China
China the People's Republic of China, is a country in East Asia and the world's most populous country, with a population of around 1.404 billion. Covering 9,600,000 square kilometers, it is the third- or fourth-largest country by total area. Governed by the Communist Party of China, the state exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities, the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. China emerged as one of the world's earliest civilizations, in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies, or dynasties, beginning with the semi-legendary Xia dynasty in 21st century BCE. Since China has expanded, re-unified numerous times. In the 3rd century BCE, the Qin established the first Chinese empire; the succeeding Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC until 220 AD, saw some of the most advanced technology at that time, including papermaking and the compass, along with agricultural and medical improvements.
The invention of gunpowder and movable type in the Tang dynasty and Northern Song completed the Four Great Inventions. Tang culture spread in Asia, as the new Silk Route brought traders to as far as Mesopotamia and Horn of Africa. Dynastic rule ended in 1912 with the Xinhai Revolution; the Chinese Civil War resulted in a division of territory in 1949, when the Communist Party of China established the People's Republic of China, a unitary one-party sovereign state on Mainland China, while the Kuomintang-led government retreated to the island of Taiwan. The political status of Taiwan remains disputed. Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China's economy has been one of the world's fastest-growing with annual growth rates above 6 percent. According to the World Bank, China's GDP grew from $150 billion in 1978 to $12.24 trillion by 2017. Since 2010, China has been the world's second-largest economy by nominal GDP and since 2014, the largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity.
China is the world's largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world's largest standing army and second-largest defense budget; the PRC is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as it replaced the ROC in 1971, as well as an active global partner of ASEAN Plus mechanism. China is a leading member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, WTO, APEC, BRICS, the BCIM, the G20. In recent times, scholars have argued that it will soon be a world superpower, rivaling the United States; the word "China" has been used in English since the 16th century. It is not a word used by the Chinese themselves, it has been traced through Portuguese and Persian back to the Sanskrit word Cīna, used in ancient India."China" appears in Richard Eden's 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. Barbosa's usage was derived from Persian Chīn, in turn derived from Sanskrit Cīna.
Cīna was first used including the Mahābhārata and the Laws of Manu. In 1655, Martino Martini suggested that the word China is derived from the name of the Qin dynasty. Although this derivation is still given in various sources, it is complicated by the fact that the Sanskrit word appears in pre-Qin literature; the word may have referred to a state such as Yelang. The meaning transferred to China as a whole; the origin of the Sanskrit word is still a matter of debate, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The official name of the modern state is the "People's Republic of China"; the shorter form is "China" Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó, a term which developed under the Western Zhou dynasty in reference to its royal demesne. It was applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and to China's Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing, it was used as a cultural concept to distinguish the Huaxia people from perceived "barbarians". The name Zhongguo is translated as "Middle Kingdom" in English.
Archaeological evidence suggests that early hominids inhabited China between 2.24 million and 250,000 years ago. The hominid fossils of Peking Man, a Homo erectus who used fire, were discovered in a cave at Zhoukoudian near Beijing; the fossilized teeth of Homo sapiens have been discovered in Fuyan Cave in Hunan. Chinese proto-writing existed in Jiahu around 7000 BCE, Damaidi around 6000 BCE, Dadiwan from 5800–5400 BCE, Banpo dating from the 5th millennium BCE; some scholars have suggested. According to Chinese tradition, the first dynasty was the Xia, which emerged around 2100 BCE; the dynasty was considered mythical by historians until scientific excavations found early Bronze Age sites at Erlitou, Henan in 1959. It remains unclear whether these sites are the remains of the Xia dynasty or of another culture from the same period; the succeeding Shang dynasty is the earliest to be confirmed by contemporary records. The Shang ruled the plain of the Yellow River in eastern China from the 17th to the 11th century BCE.
