Canada's politics: a cabinet that exists by convention alone

How the Crown holds power it does not use

Canada is a constitutional monarchy, and in law every executive act is the monarch's. The government is formally the King-in-Council, the legislature the King-in-Parliament and the courts the King-on-the-Bench. The person who is monarch of Canada also reigns over fourteen other Commonwealth realms, but the Canadian office is legally separate from the British one, a separation completed by the patriation of 1982.

The monarch's representative in Ottawa is the governor general, appointed on the advice of the prime minister for a term that by tradition runs about five years. Since 1947 the governor general has been permitted to exercise almost all of the Crown's powers. Royal assent is required for every law. The royal prerogative covers summoning, proroguing and dissolving Parliament, negotiating and ratifying treaties, declaring war, accrediting diplomats and issuing passports.

None of it is exercised freely. Under the conventions of the Westminster system the Crown acts on the advice of the prime minister and cabinet, and the one modern refusal is remembered precisely because it was one. In 1926 Governor General Lord Byng declined William Lyon Mackenzie King's request for a dissolution and invited the Conservative leader to form a government instead. It failed, an election followed, and the King-Byng affair settled the practice of non-interference that has held since. The governor general is entitled to vote in federal elections and abstains by convention.

Why the prime minister exists only by convention

The Constitution Act, 1867 describes the Crown, the Senate and the House of Commons. It does not create a prime minister. The constitution also includes unwritten conventions, and three of them run the country: that there is a prime minister and a cabinet, that the Crown grants royal assent to bills passed by both houses, and that a prime minister who loses a vote of confidence in the Commons either resigns or asks for an election. Conventions are part of the constitution and are not enforceable in court.

In practice the governor general asks the leader who can command a majority in the House of Commons to form a government. The prime minister chooses the ministers, usually around thirty of them, and the governor general appoints them. Most sit in the Commons; senators and even unelected people may serve. The cabinet is the committee of ministers that holds executive power, and through party discipline it controls the business of the House.

Party discipline is stronger in Ottawa than at Westminster or in Washington, and more votes are treated as questions of confidence, which leaves backbench members with little room outside committee work. The price of a defeat is high: a government that loses the confidence of the House falls.

When no party holds a majority of seats, the government has to find support vote by vote or by agreement. Formal coalitions are almost unknown at the federal level; the only one was the Unionist government of the First World War. In 2022 the Liberals and the New Democratic Party signed a confidence-and-supply agreement.

How Canadians elect the House of Commons

The House of Commons has 343 members, the number first used at the federal election of 28 April 2025, each elected in a single-member district, or riding, by plurality. The candidate with the most votes wins whether or not that is a majority. Seats are redistributed among the provinces after every ten-year census, roughly by population. Every citizen aged 18 or over may vote, with two exceptions by law: the Chief Electoral Officer and the deputy.

No Parliament may run longer than five years, and the limit has been exceeded once, by one year, during the First World War with unanimous consent in the House. A law passed in 2007 fixed federal elections on the third Monday in October in the fourth year after the last one, although a government can still ask for an earlier dissolution.

First past the post produces large swings. In 1993 the governing Progressive Conservatives fell to two seats and the Bloc Québécois, which runs candidates only in Quebec, became the Official Opposition. In 2011 the New Democratic Party took 59 of Quebec's 75 seats and cut the Bloc to four, below the 12 a party needs for official status. Five parties won seats in 2025: the Liberals, the Conservatives, the New Democrats, the Bloc Québécois and the Greens.

What the appointed Senate is for

The Senate has 105 members appointed by the governor general on the prime minister's advice, and they sit until the age of 75. The chamber is built on regions, not population. Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes and the West each hold 24 seats; Newfoundland and Labrador, which joined later, has six; each territory has one.

On paper its powers are almost equal to the Commons. No bill becomes law without its consent, and it may reject any bill as often as it likes, though it cannot introduce taxes or spending and can only delay a constitutional amendment for 180 days. In practice it has not vetoed a bill from the Commons since 1939. The last open confrontation came in 1990, when the Senate stalled the Goods and Services Tax and Brian Mulroney had eight extra senators appointed to pass it, the only time that power has been used.

The qualifications still include land worth $4,000 and a net worth of $4,000, amounts unchanged since 1867. Proposals for an elected, equal Senate ran through the constitutional talks of the 1980s and 1990s, and Alberta has held non-binding elections to nominate senators. On 25 April 2014 the Supreme Court ruled that an elected Senate would need the consent of seven provinces holding half the population, and that abolishing it would need all ten. In 2016 appointments began to go through an advisory board that took public applications, and in February 2023 the chamber held 39 independent senators, 15 Conservatives, 14 Progressives, 14 members of the Canadian Senators Group and eight unaffiliated members.

