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This is false. Lieutenant Governors are appointed by the Prime Minister of Canada, but are beholden to neither the federal government nor the Governor General. Lt Governors simply perform the same role at the provincial level that the Governor General performs at the federal level: 99% of the time just a ceremonial rubber stamp of signing a bill into law.

Canadian provinces are spelled out specifically in the Canadian constitution; they are not creatures of the federal government (unlike municipalities, which do exist at the whims of provincial governments, which is a big problem IMHO, but I digress.)

The only paternalistic powers that the feds hold over the provinces are Disallowance and Reservation. Neither of those powers have been used in decades. Despite the failure of constitutional amendments that, if passed, would have explicitly removed those powers from the constitution, their disuse has raised questions as to whether they are effectively defunct by convention. I suspect that any attempt by the feds to disallow or reserve a provincial law would make its way to the Supreme Court of Canada to answer that question.

Furthermore, any attempt to use those powers on a provincial government, especially so in the case of either the governments of Québec or Alberta, would result in a serious crisis of national unity.



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