the lieutenant-governor of a province has an indisputable right to dismiss his ministers if, from any cause, he feels it incumbent to do so,” but that, in deciding whether the conduct of a lieutenant-governor merits removal from his office, as in the exercise of other powers vested in him by the imperial state the governor-general “must act by and with the advice of his ministers.”  After further consideration of the subject, the Canadian government again recommended the dismissal of Mr. Letellier, and the governor-general had now no alternative except to act on the advice of his responsible ministers.  It was unfortunate that the constitutional issue was obscured, from the outset, by the political bitterness that was imported into it, and that the procedure, 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 brings its revenge even in political affairs[5].