The Defeat of the Clark Government: The Dissolution of Parliament, Leadership Conventions and the Calling of Elections in Canada

Abstract

It is a commonplace of parliamentary systems based on the Westminster model to assert that prime ministers enjoy virtually unlimited freedom to advise the dissolution of parliament and the calling of an election. However in Canada, unlike Britain, leadership conventions have served since at least 1957 to constrain a prime minister’s freedom to call an election at will. It is widely accepted in federal political circles that an election called during the four or five months of a leadership campaign would be "unfair" to the party involved in the process of choosing a new leader. But by the same token, as the fate of the Clark government attests, there is no obligation on an opposition party having put out the call for a leadership convention to complete the exercise of selecting a new leader and to abandon its larger parliamentary responsibility of testing a government’s popularity through confidence motions and, if necessary, an election. In the event, the critical error of the Clark government lay in its mistaken belief that an "election-free" period, likely to last several months, was to follow the November 1979 announcement of Mr. Trudeau’s retirement and the selection in March 1980 of his successor in a national convention.