This is a wonderful achievement.  It is an important theme that will be of great interest internationally as well as in Canada.  This appears to be on a vestige of class entitlement that has survived over the centuries and you and David have now tackled it head-on.  I look forward very much to reading your book.

During my twenty-one years in the Canadian House of Commons, three of them as Government House Leader, I participated in many discussions and debates about the rights and privileges of Members of Parliament.  During this time, if there were books like Politicians Above The Law, which presents a scholarly and analytic assessment of some of those rights and privileges, I was unaware of them.  Thus in writing this book, Maingot and Dehler not only present a strong argument for the abolition of parliamentary inviolability, but also contribute to a rather sparse body of work on the important area of how parliamentarians should govern themselves.

In Politicians Above the Law, Maingot points out that democracy must distinguish between parliamentary immunity and parliamentary inviolability.  The former, the right to speak freely in Parliament, is desirable.  The latter, exempting elected officials from the Criminal Code, is not.  What is most disturbing is Maingot's revealing evidence that in many of the world's democracies, it is legal inviolability that prevails.  Maingot calls passionately for this to change.

The author of Politicians Above The Law presents a most compelling case for the abolition of parliamentary inviolability as contrasted with the necessary concept of parliamentary immunity. Any truly democratic society requires that a member of any legislative body should be accountable to the criminal justice system.

Parliamentary immunity is a necessary guarantee of the independence of the legislature. When it extends to protecting members beyond their parliamentary activities from the criminal justice system however, it brings the legislature into disrepute and there can be few greater attacks on its independence than that caused by the contempt this engenders. You may not agree with every point made by Joseph Maingot but I believe you will agree this book should be read.