Their oracle bone script
Gregor Robertson (politician)
Not to be confused with Gregor Robertson. Gregor Angus Bethune Robertson is a Canadian entrepreneur and politician, who served as the 39th Mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia from 2008 to 2018; as mayor, Robertson oversaw the creation and implementation of the Greenest City 2020 Action Plan and spearheaded the creation of the city's first comprehensive Economic Action Strategy. Robertson was elected to the position of mayor of Vancouver as part of the Vision Vancouver slate. Prior to that, he served as a Member of the Legislative Assembly for Vancouver-Fairview, as a member of the New Democratic Party of British Columbia, from 2005 until his resignation in 2008 to run for the mayoral position. On January 10, 2018, Robertson announced in a Facebook post that he would not seek reelection that year. Robertson was born in North Vancouver in 1964, his father was an attorney with Russell Dumoulin, a prominent Vancouver law firm, his mother was a teacher. After his parents divorced, Robertson grew up in Portola Valley, near San Francisco with his mother, with his father in North Vancouver.
In 1982 he graduated from Carson Graham Secondary School in North Vancouver and attended Colorado College and the University of British Columbia, graduating from the former with a BA in English and Biology. After graduating, he intended to become a physician, but the University of British Columbia School of Medicine rejected his application. Robertson completed Emergency Medical Technician training but turned his career focus to healthy food and nutrition.. His relations include grandfather Dr. Emile Therrien, a pioneering doctor, Dr. Norman Bethune, his grandmother's cousin, a noted anti-fascist and Communist famous for battlefield medicine in the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, he worked on a ranch as a cowboy in the Cariboo restored a wooden sailboat and sailed across the Pacific for 18 months, accompanied by his wife, whom he had met in Colorado. They settled in New Zealand, where he was attracted to, began, farming as a trade. After turning 25, he returned to Canada, where he purchased land in Glen Valley near Fort Langley, made his living as a farmer there.
Robertson went on to co-found Happy Planet, a Vancouver-based company that produces and markets organic fruit and vegetable beverages and soups. He was named one of Canada's "Top 40 under 40" by The Mail, he was a Tides Canada director from 2002 until 2004, when he entered politics with the provincial New Democratic Party. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly in the 2005 election as a member of the British Columbia New Democratic Party having defeated the trade union leader Judy Darcy in a high-profile battle for the party's nomination, he beat British Columbia Liberal Party's Virginia Greene in the general election. During his time as the MLA for Vancouver-Fairview, Robertson served as the Opposition Critic for Advanced Education, Small Business Critic and as the Co-Chair of the Caucus Climate Change Taskforce. In February 2008, Robertson announced. In June 2008, Robertson secured the Vision Vancouver party's nomination as its mayoral candidate, defeating Raymond Louie and Allan De Genova.
Robertson soon announced his resignation from the Legislative Assembly effective July 15, 2008. His main rival was Peter Ladner of the Non-Partisan Association. In November 2008, Robertson came under scrutiny after reporters discovered that he had an unpaid transit infraction fine from the SkyTrain system. While the public appeared willing to accept his explanation that the original infraction was a mistake, he was criticized by some for attempting to spin his failure to pay into a politically positive statement. Robertson paid the $173 fine, he was elected by a solid margin in the 2008 municipal election. Seven of the ten seats on Vancouver City Council went to Robertson's Vision Vancouver party. "It was a hard-fought campaign," he told supporters gathered at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, "but there is far more that unites us than divides us."Robertson's campaign received donations from at least two American supporters. Councilor Ellen Woodsworth, who ran as part of the coalition led by Robertson in the 2008 election called for a ban on foreign campaign donations such as those received by Robertson.
Under Mayor Robertson's leadership, Vancouver City Council has made important progress on ending homelessness, including the approval of more than 600 temporary modular homes. The 12th annual Homeless Count in Vancouver held in 2018 saw a 2% increase in homeless residents since the 2017 count, compared with a 16% increase between 2016 and 2017. Of those counted in 2018, 659 were living on the street and 1,522 were living in shelters, compared to 537 street homeless and 1,601 sheltered in 2017. Fifty-two per cent of those counted reported being homeless for less than a year, showing the fluidity of homelessness year over year in Vancouver, in 2017, the Homelessness Service's Outreach Team secured 850 homes for residents who were homeless or at risk of homelessness. In September 2017, the Government of British Columbia announced a funding commitment of $66 million towards building 600 units of temporary modular housing in Vancouver. In partnership with the B. C Government, temporary modular homes are being built in a matter of months on empty or underutilized City-owned land, providing immediate relief to hundreds of people living without a home, as well as access to 24/7 supports, including life skills training and health services.
