Queen's Park, the Ontario provincial legislature, decorated for the holidays with lights, in Toronto, in November, 2025.Giordano Ciampini/The Canadian Press
The holidays, tragically, are winding down for another year. Beloved family traditions, laughter with loved ones, a long winter’s nap: These are some of the things that make the season magical. Little wonder that so many Canadians will trudge back to work next week repeating one rueful piece of office small-talk like a koan: The December break is always too short.
But some governments have found a way to achieve a true miracle of the season: stretching out their holidays.
Provincial governments hold the power to set their annual parliamentary calendars, and most of Canada’s legislatures concluded their fall sessions ahead of the winter break in December. Alberta finished up an eventful session after 58 days; Quebec’s Assemblée Nationale decided to recess after 82 days. The majority will start their spring sessions in February.
Not so in Ontario, which wrapped its fall session after just 51 days – 24 fewer than the year before. What’s more, Ontario’s extended 14-week break won’t end until March 23. The work of government and committees will continue, but the messy, important labour of legislating is on a long pause.
Nova Scotia’s schedule was even more egregious. Province House wrapped for the winter holidays on Oct. 3, just two weeks after the start of the fall equinox – concluding a session that lasted only eight days, two days shorter than the previous year’s fall session.
Ontario legislature to take 14-week winter break, a move opposition calls undemocratic
It feels particularly dire that a decades-long trend toward curtailing this key pillar of Canadian democracy appears to be accelerating now. This country’s leaders spent the last year underscoring the need for deliberation, collaboration and unity among all Canadians in the face of a national crisis. The chambers devoted to serve this exact purpose are increasingly being treated like rubber stamps for governments’ agendas, particularly by those with majority mandates.
Procedural workarounds have become all too common. Five government bills passed during Nova Scotia’s highly condensed fall schedule were omnibus packages, combining a sweeping range of issues into one vote while reducing cabinet ministers’ exposure to interrogations from the loyal opposition and the amount of time a bill spends in committee.
Time allocation motions are also often used to impose strict limits on the time spent debating its bills, in the alleged name of meeting tight timelines. (Of course, the rush cited by the Ontario government, which deployed time allocation for nearly 10 bills in a fall session it chose to start late, was entirely of its own making.)
Governments have argued that shorter sessions allow for quicker and more decisive action. “We made it very efficient and productive and lots of good things happened during this session,” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston said in October. Ontario’s government House leader Steve Clark justified the longer break by citing “the tremendous amount of legislation that we were able to drive forward.” But while efficiency and quantity of laws enacted may be metrics of success for the government, the success of a parliamentary democracy should be measured based on the effectiveness of considered legislation that is improved by hearing from stakeholders and democratically elected representatives.
Other defenders of this trend argue that elected representatives need to spend less time in parliament and more time in their home ridings consulting with constituents. This only sounds like an admission that legislators are unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Parliament is one of the few avenues available for the opposition to hold the government accountable for its actions, particularly when it has won more than half the seats. Governments tend to bristle at such impediments, but disagreement – even if it is sometimes unruly or bogs down the process – is not a bug of the system, but a feature, one that allows the many Canadians who voted for opposition members to be heard. Legislatures also provide a physical location where journalists and sometimes voters themselves face their representatives head-on, which can lead to position reversals.
Canadian democracy has long been caught in the push and pull between an impulse toward centralized executive power and the historic constitutional division of powers. Politicians need to remember – and communicate through word and deed – that in Canada’s constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, the Crown’s power is checked by the legislative body. Subtract parliament from the equation and what’s left looks an awful lot like monarchy.