A11
Municipal Corporations Act, 1882. The officer sued to recover
pay for the period during which he had been suspended. three Lords Justices agreed that he was not entitled to it. Lord Sterndale put it this way at p.71:
"I should have thought that power to suspend
the operation of a contract necessarily suspended its whole operation including not only the performance of duty but also the right to pay during the period of suspension.
??
In the Canadian case of Vaillancourt v. The King (referred
to in I.L.M. Richardson, "Incidents of the Crown-Servant
Relationship" (14)) udette, J. asked:
"What does suspension mean, if not suspension of work which carries with it suspension of the right to wages?"
In my view this approach is to be preferred to that of the ancient authorities which I have referred to earlier. By the time the Letters Patent were given the medieval concept of public office had passed away. It was no longer a form of property that, once granted as a favour, the grantee could deal with unilaterally as his own. It had already become a mutual relationship of employer and employee, cach of whom and rights and obligations. It follows naturally then that if the obligations are suspended, so are the concomitant rights. For those reasons I am satisfied that the Crown has in Hong Kong the prerogative power to suspend a public officer at pleasure and without pay.
And I should say here, for the sake of the record, that counsel for the plaintiffs does not at this level challenge the proposition that dispensers are public officers in this sense. Nor does he dispute that the Government's right in this respect is unfettered. But on these points also he reserves his right to argue to the contrary elsewhere.
It is of course open to the Crown to dispossess itself of a prerogativo power. Campbell v. Hall, to which I have already referred is a good example. By a Proclamation, followed by Letters Patent, the Governor of the then newly captured island
(14) (1955) 33 Canadian Bar Review 424 at 441
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