Global Information1926 Canadian federal election information
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2010) |
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
245 seats in the House of Commons 123 seats needed for a majority | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Turnout | 67.7%[1] ( 1.3pp) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 The Canadian parliament after the 1926 election | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The 1926 Canadian federal election was held on September 14, 1926, to elect members of the House of Commons of Canada of the 16th Parliament of Canada.[3] The election was called after an event known as the King–Byng affair.
In the 1925 federal election, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's Liberal Party of Canada had won fewer seats in the House of Commons of Canada than the Conservatives of Arthur Meighen. King, however, was determined to continue to govern with the support of the Progressive Party. The combined Liberal and Progressive caucuses gave Mackenzie King a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, and the ability to form a minority government. The agreement collapsed, however, after a scandal, and King approached the governor-general of Canada, Baron Byng of Vimy, to seek dissolution of the Parliament. Byng refused on the basis that the Conservatives had won the most seats in the prior election and so he called upon Meighen to form a government.
Prime Minister Meighen's government was soon defeated in a vote of non-confidence, and Byng agreed to Meighen's request to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. King effectively campaigned against Byng, instead of against Meighen, in the election and won the most seats in the House of Commons although his party won a smaller proportion of the popular vote than the Conservatives. However, this was largely because the Liberals did not run candidates in all ridings and had an informal electoral pact with the Progressives and Liberal-Progressives. In particular, the election results in Manitoba had Meighen's party capture almost 40 percent of the vote, twice the vote share of any other party, but no seats. Thus, King's Liberals were able to govern with the support of Liberal-Progressive Members of Parliament.
The Progressive Party's Albertan legislators left the party and instead sought re-election under the United Farmers of Alberta banner. At the time, the UFA formed the government in Alberta. They won eleven seats in Alberta, an increase of nine from the previous year and the same number the Progressives won elsewhere. The Progressives' seat count was halved compared to 1925, although when viewed in its totality the election result can also be regarded as a combined net decrease of two seats for the Progressives and UFA.
Byng returned to Britain at the end of the year and was raised to the rank of viscount as an expression of confidence in him. After his party's defeat and the loss of his own seat, Meighen resigned as Conservative leader.
- ^ "Voter Turnout at Federal Elections and Referendums". Elections Canada. Retrieved March 10, 2019.
- ^ The United Farmers of Alberta, which at the time formed the government in that province, did not have a separate party leader at the federal level. At the time of this election, party leader John E. Brownlee was the Premier of Alberta and the MLA for Ponoka in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta.
- ^ Sharp, Walter R. (1927). "The Canadian Election of 1926". American Political Science Review. 21 (1): 101–113. doi:10.2307/1945541. ISSN 0003-0554.