During the 2008 campaign Robertson promised he would establish a mental health advocate position, as p
Immigration to Canada
Immigration to Canada is the process by which people migrate to Canada to reside there. The majority of these people become Canadian citizens. After 1947, domestic immigration law and policy went through major changes, most notably with the Immigration Act, 1976, the current Immigration and Refugee Protection Act from 2002. In Canada there are four categories of immigrants: family-class, economic immigrants and the humanitarian and other category. In 2016, Canada admitted 296,346 permanent residents, compared to 271,845 the previous year – the highest admissions levels since 2010. Of those admitted, 53 % were their accompanying immediate families. According to data from the 2016 census by Statistics Canada, 21.9% of the Canadian population reported they were or had been a landed immigrant or permanent resident in Canada – nearly the 22.3% recorded during the 1921 Census, the highest level since the 1867 Confederation of Canada. More than one in five Canadians were born abroad, 22.3% of the population belonged to visible minorities, of whom 3 in 10 were born in Canada.
In 2013–2014, most of the Canadian public, as well as the major political parties, supported either sustaining or increasing the current level of immigration. A 2014 sociological study concluded that "Australia and Canada are the most receptive to immigration among western nations". However, in 2017, the majority of Canadians indicated that they agree that Canada should accept fewer immigrants and refugees. Canadian immigration policies are still evolving. In 2008, Citizenship and Immigration Canada made significant changes to streamline the steady flow of immigrants, such as changes reducing professional categories for skilled immigration as well as caps for immigrants in various categories. In 2015, Canada introduced the Express Entry system, providing a streamlined application process for many economic immigrants. Additional changes were made in April and May 2017. In November 2017, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen announced that Canada would admit nearly 1 million permanent residents to Canada over the following three years, rising from 0.7% to 1% of its population by 2020.
This increase was motivated by the economic needs of the country facing an aging demographic, with the number of senior citizens expected to double by 2036 alongside a decline in the proportion of working-age adults. After the initial period of British and French colonization, four major waves of immigration and settlement of non-aboriginal peoples took place over a period of two centuries; the fifth wave is occurring. The first wave of significant, non-aboriginal immigration to Canada occurred over two centuries with slow but progressive French settlement of Quebec and Acadia with smaller numbers of American and European entrepreneurs in addition to British military personnel; this wave culminated with the influx of 46–50,000 British Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, chiefly from the Mid-Atlantic States into what is today Southern Ontario, the Eastern Townships of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia of whom 36,000 went to the Maritimes. Some of these made their way to Ontario. A second wave of 30,000 Americans settled in Ontario and the Eastern Townships between the late 1780s and 1812 with promises of land.
Some several thousands of Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders from forced land clearances in Scotland migrated to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and parts of Eastern Ontario during this period. It marked a new age for its people; the second wave consisting of British and Irish immigrants or the Great Migration, encouraged immigrants to settle in Canada after the War of 1812, included British army regulars who had served in that war. In 1815, 80% of the English-speakers in Canada who numbered 250,000 were either American colonists, or their descendants. By 1851 their percentage had dropped to 30%; the colonial governors of Canada, who were worried about another American invasion attempt and to counter the French-speaking influence of Quebec, rushed to promote settlement in back country areas along newly constructed plank roads within organized land tracts in Upper Canada, much of the settlements were organized by large companies to promote clearing, thus farming of land lots. With the second wave Irish immigration to Canada had been increasing, small numbers to organized land settlements but many more arriving to work on canals, timber and peaked when the Irish Potato Famine occurred from 1846 to 1849 resulting in hundreds of thousands more Irish arriving on Canada's shores, although a portion migrated on to the United States, either in the short-term or over the subsequent decades.
