Mackenzie Attacks the Unconstrained Executive Power

Mackenzie deplored once again the fact that the popular House had so little control over that government. The only effective check a colonial Assembly has ever had upon the executive branch has been the right to refuse to vote supplies until grievances are remedied. But in Upper Canada this check had been effectively diminished by the passage, in the Tory Assembly of 1831, of a bill that provided for the chief officials' salaries to be paid without reference to the Assembly. This "Everlasting salary Bill," as he caustically called it, Mackenzie attacked once again.

--William Kilbourn, The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada, Voyageur Classics (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008), 155.