Mapleleafweb.com: Democracy Workings - Responsible Government

Please Note! This particular section of Mapleleafweb is outdated and is in the process of being updated and migrated to the new version of Maple Leaf Web. Maple Leaf Web makes no guarantee that the information below is up to date and or correct.

Please update your bookmarks and thank you for your patience. Please contact us if you have any questions or comments

Responsible Government

July 3rd 2001

The concept of responsible government is at the heart of Canada's parliamentary democracy. For many people, however, it is a confusing concept. When asked to define responsible government, most people intuitively think that it means that government is responsible to the people it governs. While there is an element of truth to this, the technical meaning of responsible government is that the government is responsible to the elected representatives of the people.

What this means in contemporary Canada is that the government (meaning the Prime Minister and Cabinet) is answerable to the House of Commons for how it uses its authority. There are several ways this idea gets expressed. The most important is that the government must maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. In other words, a majority of the members of the House of Commons must support the government. If, for whatever reason, a government is unable to maintain the support of a majority of MPs, the Prime Minister must submit his or her resignation to the governor-general, who typically calls a new election or, in rare cases, asks another person in the House of Commons to try to form a government that will have the confidence of the House.

Individual cabinet ministers run government departments and must answer to the House of Commons for the way those departments are being run, their policies and budgets, and any mistakes made by department officials. This is what Question Period is all about: it provides a forum for individual Members of Parliament to ask questions of ministers. It's one of the most visible ways that the government is held responsible to the House of Commons. The Standing Committee system also essentially provides a series of Parliamentary committees that "shadow" government departments and oversee their operations.

The idea of responsible government is infused throughout the Parliamentary system. Interestingly, though, this idea does not appear in Canada's written constitutional documents. It is a constitutional convention, an unwritten rule that Canada's political actors view as binding.

The idea of responsible government emerged in Canada before political parties, but the operation of the convention of responsible government is obviously strongly influenced by the presence of political parties in the House of Commons. When a majority of the members of the House of Commons come from one party (as is usually the case in Canada), the Prime Minister is the leader of that party and the cabinet ministers are usually chosen from the ranks of MPs of that party. Maintaining the confidence of the House of Commons usually consists of party discipline, which is the practice of MPs voting the way the party has collectively decided.

Finally, the convention of party discipline has an important implication for the nature of democracy in Canada. Canadians do not directly elect their government. In a federal election, Canadians elect a Parliament. From among the members of the House of Commons, a leader who can muster the support of a majority of the MPs forms a government. In a sense, it is the representatives of the people who choose a government. Canadians elect their governments indirectly.