At least 800,000 immigrants arrived between 1815 and 1850, 60% of them British and the remainder Irish. This movement of people is known as the Great Migration boosted Canada's population from 500,000 in 1812 to 2.5 million by 1851. Ontario: 952,000; the French-speaking population was 300,000 in 1812 and had increased to approx. 700,000 by the 1851 census. Demographically it had swung to a majority English-speaking country; the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 copied the American system by offering ownership of 160 acres of
Ku Klux Klan in Canada
The Ku Klux Klan is an organization that expanded operations into Canada, based on the second Ku Klux Klan established in the United States in 1915. It operated as a fraternity, with chapters established in parts of Canada throughout the 1920s and early 1930s; the first registered provincial chapter was registered in Toronto in 1925 by two Americans and a Torontonian. The organization was most successful in Saskatchewan, where it influenced political activity and whose membership included a member of Parliament; the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865 resulted in the termination of the secessionist movement of the Confederate States of America and the abolition of slavery, the underlying cause of the war. The United States entered a period of Reconstruction, during which the infrastructure destroyed during the civil war would be rebuilt, national unity would be restored, freed slaves were guaranteed their civil rights with the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. In December 1865, six veterans of the Confederate Army established the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee.
Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson undertook a moderate approach to Reconstruction, but after the 1866 election resulted in the Radical Republicans controlling the policy of the 40th United States Congress, a harsher approach was adopted in which former Confederates were removed from power and freedmen were enfranchised. In July 1868, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, addressing citizenship rights and granting equal protection under the law; the 1868 presidential election victory by Ulysses S. Grant, who supported Radical Republicans, further entrenched this approach. Under his presidency, the Fifteenth Amendment to the constitution was passed, prohibiting federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude"; this was followed by three Enforcement Acts, criminal codes protecting African Americans and targeting the Ku Klux Klan. It was the third act known as the "Ku Klux Klan Act", which resulted in the termination of the Ku Klux Klan by 1872 and prosecution of hundreds of Klan members.
The release of the film The Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith in 1915, glorifying the original Ku Klux Klan using historical revisionism, stoked resentment among some citizens and riots in cities where it screened; the day before Thanksgiving in 1915, William Joseph Simmons and 15 of his friends established the second Ku Klux Klan atop Stone Mountain in Georgia, ceremonially burning a cross to mark the occasion. In March 1922, an African American man named Matthew Bullock fled North Carolina after the Ku Klux Klan had stated he was a wanted man, accusing him of inciting riots, his brother had been killed by Klansmen, who the Toronto Star reported at the time had "threatened to send robed riders to fetch Bullock and whisk him back to the American south". On 1 December 1924, C. Lewis Fowler of New York City, John H. Hawkins of Newport and Richard L. Cowan of Toronto signed an agreement to establish the Knights of Ku Klux Klan of Canada. Funding responsibilities for the provincial organization were split among them, each was a founding Imperial Officer of the Provincial Kloncillum, the governing body of the organization.
Fowler travelled to Canada on 1 January 1925 to establish the organization. Cowan was the Imperial Wizard, Hawkins the Imperial Klaliff and Chief of Staff, Fowler the Imperial Kligrapp, they split the organization's income equally. Fowler left Canada in 1926. During the mid 1920s, Ku Klux Klan branches were established throughout Canada. According to historian James Pitsula, these groups observed the same racial ideology but had a narrower focus than those in the United States to preserve the "Britishness" of Canada with respect to ethnicity and religious affiliation; the Ku Klux Klan of Canada made efforts to distinguish itself from the American organization, which used a "spectacular level of violent criminality" against black Americans and the white Americans who supported them. Hawkins stated at a rally in London that the Canadian Ku Klux Klan was not lawless, that it abided by the laws of the nation, but that it would promote changing those laws it didn't support or did "not meet the needs of the country".
