The Speaker does vote in case of a tie, but by long-standing convention his/her vote is not partisan, but must be cast to allow the continuation of debate, or to maintain the status quo. Speaker of the House of Commons (Canada) - Wikipedia
Yes, if it’s second reading or a procedural vote, the Speaker will use their vote to allow debate to continue.
But if it’s a final vote on a measure, such as third reading, and it’s a tie, the Speaker will vote against the government. The government cannot rely on the neutral Speaker to get its measure across the finish line.
Relevant provision of the Constitution Act, 1867:
The Speaker votes with the government on confidence motions.
The POLLS did not call for a majority. POLLS measure how many people will vote for a given party. The POLLS were maybe a point or two off, which is well within their stated MOE.
ANALYSTS said a majority was likely but not certain. They were in fact reasonably close; analysts like 338 said the Liberals would get somewhere between 160 and 195 seats, and that’s what happened. The midpoint was maybe 180-185, but no one said they were sure they’d get that bang on. Had someone like 338 predicted the Liberals would get roughly 230 seats, or 95, they clearly would have been doing things wrong. 169 is right inside their prediction window.
I’m sorry but I do not know why this stuff is hard to understand.
Not a critique of you, but this is slightly inaccurate. 
It’s not unheard of for the Speaker to be a member of the Opposition, and in fact this has happened twice in recent memory—namely, the 39th and 40th Parliaments, from 2006 to 2011, where a Liberal Speaker presided over a Conservative minority government.
The US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, was confirmed today. At one point Canada might have seemed like a less-stressful posting than some others (no offense to our northern neighbors). . But nowadays….
At least it looks like he has prior experience and doesn’t agree with Trump’s “51 State” malarkey.
Hey Neighbour! Driving though Manotick before the election, I saw a lot of blue signs in your riding. I was glad to see the final results Tuesday morning. I was able to actually vote for our PM.
The polls that I saw had huge margins of error. With several ridings being decided by a handful of votes, like Tera Nova with 12, it isn’t hard to miss the seat count by 5-10.
With the exception of this election, I strategically vote in the hopes that I will contribute to the making of a minority government. But absolutely not this time, and it actually worries me, not that many voted conservative, but that many voted for PP. That disturbs me.
I think that, just like in the US, many people just automatically vote along party lines. I admire my ex-wife, who runs a business and could be considered an automatic Conservative supporter, but has now been 100% behind Mark Carney and, like me, hoping for a Liberal majority. We didn’t get the majority, but Carney has formed the next government and is likely to get the support of the Bloc and probably the NDP as well. In fact, the Trumpster has been an amazing unifying effect for Canada, even if not everyone agreed on who the best leader would be to deal with him.
But 10 seats is really close.
POLLS don’t predict seat allocation. POLLS are of voters. A typical poll would say “45 percent will vote Liberal, 40 percent Tory, 7 percent BQ, 6 percent NDP, 2 percent other.” That is not the percentage of SEATS that will be won.
To predict seats, you need many polls, analysis of how vote percentages are expected in different regions and provinces, past results in each riding, and various other elements of analysis.
Yeah, it’s super complicated. To do a proper seat projection, you’d need to poll a representative sample of voters in every riding. Because in some ridings, the individual candidates might matter more than their parties. That 338 got as close as they did is actually pretty remarkable. The slight miss by the pollsters’ aggregate numbers (slightly under on CPC, slightly over on NDP though both within margin of error) would easily account for the ~15 or so seats 338 was out by.
Except in own riding apparently.
That’s not what the House of Commons Procedure and Practice manual says:
As of 2016, there have been 11 tie votes in the Commons that required the Speaker to give a casting vote. Of those, Speaker Milliken gave 5. In each case, he voted to allow debate to continue.
One of those, a vote on a financial matter in 2006, was likely a confidence matter. He voted in favour of the bill at second reading, to allow debate to continue.
It may have been a different matter at third reading, since the financial bill was an amendment bill. Based on the third bullet above, voting to preserve the status quo may well have meant that he would have voted Nay.
Ah, but that was a different seat count, which affects the political calculus.
In 2006, Harper was 31 seats short of a majority. In 2011 2008 [fixed typo], he was 12 seats short. Whether the Speaker came from the Opposition side or the government side would not have made a difference between a majority government and a minority government. The incumbent Liberal Speaker in the previous Parliament had been Peter Milliken, who was already highly respected by the members of the House for his skills as Speaker and his impartiality during the Martin minority government, so he was a strong candidate to be Speaker after the 2006 election.
The hypothetical I was giving was what if there’s a really close election? What if the vote count ended up this week with Liberals 172, Opposition parties 171? If the Liberals elected one of their own, they would move from majority to minority. If the Opposition elected one of theirs as Speaker, they would be confirming the government with a majority. What would the political calculus be? Dunno.
But there is a precedent. In the New Brunswick election in 2017, there was a hung Parliament.
- 25 seats were needed for a majority;
- Premier Gallant and the Liberals got 21;
- Higgs and the PCs got 22;
- People’s Alliance got 3;
- Greens got 3.
Gallant tried to form a government by discussions with the two smaller parties. When the Assembly was summoned, the first order of business is always the election of a Speaker. Initially, none of the Liberals put their name forward, because they could not afford to lose even one seat, so the other parties withdrew their nominees as well. Eventually, the Liberals agreed to nominate one of their members in order to start the Assembly. But that’s the kind of calculus that goes on in a hung parliament with parties that are close in numbers.
(Gallant and the Liberals were defeated on the Throne Speech by Higgs and the other parties; Higgs took office; the Liberal elected as Speaker continued in office for the term of that Assembly.)
The CPC won a majority in 2011.
Quite right; typo; will change to 2008. Thanks.
Oops - another typo. That should be 2005, not 2006. I went back and checked the Journals. It most definitely was a confidence matter – the budget bill. On second reading the vote was tied so Speaker Milliken voted in favour of second reading, as that sent the bill to committee for further discussion. He stated that he was voting in favour of second reading to allow the debate to continue.
The validated results for Terrebonne, which initially was reported as the Liberal candidate defeating the BQ by 35 votes, has flipped the results to the BQ winning by 44 votes. This is still within the mandatory recount margin. So the Liberals are back down to 168 seats.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/elections-canada-terrebonne-riding-flips-validation-liberals-bloc-1.7524107
Alberta MP resigns seat so Poilievre can stand for election in Alberta.
Carney says be-election will be called as soon as possible.
Scheer is the Leader of the Opposition in the meantime.