James Bowden's Blog

Houston Breached the Last Redoubt

Nova Scotia long resisted the trend of fixed-date elections in Canada and stood for years as the last redoubt of the ten provinces to rely solely on section 4(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982, which sets the maximum life of a legislative assembly at five years from the date fixed for the return of writs of the previous general election. And no province agonised over fixed-date elections quite like Nova Scotia either. The House of Assembly considered several private members’ bills to implement fixed-date elections from 2007 to 2013; they all failed because they never gained the support of the government. All fixed-date election laws in Canada started out life as government bills. Stephen McNeil, Liberal Premier from October 2013 to February 2021, even went so far as to rule out imposing a fixed-date election law in Nova Scotia altogether on 8 April 2015 only two days after Wade MacLaughlan, at the time the new Liberal Premier of Prince Edward Island, ignored his province’s electoral schedule. McNeil also alluded to all the ad hockery that Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island had gone through to avoid the possibility that their provincial general elections would overlap with the federal general election in October 2015 as evidence that “fixed dates haven’t been working.”[1] All that changed on the Fifth of November 2021.

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The Current Fixed-Date Elections Law

Before the House of Commons lies a bill to amend the fixed-date elections law in sections 56.1 and 56.2 of the Canada Elections Act. It continues in the long tradition of tinkering and ad hockery that has long characterised the fixed-date election laws across Canada, and which I have chronicled over the last decade or so.

The current sections pertaining to fixed-date elections, which have shortened the maximum life of a parliament from five years to somewhere between four and five years (depending upon the date of the dissolution of the previous parliament), mandate that general elections shall occur on the third Monday of every fourth October after the previous general election. Since Parliament adopted these sections in 2007, only the elections of 2015 and 2019 have happened as scheduled. The previous general election fell in September 2021 after the Governor General granted Prime Minister Trudeau an early dissolution to the 43^rd Parliament; consequently, the schedule of the next general election has shifted to 20 October 2025. Incidentally, this also means that four years and one month, rather than four years, would pass between general elections – which is why I describe the fixed-date election law as having shortened the life of a parliament to somewhere between four and five years, rather than to precisely four years.

The current law as enacted in 2007 does, however, build in some flexibility if the scheduled polling day of the federal general election would come into “conflict with a day of cultural or religious significance or a provincial or municipal election,” in which case the Chief Electoral Officer could recommend that the Governor-in-Council choose another polling day – either the next day (the third Tuesday of the fourth October), or seven days later, the following Monday (the fourth Monday of the fourth October). But the Chief Electoral Officer must make this recommendation before 1 August in the year of the scheduled election. The Governor-in-Council, which is to say, the Governor General acting on the advice of Cabinet, would make the operative decision.

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