A 1925 photograph of garbed Canadian klansmen published by the London Advertiser demonstrated that the Klan robes in Canada differed from those in the United States by including a maple leaf opposite the cross insignia. One of the most prominent groups was the Ku Klux Klan of Kanada, whose main principles of white supremacy and nationalism required members to pledge that they were white and Protestant. Organizers stated that the Ku Klux Klan was a Christian organization with "first allegiance to Canada and the Union Jack", disqualifying Jews from membership because they are not Christian, Roman Catholics because their first allegiance is to the Pope in Rome. Although the KKK operated throughout Canada, it was most successful in Saskatchewan, where by the late 1920s its membership was over 25,000. Historian Allan Bartley states that this success was a result of opposition to liberal Government of Saskatchewan policy established by the entrenched Saskatchewan Liberal Party, which had held power in the province since its inception in 1905.
In 1991, Carney Nerland, a professed white supremacist, member of the Ku Klux Klan and leader of the Saskatchewan branch of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nation killed a Cree man, Leo LaChance, with an assault rifle. LaChance had entered Saskatchewan pawn shop to sell furs he had trapped. Although distancing itself from the violence
History of Chinese immigration to Canada
In the late 1770s, some 120 Chinese contract labourers arrived at Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island. The British fur trader John Meares recruited an initial group of about 50 sailors and artisans from Canton and Macao. At Nootka Sound, the Chinese workers built a dockyard, a fort and a sailing ship, the North-West America. Regarding this journey and the future prospects of Chinese people settlement in colonial North America, Meares wrote: The Chinese were, on this occasion, shipped as an experiment: they have been esteemed as hardy, industrious, as well as ingenious race of people. If trading posts should be established on the American coast, a colony of these men would be a valuable acquisition; the next year, Meares had another 70 Chinese shipped from Canton. However, shortly upon arrival of this second group, the settlement was seized by the Spanish in what became known as the Nootka Crisis; the Chinese men were imprisoned by the Spanish. It is unclear what became of them but some returned to China, while others were put to work in a nearby mine and taken to Mexico.
No other Chinese are known to have arrived in western North America until the gold rush of the 1850s. The Chinese first appeared in large numbers in the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1858 as part of the huge migration to that colony from California during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in the newly declared Mainland. Although the first wave arrived in May from California, news of the gold rush attracted many Chinese from China. In the goldfields, Chinese mining techniques and knowledge turned out to be better than those of other miners, they employed hydraulic techniques, such as the use of "rockers", a technique whereby blankets were used to filter alluvial sand and burned, resulting in the gold melting into lumps in the fire. In the Fraser Canyon, Chinese miners stayed on long after all others had left for the Cariboo Gold Rush or other goldfields elsewhere in BC or the United States, they continued hydraulic mining and farming, owned the majority of land in the Fraser and Thompson canyons for many years afterwards.
At Barkerville, in the Cariboo, more than half the town's population was estimated to be Chinese, several other towns, including Richfield, Van Winkle, Quesnellemouthe and Quesnelle Forks, had significant Chinatowns. There was no shortage of successful Chinese miners. §§ When British Columbia agreed to join Confederation in 1871, one of its conditions was that the Dominion government build a railway linking B. C. with eastern Canada within 10 years. British Columbia politicians and their electorate agitated for an immigration program from the British Isles to provide this railway labour, but Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, insisted the project cut costs by employing Chinese workers to build the railway, he told Parliament in 1882: "It is a question of alternatives: either you must have this labour or you can't have the railway.". In 1880, Andrew Onderdonk, an American, one of the main construction contractors in British Columbia for Canadian Pacific Railway recruited Chinese labourers from California.
When most of these deserted the railway workings for the more lucrative goldfields and his agents signed several agreements with Chinese contractors in China's Guangdong province and via Chinese companies in Victoria. Through those contracts more than 5,000 labourers were sent as "guest workers" from China by ship. Onderdonk recruited over 7,000 Chinese railway workers from California; these two groups of workers were the main force for the building of Onderdonk's seven per cent of the railway's mileage. As was the case with non-Chinese workers, some of them fell ill during construction or died while planting explosives or in other construction accidents, but many deserted the rail workings for the province's various goldfields. By the end of 1881, the first group of Chinese labourers, numbered at 5,000, had less than 1,500 remaining as a large number had deserted for the goldfields away from the rail line Onderdonk needed more workers, so he directly contracted Chinese businessmen in Victoria and China to send many more workers to Canada.
