The evolution of federalism and executive power in Canada and Australia

Abstract

Canada and Australia share a common institutional legacy, with constitutions that combine the power distributing impulse of federalism with the concentration of authority associated with parliamentary government. But the two federations have experienced sharply different historical trajectories, with Canada decentralizing while Australia has centralized. This instituional divergence in part reflects distinctive patterns in negotiating executive authority across the federal divide. Canadians have relied upon the high stakes, episodic intergovernmental relations of executive federalism, more open to radical shifts in both direction and momentum. Australians have experienced more regularized intergovernmental and inter-institutional path-dependent forms of negotiation as seen in the Council of Australian Governments and the Senate. As a result, the federal balance of executive authority appears contested in Canada, but relatively settled in Australia.