Elections are also held for self-governing First Nations and for many other public and private organizations including corporations and trade unions.
Senators are given permanent terms (up to age 75) and thus often serve much longer than the prime minister who was primarily responsible for their appointment.
Canadians vote for their choice for local Member of Parliament (MP), who will hold a seat in the House of Commons.
However, the viceroy's compliance is not assured -- the governor general has the right to seek out another party leader who is thought to command the confidence of the House (support from majority of the MPs) and ask them to form a government.
The five-year time limitation is strictly applied to the life of the parliament or assembly in question — this body is not deemed to have been formed until the return of the writs and ceases to exist the moment it is dissolved.
This provision was enacted to allow Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden to delay a federal election for about a year during the First World War.
[citation needed] Since then, the provision has only been used twice, both times by provincial governments — Ontario delayed an election for a few weeks in the year following the Armistice in 1918.
[5] In 2008, Conservative politicians tried to use the public's misconception of how governments are formed to defend its decision to maintain its grip on power despite not having a majority of seats in the House of Commons.
[6] Hugo Cyr found in 2017 that the Canadian media's habit of announcing, before polls close on election nights, which party will form the next government misrepresents the process of the governor general or lieutenant governors appointing cabinet or executive councils, respectively, "as automatic, merely a matter of arithmetic".
[7] The leader of a party that secures a majority of seats in the House of Commons or other legislative assembly is the obvious choice to be prime minister or premier.
[5] In many cases, minority governments have been sustained in power due to passage of bills by ad hoc case-by-case multi-party support, at least for a couple years.
Section 4 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms limits the term of any federal, provincial, or territorial parliament to a maximum of five years after the return of the writs of the last election.
The date of the by-election is determined by the governor general, who must call it between 11 and 180 days after being notified of the seat vacancy by the Speaker of the House of Commons.
Every year, about 400,000 Canadians reach voting age and 200,000 Canadians die, resulting in changes to the National Register of Electors based on information obtained from the Canada Revenue Agency, provincial and territorial motor vehicle registrars, and provincial electoral agencies with permanent voters lists.
[16] Jean-Pierre Kingsley, then the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada for 15 years, explicitly recommended in his 2015 official post-election report that Parliament remove the five-year limit by amendment, but no action was taken.
[18][19] In May 2014, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled in favour of Canadian expatriates Gillian Frank and Jamie Duong's claim that the five-year limit was an unconstitutional restriction on the right to vote, in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, leading to a period of fourteen months during which all Canadian expatriates could apply to be on the register of electors.
[20] However, the decision was reversed 2–1 on appeal at the Court of Appeal for Ontario on July 20, 2015, in a judicial opinion citing Canada's history of using a residence-based electoral district system and a justification based on social contract theory, which held that the five-year limit was a permissible limitation of the constitutional right to vote under Section One.
[21][22] In response to the appellate court ruling, Elections Canada implemented changes in August 2015 to require expatriates already on the register to declare an intended date of return.
In practice, the prime minister will generally keep a campaign as brief as is legal and feasible, because spending by parties is strictly limited by the Elections Act.
In the ten provinces and Yukon, elections are contested by candidates either representing political parties or running as independents.
[33] Canadian MP William Charles Good introduced legislation in the House of Commons in June 1922 that would have seen Instant-runoff voting used in each riding where more than two candidates were competing and he also called for demonstration multi-member districts in to provide experience of proportional representation.
By comparison, the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau promised to review numerous electoral reform options through an "all party parliamentary committee" and to implement the changes in time for the next election.
The Liberal members of the all party special-committee urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to break his promise to change Canada's voting system.
[37][38][39][40][41] On February 1, 2017, the new Liberal Minister of Democratic Institutions, Karina Gould, announced that Trudeau instructed her that a change of voting system would no longer be in her mandate.
She claimed a lack of broad consensus among Canadians in favour of one particular type of electoral voting and that the various political parties could not agree on a new system as reasons for the abandonment of the 2015 election promise.
[45] The 2016 Plebiscite on Democratic Renewal[46] was a non-binding[47] referendum held in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island between October 27 – November 7, 2016.
The referendum asked which of five voting systems residents would prefer to use in electing members to the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island.
After three options were eliminated due to being un-electable, mixed member proportional representation received more than 52% support on the final count.
On April 28, 2021, Justice Minister LeBel informed a legislative committee hearing that the government would not move forward with a referendum on electoral reform in 2022.
LeBel blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for altering the government's timeline and could not commit to providing an alternate date for the referendum, effectively ending discussions about electoral reform in Quebec.