Onderdonk engaged these Chinese labour contractors who engaged Chinese workers willing to accept only $1 a day while white and native workers were paid three times that amount. Chinese railway workers were hired for 200 miles of the Canadian Pacific Railway considered to be among the more difficult segments of the projected railway, notably the area that goes through the Fraser Canyon; as with railway workers on other parts of the line in the Prairies and northern Ontario, most of the Chinese workers lived in tents. These canvas tents were unsafe, did not provide adequate protection against falling rocks or severe weather in areas of steep terrain; such tents were typical of working-class accommodations on the frontier for all immigrant workers although foremen, shift bosses and trained railwaymen recruited from the UK were housed in sleeping cars and railway-built houses in Yale and the other railway towns. Chinese railway workers established transient Chinatowns along the rail line, with housing at the largest consisting of log-houses half dug into the ground, a common housing
Prime Minister of Canada
The Prime Minister of Canada is the primary minister of the Crown, chairman of the Cabinet, Canada's head of government. The current, 23rd, Prime Minister of Canada is the Liberal Party's Justin Trudeau, following the 2015 Canadian federal election. Canadian prime ministers are styled as The Right Honourable, a privilege maintained for life; the Prime Minister of Canada is in charge of the Prime Minister's Office. The Prime Minister chooses the ministers that make up the Cabinet; the two groups, with the authority of the Parliament of Canada, manage the Government of Canada and the Canadian Armed Forces. The Cabinet and the Prime Minister appoint members of the Senate of Canada, the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada and federal courts, the leaders and boards, as required under law, of various Crown Corporations, selects the Governor General of Canada. Under the Canadian constitution, all of the power to exercise these activities is vested in the Monarchy of Canada, but in practice the Canadian monarch or their representative, the Governor General of Canada approves them and their role is ceremonial, their powers are only exercised under the advice of the Prime Minister.
Not outlined in any constitutional document, the office exists only as per long-established convention that stipulates the monarch's representative, the governor general, must select as prime minister the person most to command the confidence of the elected House of Commons. The position of prime minister is not outlined in any Canadian constitutional document and is mentioned only in passing in the Constitution Act, 1982, the Letters Patent, 1947 issued by King George VI; the office and its functions are instead governed by constitutional conventions and modelled on the same office in the United Kingdom. The prime minister, along with the other ministers in cabinet, is appointed by the governor general on behalf of the monarch. However, by the conventions of responsible government, designed to maintain administrative stability, the governor general will call to form a government the individual most to receive the support, or confidence, of a majority of the directly elected members of the House of Commons.
While there is no legal requirement for the prime minister to be a member of parliament, for practical and political reasons the prime minister is expected to win a seat promptly. However, in rare circumstances individuals who are not sitting members of the House of Commons have been appointed to the position of 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 had died in office—John A. Macdonald in 1891 and John Sparrow David Thompson in 1894; that convention has since evolved toward the appointment of an interim leader from the commons in such a scenario. Prime ministers who are not Members of Parliament upon their appointment 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 1925 federal election "governed from the hallway" before winning a by-election a few weeks later.
John Turner replaced Pierre Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party in 1984 and subsequently was appointed prime minister while not holding a seat in the House of Commons. Turner was the last serving prime minister to not hold a commons seat. Should a serving prime minister today lose his or her 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 resign to allow the prime minister to run in the resulting by-election. A safe seat is chosen. However, if the governing party selects a new leader shortly before an election is due, that new leader is not a member of the legislature, he or she will 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.
