Talk:Executive Council of Ontario

Past Executive Councils
Does anyone know how to find past cabinet lists? this is presenting a large problem. Honour 20:14, 10 August 2006 (UTC)Graham @ WLU
 * Despite the timestamp on that last comment, it is still a big problem. I can't find out when the Ministries of Energy and Infrastructure were originally put into place. &mdash; Nova  Dog  &mdash;  ( contribs ) 14:12, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Ten years later and this still needs to be fixed. We're losing valuable information by overwriting this page. // sikander { talk } 17:55, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
 * You can find some of this information on the Ford Ministry and Wynne Ministry Pages now. We should maybe make pages for some other Ministries like McGuinty. Legend of 14 (talk) 00:13, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Order of ministers
There seems to be a disagreement as to whether the ministers should be ordered alphabetically or by some precedence. The premier's website uses an alphabetical list. The legislature's website also uses an alphabetical list. A provincial executive council is different than the federal privy council; membership is temporary not for life and therefore precedence does not apply in the same way. What source suggests precedence? I suggest we follow the example of the government's own websites and go alphabetically. Thoughts? - Nbpolitico (talk) 12:55, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Historical connection with Legislative Council; (dis)continuity across confederation more generally
Many of the institutions of the Westminster system are ultimately derived from the royal court. In particular this includes the privy council, executive council and/or cabinet on the one hand, and on the other hand the parliament or legislature, especially the upper house or legislative council. The Province of Canada had a legislative council until confederation; after confederation so did Quebec (and the new Parliament of Canada had a Senate), but Ontario did not. So did the executive council in Ontario inherit any functions previously carried out by the legislative council? Certainly in the UK, the functions of the House of Lords and the House of Commons have not been quite identical; they go beyond simply the requirement for agreement between the two houses to pass Bills. The most obvious example, but it may have no analogy in Canada, is the (then) judicial role of the House of Lords. This was closely entwined with the judicial committee of the privy council, thereby crossing the divide mentioned at the top in the same sense that a positive answer to this question would imply. A slightly more general question would be: How did the formal role of the executive council evolve in going from the Province of Canada (with its lower house and legislative council) to the Province of Ontario (with its single legislative assembly)? Perhaps this subtlety is just lost in the greater change due to the bifurcation between the new Dominion of Canada and the new Province of Ontario.

It would also be interesting to capture the sense in which the new Dominion and/or the new Province (predominantly one or the other, or both, or neither) were seen in Ontario at the time as successors of the Province of Canada.