In Canada, some Canadian jurisdictions have passed legislation fixing election dates, so that elections occur on a more regular cycle (usually every four years) and the date of a forthcoming election is publicly known. However, the Governor General of Canada, on the advice of the Prime Minister of Canada, the provincial lieutenant governors, on the advice of the relevant premier, and the territorial commissioners, on the advice of the relevant premier, do still have the power to call a general election, as is traditional in Westminster-style parliamentary governments, at any point before the fixed date. By-elections, used to fill vacancies in a legislature, are also not affected by fixed election dates.
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“The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan and the whole fixed upon stilts.”
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“He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.”
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“Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,”
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“This universal exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the keeper of a menagerie showing his animals’ claws. It was the English leopard showing his claws.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)