Repealing Fixed-Date Election Laws

Nova Scotia, the last province to adopt a fixed-date elections law in 2021, also became the first to repeal one in March 2025. The hegemony of these laws lasted only four years. More significant still, Ontario also repealed its fixed-date elections late in late November 2025 after having initially enacted it twenty years before. Interestingly, both provinces repealed their statutes in the first session after their incumbent premiers called snap elections and won new majorities. Fixed-date election laws did nothing apart from reducing the maximum life of a parliament or legislatures from five years to somewhere between four and five years in a roundabout way. Parliament and the legislatures should simply have enacted laws which directly lowered their maximum lives to four years in wording mimicking s. 4(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982, that parliament or a legislature can live “four years after the date fixed for the return of the writs of a general election and no longer.” Ottawa and the other provinces should follow suit and repeal their equivalent laws as well.

Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s Longest-Serving Prime Minister

I have been saying for ten years that Mackenzie King does not qualify as “Canada’s longest-serving prime minister,” contrary to scholarly belief, and nor does his tenure set the record as the longest-serving prime minister anywhere in the Commonwealth, whether that means only the fifteen Commonwealth Realms which recognize Charles III as King, or the international organization called the Commonwealth of Nations, which also includes many republics once part of the British Empire. Perhaps I now sound like Randy Quaid’s character in Independence Day when he exclaimed: “I’ve been sayin’ it. I’ve been sayin’ it for ten damn years! Ain’t I been sayin’ it? Huh? I’ve been sayin’ it!” But I hold out this faint hope that the main thrust of my first foray into this subject in 2015, and my larger article from 2020 will yet one day blast its way into Canadian historiography and end this myth about Mackenzie King once and for all.  Mackenzie King served the longest as prime minister neither of Canada – that honour goes to Sir John A. Macdonald – nor of the Commonwealth, because no one has matched Sir Vere Bird’s tenure in Antigua and Barbuda.

Similar Posts: 

• My Published Works
• Bowden, J.W.J. “The History of Ontario’s Fixed-Date Election Law, 2004-2025.” Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law 20, no. 1 (2026): 145-155.
• Updates on the Reform Act and Fixed-Date Elections (May 2025)
• Nova Scotia Poised to Repeal Its Fixed-Date Elections Law (February 2025)
• Sorry, Steve Paikin, But Mackenzie King Is Not The Longest-Serving Prime Minister in the Commonwealth (January 2025)
• Bowden, J.W.J. “Canada’s Legal-Constitutional Continuity, 1791-1867.” Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law 14, no. 3 (2020): 581-623.
• Who is Canada’s Longest-Serving Prime Minister? It Depends on When “Canada” Began (July 2016)
• Bowden, James W.J. “1791: The Birth of Canada.” The Dorchester Review 5, no.1 (Spring-Summer 2015): 28-32.