The Prime Minister of Canada (French: Premier ministre du Canada) is the primary minister of the Crown, chairman of the Cabinet, and thus head of government for Canada, charged with advising the Canadian monarch or viceroy on the exercise of the executive powers vested in them by the constitution. Not outlined in any constitutional document, the office exists only as per long-established convention originating in Canada's former colonial power, the United Kingdom, which stipulates that the monarch's representative, the governor general, must select as prime minister the person most likely to command the confidence of the elected House of Commons; this individual is typically the leader of the political party that holds the largest number of seats in that chamber.
The current, and 22nd, Prime Minister of Canada is the Conservative Party's Stephen Harper, who was appointed on February 6, 2006, by Governor General Michaëlle Jean, following the general election that took place that year. As with all other Canadian prime ministers, Harper is styled as The Right Honourable (French: Le Très Honorable), a privilege maintained for life.
Read more about Prime Minister Of Canada: Origin of The Office, Qualifications and Selection, Mandate, Role and Authority, Privileges, Style of Address, Activities Post-commission
Famous quotes containing the words prime minister, prime, minister and/or canada:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,
As if at pain; for it is pain, to think
This pantomime
Of compensating act and counter-act,
Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,
My ablest time.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Just let him be minister if that’s what he desires, but without his brother and his brother-in-law.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante’s scheme, Limbo is to Hell.”
—Irving Layton (b. 1912)