656 THE FEDERATIONS AND THE UNION [PART IV 
perform all the acts for a province which a Governor may 
perform for a Colony, as for instance, the appointment of 
officers, the dismissing of officers, the summoning, proroguing, 
and dissolving of Parliaments, and so forth. The power of 
pardon is given by local statutes in all the provinces, and 
the power of altering the Great Seal is given by Imperial 
statute in the case of the new Provinces of Ontario and 
Quebec and by local Acts in the old provinces which 
joined the Federation, and by the constitutions in the case 
of the created provinces. 
The real position of the Lieutenant-Governor is that he 
is the wielder of the executive power of the province in its 
entirety, just as a Colonial Governor wields the power of 
the Colony. Some confusion has crept into the discussion 
of his position as the result of the vague use of the preroga- 
tive. In its widest sense all executive government may 
be called a part of the prerogative, but the term is perhaps 
more generally applied merely to that portion of the executive 
authority which rests not on statute but on the common 
law. It may be more convenient to adopt the wider use 
of the term, and to ascribe to the Governor of a Colony 
and the Lieutenant-Governor of a province the royal 
prerogative, but it must be remembered that the preroga- 
tives they wield are those appropriate to a Colony or province, 
and, as has been already seen, these prerogatives are not 
co-extensive with those of the Crown in the United Kingdom. 
When this view is borne in mind, it is easy to see that 
Lefroy?! is wrong in rejecting the arguments of the Ontario 
Government in the Lieutenant-Governor’s most admirable 
dispatch of January 22. 1886.2 those of Mr. Blake in the 
Lt Legislative Power in Canada, pp. 90-122. He fully admits that 
Lieutenant-Governors represent the Crown—the question is how far they 
do so. But he seems wrong in treating Blake’s views as those of Higin- 
botham ; Blake does not say that the executive power is given by the Act 
of 1867 in the sense in which Higinbotham held that the Act of 1855 gave 
it in Victoria. For incorrect views see the references on p. 106, note 1, and 
Lord Granville’s dispatch of February 24, 1869, in Canada Sess. Pap., 1869, 
No. 16; Lord Carnarvon’s dispatch, January 7, 1875, in Sess. Pap., 1875. 
No. 7. 2: Ontario Sess. Pap., 1888, No. 37, pp. 20-22,