reserve powers

What the Governor General Actually Does — and the One Time One Said No.

The Governor General is the federal representative of Canada's head of state (the King), appointed by the King on the Prime Minister's advice, conventionally for about five years. The office's constitutional functions include summoning, proroguing, and dissolving Parliament; granting royal assent to bills (the final step of every federal law); appointing the Prime Minister and, on the PM's advice, ministers, senators, and superior-court judges; signing orders-in-council; and serving as commander-in-chief. By constitutional convention, almost all of this is exercised on the advice of the Prime Minister who commands the confidence of the House of Commons — the GG's personal discretion is confined to the reserve powers, used in genuinely exceptional circumstances. The only federal exercise of a reserve power against a Prime Minister's advice remains the 1926 King-Byng affair, when Governor General Lord Byng refused Prime Minister Mackenzie King's request for dissolution months after an election, invited Arthur Meighen to govern instead, and watched Meighen's government fall within days — producing an election King won on the issue of the refusal itself. The episode is simultaneously the proof the reserve powers exist and the cautionary tale that keeps them sheathed: every Governor General since has granted every prime ministerial request, including the politically explosive 2008 prorogation.