There’s a federal election in Canada on Monday, April 28, 2025. Back on January 6, when Justin Trudeau announced his eventual resignation as Prime Minister, my American-born wife asked me to explain how transitions of power worked in Canada. We quickly realized thing were more complicated and, to an American, confusing, than I initially thought. I wrote up some explanations, to which she responded “my head hurts!” So here I am again, trying to explain things to Americans who might know little or nothing about civics in Canada.
If you want a conventional explanation there are plenty of sites that lack my feeble attempts at humour:
- The Elections Canada website is the ultimate source, by the people who actually run the elections. It’s bilingual, so your first choice is the English or the French version.
- Wikipedia explains things in its usual mostly coherent and boring style, with links to a lot of related stuff.
Selecting a Prime Minister
The Prime Minister (PM) is the Head of Government, which is sort of like a combination of the top people in the American Executive branch (president, vice president, and cabinet members) and a subset of the legislative branch (Congress, specifically the House of Representatives), because that’s the way parliamentary systems based on the British model work. The prime minister and cabinet members in Canada are members of parliament (the House of Commons) as well as having executive responsibilities.
The American president is both head of state and somewhat equivalent to a head of government in the British sense. Other countries generally completely separate the head of state and head of government. In Britain, at the moment the head of state is King Charles, and the head of government (prime minister) is Keir Starmer of the Labour party. In many other countries the two positions are president and prime minister.
Canadians don’t directly elect a prime minister, much as they might want to. He or she is appointed by the Governor General (GG) to whom the Head of State, the current monarch of Canada (currently always the same as the monarch of England) delegates their power to select a Prime Minister. The whole system has a very long history, evolving over hundreds of years from the time when there were (nearly) absolute monarchs deriving their legitimacy (such as it was) from the divine right of kings.
The Governor General selects a new prime minister within a few days after one of two things happens:
- An election is held.
- The governing party selects a new leader.
The GG always picks the leader of the plurality party: the one with the most seats in the House of Commons in Parliament (I don’t know what happens if there is a tie). Theoretically, he or she can pick anybody, but at the federal level, since the constitutional crisis of 1926 (the King-Byng Affair), it’s always been the leader of the plurality party. There was a minor hiccup in Ontario a few decades ago but that’s irrelevant at the moment.
So, on March 9, Mark Carney was selected as leader of the then-governing Liberal Party. He did not become prime minister immediately; that happened on March 14, when Mary Simon, the current Governor General, called on him to form a government. In the meantime, Justin Trudeau (or, Trudeau II, since his father was also PM) was still prime minister.
As of this writing, Carney does not have a seat in the Commons (see above: the GG can pick anyone) and isn’t guaranteed to win one in the election. But he’s still prime minister, if the Liberals win, until he resigns in embarrassment and his party selects yet another leader. He just can’t participate in debates in Parliament – he has to watch from the gallery overlooking the House of Commons.
The Election Campaign
The Governor General decides when there will be an election, more or less, but there are constraints. The Constitution calls for an election at least every 5 years, but the GG can call one earlier. There’s a “fixed election date” law, but it’s a law, not a constitutional requirement, and the GG can ignore it. And she just did, since our next fixed election date was supposed to be October 27, 2025, but she had an excellent excuse: the Prime Minister requested one. The GG pretty much always does what the PM asks (about which, more in a hypothetical future post).
Unlike the American system, in theory people don’t obviously campaign constantly, starting immediately after the previous election. You can’t campaign until the Governor General “drops the writ” (a popular but completely inaccurate phrase). What happens is:
- On the advice of the Prime Minister, the Governor General issues a proclamation of an election date (what people generally mean when they say the GG “drops the writ”), which must take place 36-50 days after the proclamation. That’s now April 28.
- Elections Canada issues the actual writs, plural, one to the returning officer of each riding (our equivalent of an American congressional district). I’m not going to look up how returning officers are selected.
- There are limits on how much political parties, and even third parties, can spend on campaigning. In theory there isn’t any of this Citizens United, billionares-have-the-right-to-buy-elections stuff; I’m sure rich people have ways around this, but maybe I’m too cynical in my old age (70.5 and counting).
But, really, every obnoxious speech in Question Period should probably be considered to be campaigning, as well as every interview with a party leader, and every political editorial in a newspaper, and those can happen at any time.
How Voting Works
You get to vote if you are a citizen and Elections Canada knows who you are. Elections Canada is an independent agency that is not (or at least less) susceptible to political pressure. They set riding boundaries (subject to constitutional constraints) and run the actual elections. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are really hard in Canada.
They send you a card via snail mail; you take it to your polling station, show it and one piece of government-issued ID, and you can vote. You can claim the right to vote at the polling place, but I’ve never needed to learn that part of the process.
By American standards the process is very fast! You walk into an almost-empty school gym or apartment lobby, present your elector card (see above), get handed a ballot with maybe six names, walk over to a table with a cardboard shield for privacy, carefully make an X with a pencil, and go back to hand your ballot to someone who puts it in a box. When we had our first election after my wife and I moved to Kingston, she thought I must have forgotten my ID or something when I came home within about fifteen minutes. Cities larger than my hometown, Kingston, might have longer waiting lines in some ridings, but I have never heard of multi-hour lineups like in many voter-suppressed American congressional districts. Toronto residents: is it different where you are?
Or, you could loudly Decline Your Ballot, handing it back to the bewildered person who expects to collect ballots normally. This sort of means “none of the above” and is a form of protest a little more brazen than spoiling your ballot; they have to count and report how many people do this. I sometimes dream of None of The Above being able to win, meaning “try again with a different bunch of choices; none of these dudes can run again for 5 years.” My dear departed American father-in-law would have loved to have this option.
Who Do We Vote For
Yes, I know, that whole thing about the Excited States of America electing dogcatchers is a joke other countries make. But, depending on the state, they elect sheriffs, judges, district attorneys, and a bunch of other officers. In Canada, the equivalents are all appointed. All we vote for are members of the federal and provincial parliaments, mayors, city councillors, and members of school boards – the latter of whom have a lot less power than in the USA. In Ontario, school funding is set by, and mostly supplied by, the province, so there is less of an issue of disparity between rich and poor districts.
Is this better or worse? There are trade-offs. In Canada the people don’t have a say in who takes on these roles that can have a profound effect on their lives. On the other hand, those office-holders don’t have to play politics to stay in their jobs, which means they don’t have to bow to political pressure. If they’re dedicated to their jobs, and not corrupted by other factors, they can make unpopular decisions that might actually be the right thing to do.
But they might not.
More Confusion Deferred
There is a lot more Americans probably don’t know about Canadian civics, and I might write about them someday. For example,
- How Parliament works, particularly how the Executive (the Cabinet) overlaps with the Legislature (the Commons and Senate).
- What the PM’s actual powers are (probably too many).
- Political parties (by American standards, most of us are left-wing crazies, even, at times, some people in the most right-wing parties).
- Minority governments.
- Anything my foreign friends ask about when they read this.
For Potential Immigrants
Some of my American friends are seriously considering moving to Canada because of What Is Going On Right Now. Getting to the point of citizenship and ability to elect people is beyond the scope of this post. What is relevant: If you’re 55 or over, you no longer need to pass a civics test to become a citizen. Yay! Sorry to all of you under 55.