Minority Report

Are minority governments a benefit to Canada or a burden?

Earlier this month, Mark Carney’s Liberals won a federal election in Canada, but failed to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons, meaning he heads a minority government.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

In the last century, the question of how to feel about minority governments was academic; from 1980 to 2004 Canada had robust majority governments. But that was then. From 2004 to 2025, Canada has had minority governments for roughly nine of those years, nearly as long as the twelve years of majority rule during the same period. And PM Carney’s minority government should last at least two years, so the relative count will narrow further.

Readers unfamiliar with Westminster parliaments may not have a firm grasp on what is at stake in the question. In these systems, the organizing principle is confidence, as in, the government must retain the confidence of the people, who are represented by their members of Parliament (MPs). If the government of the day proposes a law in more MPs vote against it than for it, then the government has ‘lost confidence’. This means that it must resign and a new election be held.

The governing party can generally count on its MPs to support its own initiatives. That means that when the governing party has more than half of the seats in Parliament, loss of confidence tends not to happen. Such governments are casually known as ‘majority’ governments.

By contrast, if the governing party has only a plurality of the seats, then loss of confidence is always possible; in fact, at least some of the opposing MPs must vote with the government, or abstain, or skip attending Parliament that day to prevent a loss of confidence. This situation is called a ‘minority’ government: it’s a situation where the governing party’s hold on power is fragile.

In the last century minority governments were rare but people still liked to argue, so even though the question was abstract, some people still had arguments to hand as to why minorities were bad. That case went like this: