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Three weeks ago, the airways and newspapers were filled with heated debate about Canada's mission to Afghanistan.

The recent shift to "peace-making" and an increase in casualties among Canadians led many newly elected MPs to demand Parliament debate this mission as soon as it convened. Public opinion polls showed there was broad support for such a debate, with two-to-one in favour. Now, with today's opening of Parliament, there is barely mention of the issue.

That Prime Minister Stephen Harper would oppose such a debate should not be surprising. That is the same position taken by his predecessors. It is, after all, the Prime Minister's prerogative to deploy troops.

Prerogative powers are those handed down directly from the monarch to his or her ministers over the centuries. Everything was at one time royal prerogative. It is through documents like Magna Carta, supply of money, passage of laws and subsequent judicial review that prerogative has been curtailed. And it is through that curtailing of prerogative that Britain, and by extension Canada, was transformed from monarchical dictatorship and feudal society into a modern democracy. The House of Commons, after all, is the sole directly elected institution in the entire federal system of government. What authority it takes for itself, it exercises in the name of the people. This point has been repeatedly made by Mr. Harper when it comes to the courts, the Senate and the bureaucracy.

Foreign affairs is one of the last and, certainly largest, areas of royal prerogative - the exercise of which rests mostly with the prime minister directly - that exists with little parliamentary oversight. Royal prerogative governs the making of treaties, the declaration of war, the deployment of the Armed Forces, the recognition of foreign states and the accreditation and reception of diplomats.

It was prime minister Mackenzie King, in 1922, who first said the government should not commit Canadian troops without consulting Parliament. Historians and political scientists will point out that this claim of parliamentary jurisdiction was simply a way of exerting Canadian sovereignty and keeping Canada out of the Chanak affair. (Britain had appealed for military support from the colonies after its troops stationed near Chanak, Turkey, were threatened with attack by the Turks.)

In the First World War, Canada had been committed to war by the British government without prime minister Robert Borden even being consulted.

Seventeen years after claiming for Parliament the right to be consulted, Mackenzie King's government entered the Second World War separate from Britain, but gave Parliament no real say. In the Commons debate of September, 1939, King informed Parliament that it was already government policy to go to war and that the government would resign if MPs failed to give their support.

In the Korean conflict, Louis St. Laurent committed three destroyers and an air force squadron during the summer of 1950 while Parliament was not sitting.

Brian Mulroney sent ships to the first war in the Gulf during the summer of 1990; Jean Chrétien sent CF-18s to Europe for the Kosovo air war, also in the summer (1998), and Paul Martin deployed troops to Afghanistan in May, all without advance debate or a parliamentary vote.

But the fact prime ministers have kept their prerogative powers intact and avoided any substantive parliamentary oversight should not be seen as precedent-setting. After all, if it were up to kings and queens, and later their prime ministers, everything would still be their prerogative. Prerogative can be curbed by an Act of Parliament.

This would suggest that if Parliament is going to hold a debate on troop deployment, it should not waste time on yet another "take-note" debate, with no final vote. Instead, Parliament should discuss legislation to govern future deployment of troops, declaration of war and, perhaps, even treaties. Parliament can always opt to preserve the prerogative. Alternately, it might take away the prerogative and then turn around and empower a minister or the prime minister to act under specific circumstances.

It is not revolutionary to suggest Parliament debate limits to royal prerogative. It is the essence of parliamentary government.

And unlike appointments to the Supreme Court and the Senate - prime ministerial managed prerogatives that Mr. Harper himself has recently said are in need of democratic reform and parliamentary oversight - war is a matter of life and death.

So whatever his motives 84 years ago, it is probably time to debate Mackenzie King's admonishment that the Canadian Parliament should always be consulted before military commitments are made.

Besides, 791 years after King John was forced to sign the first Magna Carta, it seems archaic and out of touch to dismiss calls for a parliamentary debate simply because war is the historic prerogative of the king and his first minister.

Bruce M. Hicks is the former editor-in-chief of The Financial Post's Directory of Government. He is currently doing doctoral research at the Université de Montréal.