How power is divided between Ottawa and the provinces

The Constitution Act, 1867 divides legislative power between Parliament and the provinces, and its authors meant the central government to be the stronger. John A. Macdonald preferred a unitary state, and the text carries the marks of it. Ottawa appoints each province's lieutenant-governor, who can hold back a provincial law until Ottawa approves it; Ottawa may disallow any provincial law within a year of its passage; and Parliament may declare works and undertakings inside a province to be under federal jurisdiction. The Canadian Encyclopedia calls those powers quasi-federal and notes they are now rarely used.

The provinces grew anyway. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London read the 1867 Act in their favour until 1949, and the fields it had left them, social programs and natural resources, became the expensive and valuable ones. Alberta and Saskatchewan took control of their own resources in 1930. Between 1960 and 1980 the provincial share of taxation and public spending rose sharply, Quebec opted out of federal programs for cash and set up its own pension plan, and Alberta's oil revenues after 1972 set it against Ottawa.

Ottawa's answer is money. It first levied an income tax in 1917 and took all personal income tax revenue from 1941 to 1954. The federal spending power, which the courts infer from the constitution, lets it attach conditions to transfers in fields it cannot regulate: the Canada Health Act pays provinces on condition that their health systems meet federal standards. Equalization payments move money toward the provinces with smaller tax bases, and the provinces argue in both directions over the formula.

The federation is bijural. Quebec runs its private law under the Civil Code of Quebec and every other province uses the common law, so by law three of the nine judges of the Supreme Court of Canada come from Quebec. None of the provinces has a written constitution of its own; their structures are set out in the 1867 Act, in the terms of union of the provinces that joined later, and in ordinary statutes.

How the Charter of Rights can be set aside

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, binds federal and provincial governments alike and lets courts strike down laws that breach it. It also carries its own escape hatch in section 33, the notwithstanding clause, which lets Parliament or a provincial legislature declare that a law will operate despite the Charter's fundamental freedoms, legal rights and equality rights. The declaration lapses after five years unless it is renewed. Democratic rights, mobility rights and language rights are outside its reach.

The clause was the price of provincial consent in the Kitchen Accord of November 1981. The federal government has never used it. Quebec's government wrote it into every law passed between 1982 and 1985 and amended all earlier laws to carry it. Elsewhere it stayed rare for decades: Alberta used it in 2000 in a marriage law the Supreme Court later found to be federal business, and Saskatchewan used it in 2017 to protect school funding for non-Catholic pupils at Catholic schools.

The recent uses have drawn more attention. Quebec's secularism law of June 2019, which bars public employees such as teachers, police officers and judges from wearing religious symbols at work, invokes it to block Charter challenges. Ontario invoked it in 2018 and again in June 2021, when its legislature passed a bill limiting third-party election spending by 63 votes to 47 after a court had struck the law down. Ontario's government said it was using every tool it had to protect elections from outside influence; critics of the Quebec law called it legalised discrimination.

How the constitution itself can change

Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982 sets out five ways to amend the constitution, and which one applies depends on what is being changed. Before 1982 an amendment needed an act of the British Parliament; since then every textual change has had to pass one of these formulas.

The written text is only part of it. The constitution also includes the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the historic numbered treaties and the modern land claim agreements, and Part II of the 1982 Act addresses the rights of Aboriginal peoples. The Supreme Court reaffirmed in its 1998 reference on Quebec secession that the constitution has unwritten components, and the principles counted among them include federalism, democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and respect for minorities.

Who Canada stands with abroad

Canada's alliances run through the United States and through the old imperial networks. It was a founding member of NATO, created the North American Aerospace Defense Command with the United States in 1958, and belongs to the Five Eyes intelligence partnership. It sits in the G7, the G20, the OECD, the Commonwealth and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, which it joined in 1970, and in the Organization of American States since 1990.

Trade treaties bind it to its neighbour. The Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement of 1989 became the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and was replaced by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Canada is also a party to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and has been in APEC since November 1989.

Since 1945 Canada's support for multilateral institutions has been tied to peacekeeping. Lester Pearson proposed the United Nations Emergency Force in the Suez crisis of 1956 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. Canada sent combat troops to Korea in 1950, joined the coalition against Iraq in 1990 and served in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2011.