the transaction in question.
When the lieutenant-governor was in possession of the evidence taken
before this commission, he came to the conclusion that it was his duty
to relieve Mr. Mercier and his colleagues of their functions as
ministers "in order to protect the dignity of the crown and safeguard
the honour and interest of the province in danger." Mr. de Boucherville
was then called upon to form a ministry which would necessarily assume
full responsibility for the action of the lieutenant-governor under the
circumstances, and after some delay the new ministry went to the country
and were sustained by a large majority. It is an interesting coincidence
that the lieutenant-governor who dismissed the Mercier government and
the prime minister who assumed full responsibility for the dismissal of
the Mercier administration, were respectively attorney-general and
premier in the cabinet who so deeply resented a similar action in 1878.
But Mr. Letellier was then dead--notoriously as a result of the mental
strain to which he had been subject in the constitutional crisis which
wrecked his political career--and it was left only for his friends to
feel that the whirligig of time b