The Canadian prime minister serves at Her Majesty's pleasure, meaning the post does not have a fixed term. Once appointed and sworn in by the governor general, the prime minister remains in office until he or she resigns, is dismissed, or dies; the lifespan of parliament was limited by the constitution to five years, though the governor general may still, on the advice of the prime minister, dissolve parliament and issue the writs of election prior to the date mandated by the Canada Elections Act. As of 2007, with an amendment to the Elections Act, Section 56.1 was changed
Governor General of Canada
The Governor General of Canada is the federal viceregal representative of the Canadian monarch Queen Elizabeth II. The person of the sovereign is shared both with the 15 other Commonwealth realms and the 10 provinces of Canada, but resides predominantly in her oldest and most populous realm, the United Kingdom; the Queen, on the advice of her Canadian prime minister, appoints a governor general to carry out most of her constitutional and ceremonial duties. The commission is for an unfixed period of time—known as serving at Her Majesty's pleasure—though five years is the normal convention. Beginning in 1959, it has been traditional to rotate between anglophone and francophone officeholders—although many recent governors general have been bilingual. Once in office, the governor general maintains direct contact with the Queen, wherever she may be at the time; the office began in the 16th and 17th centuries with the Crown-appointed governors of the French colony of Canada followed by the British governors of Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Subsequently, the office is, along with the Crown, the oldest continuous institution in Canada. The present incarnation of the office emerged with Canadian Confederation and the passing of the British North America Act, 1867, which defines the role of the governor general as "carrying on the Government of Canada on behalf and in the Name of the Queen, by whatever Title he is designated". Although the post still represented the government of the United Kingdom, the office was Canadianized until, with the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931 and the establishment of a separate and uniquely Canadian monarchy, the governor general become the direct personal representative of the independently and uniquely Canadian sovereign, the monarch in his Canadian council. Throughout this process of increasing Canadian independence, the role of governor general took on additional responsibilities. For example, in 1904, the Militia Act granted permission for the governor general to use the title of Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian militia, in the name of the sovereign and actual Commander-in-Chief, in 1927 the first official international visit by a governor general was made.
In 1947, King George VI issued letters patent allowing the viceroy to carry out all of the monarch's powers on his or her behalf. As a result, the day-to-day duties of the monarch are carried out by the governor general, although, as a matter of law, the governor general is not in the same constitutional position as the sovereign. In accordance with the Constitution Act, 1982, any constitutional amendment that affects the Crown, including the office of the Governor General, requires the unanimous consent of each provincial legislature as well as the federal parliament; the current governor general is Julie Payette, who has served since 2 October 2017. The Government of Canada spells the title governor general without a hyphen; the Canadian media still use the governor-general spelling. As governor is the noun in the title, it is pluralized. Moreover, both terms are capitalized; the position of governor general is mandated by both the Constitution Act, 1867 and the letters patent issued in 1947 by King George VI.
As such, on the recommendation of his or her Canadian prime minister, the Canadian monarch appoints the governor general by commission issued under the royal sign-manual and Great Seal of Canada. That individual is, from until being sworn-in, referred to as the governor general-designate. Besides the administration of the oaths of office, there is no set formula for the swearing-in of a governor general-designate. Though there may therefore be variations to the following, the appointee will travel to Ottawa, there receiving an official welcome and taking up residence at 7 Rideau Gate, will begin preparations for their upcoming role, meeting with various high level officials to ensure a smooth transition between governors general; the sovereign will hold an audience with the appointee and will at that time induct both the governor general-designate and his or her spouse into the Order of Canada as Companions, as well as appointing the former as a Commander of both the Order of Military Merit and the Order of Merit of the Police Forces.
The incumbent will serve for at least five years, though this is only a developed convention, the governor general still technically acts at Her Majesty's pleasure. The prime minister may therefore recommend to the Queen that the viceroy remain in her service for a longer period of time, sometimes upwards of more than seven years. A governor general may resign, two have died in office. In such a circumstance, or if the governor general leaves the country for longer than one month, the Chief Justice of Canada serves as Administrator of the Government and exercises all powers of the governor general. In a speech on the subject of confederation, made in 1866 to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, John A. Macdonald said of the planned governor: "We place no restriction on Her Majesty's prerogative in the selection of her representative... The sovereign has unrestricted freedom of choice... We leave that to Her Majes
