History
The House of Commons came into existence in 1867, when the British Parliament passed the British North America Act, uniting the Province of Canada (which was separated into Quebec and Ontario), Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into a single federation called the Dominion of Canada. The new Parliament of Canada consisted of the Queen (represented by the Governor General, who also represented the Colonial Office), the Senate and the House of Commons. The Parliament of Canada was based on the Westminster model (that is, the model of the Parliament of the United Kingdom). Unlike the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the powers of the Parliament of Canada were limited in that other powers were assigned exclusively to the provincial legislatures. The Parliament of Canada also remained subordinate to the Westminster Parliament, the supreme legislative authority for the entire British Empire. Greater autonomy was granted by the Statute of Westminster 1931, after which new Acts of the British Parliament did not apply to Canada, with some exceptions. These exceptions were removed by the Canada Act 1982. From 1867 to 1916 the Commons met in the old chambers until these were destroyed by fire. It relocated to the amphitheatre of the Victoria Memorial Museum - what is today the Canadian Museum of Nature from 1916 to 1922. Since 1922, the Commons has sat in the same chamber.
Read more about this topic: House Of Commons Of Canada
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)