Prime Minister of Canada - Qualifications and Selection

Qualifications and Selection

The prime minister, along with the other ministers in cabinet, is appointed by the governor general on behalf of the Queen. However, by the conventions of responsible government, designed to maintain administrative stability, the viceroy will call to form a government the individual most likely to receive the support, or confidence, of a majority of the directly-elected House of Commons; as a practical matter, this is often the leader of a party whose members form a majority, or a very large plurality, of Members of Parliament (MPs). Legally, this may be any citizen of Canada of voting age (18 years and over)—the requirements to gain election to the House of Commons. It is not actually clear as to whether there are age or citizenship restrictions on the position of prime minister itself, as it is not necessary for the incumbent to be a sitting MP. However, this is more of an academic question since the constitutional conventions involved in selecting the prime minister make the appointment of anyone ineligible for election to the house an obvious infeasibility.

In rare circumstances individuals who are not members of the Commons can be appointed prime minister. Two former prime ministers—Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott and Sir Mackenzie Bowell—served in the 1890s while members of the Senate; both, in their roles as Government Leader in the Senate, succeeded prime ministers who died in office (John A. Macdonald in 1891 and John Sparrow David Thompson in 1894), a convention that has since evolved toward the appointment of an interim leader in such a scenario. It should be noted that the Senate was considered a much more powerful body in the first half century after confederation. By the 1920s however the Senate had lost much of its original influence, and hence no sitting senator had been known to have serious aspirations of becoming prime minister whilst remaining in the Senate. Prime ministers who are not Members of Parliament upon their appointment (or who lose their seats while in office) have since been expected to seek election to the Commons as soon as possible. For example William Lyon Mackenzie King, after losing his seat in the same general election that his party won, briefly "governed from the hallway" before winning a by-election a few weeks later. Similarly, John Turner replaced Pierre Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party in 1984 and subsequently was appointed prime minister even though he did not hold a seat in the lower chamber of parliament; Turner won a riding in the next election but the Liberal Party was swept from power. Turner was the last sitting prime minister to not hold a Commons seat.

Should a sitting prime minister today lose his seat in the legislature (or should a new prime minister be appointed without holding a seat), the typical process that follows is that a junior member in the governing political party will immediately resign to allow the prime minister to run in the resulting by-election. A safe seat is usually chosen; while the Liberal and now defunct Progressive Conservative parties traditionally observed a convention of not running a candidate against another party's new leader in the by-election, the New Democrats and other smaller parties typically do not follow the same convention. However, if the governing party selects a new leader shortly before an election is due, and that new leader is not a member of the legislature, he or she will normally await the upcoming election before running for a seat in parliament.

In a poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid following the first prorogation of the 40th parliament on December 4, 2008, it was found that 51% of the sample group thought the prime minister was directly elected by Canadians.