Fighting over the Office of Lieutenant-Governor

But section 58 of the Act provides that the governor general in council (legalese for federal cabinet) appoints the lieutenant-governors of the provinces. For Macdonald that meant the lieutenant-governors were representatives, not of the queen, but of the federal government--they were Ottawa's agents in provincial governments.... Oliver Mowat would have none of that. A provincial government was not a mere local government with the status of a municipality. A provincial government had all the paraphernalia of responsible parliamentary government, and part of that paraphernalia was a representative of the queen as titular head of government. That was what the self-governing British North American colonies had before Confederation and what the provinces must have within Confederation.

--Peter H. Russell, Canada's Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 214-215.