Is the Governor General going to do her job?

Despite press reports yesterday that implied that the Governor General did not have the power to dismiss the prime minister, Andrew Coyne sets the record straight:

Both the story and the "senior government official" are wrong. The Governor General most certainly has the right to advise her first minister. As Bagehot famously put it, under the British constitution (of which we are the inheritors) the sovereign has three rights: "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn." Ordinarily, it is true, the prime minister is not bound to follow her advice, but that is a different statement.

And while it is also ordinarily true that she is bound to take his, that is not true of one matter in particular: who should be her first minister. If the Governor General is of the opinion that the current prime minister does not command the confidence of the House of Commons, she has the absolute right to dismiss him and to call upon someone else, or to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. It is not the prime minister, acting on the Governor General's advice, who dissolves Parliament: it is the Governor General, usually on the prime minister's advice but not always.

The bold sentence is the key to the whole affair. I can't imagine how the Governor General cannot see that her duty is plain: parliament has demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, their lack of confidence in the government, yet the government has not resigned. It is her job to dismiss Mr. Martin and either call upon Mr. Harper to form a new government or to require a new general election.