The House of Commons just capped off one of its least productive years

The House of Commons sat for just 72 days in 2025; the least that Canada has used its Parliament in more than 80 years.

The year’s tally was lower even than in 2021, when the House of Commons saw its sitting calendar obliterated by COVID-19 lockdowns. In the end, however, that year still managed 95 sitting days.

To find a lighter parliamentary calendar, the most recent record would be in 1937, when MPs sat for just 62 days, according to an online database maintained by the Parliament of Canada.

But the MPs of 1937 had a much smaller government to oversee. There were 245 of them representing 11 million people, and they were in charge of a federal budget equivalent to about $8 billion in 2025 dollars.

The 45th Parliament, by contrast, is 342 members representing 41 million people and overseeing a budget that just came in at $586 billion.

Nevertheless, across the entirety of 2025 those 342 MPs passed just seven bills.

One was the federal budget. Another was a bill to extend Canadian citizenship to foreign nationals with Canadian-born parents. Another was the One Canadian Economy Act, which extended extraordinary powers to Prime Minister Mark Carney to exempt resource projects from environmental and other reviews.

The other four were a mixture of routine supply bills and minor amendments, such as a Bloc Québécois bill forbidding the Canadian government from decreasing dairy tariffs as a condition of free trade negotiations.

The cause of the low sitting days is largely owed to the turmoil surrounding the final departure of former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Rather than resigning outright in the face of a caucus revolt, Trudeau prorogued Parliament for three months until a replacement Liberal leader could be selected.

That replacement, Mark Carney, then called an election for April 28.

As such, one third of 2025 had already passed before it was even possible to convene Parliament. And Carney actually convened Parliament much faster than is typical after a general election. MPs were in their seats by May 26, less than a month after the vote.

After the 2015 and 2021 elections, by comparison, Parliament remained prorogued for two months.

But the record-low sitting days charted in 2025 is the culmination of a gradual erosion in the amount of time MPs are expected to be in Ottawa.

Across the more normal years of 2022 and 2023, the House of Commons convened for an annual average of 122 days.

Given that the House of Commons doesn’t typically sit on weekends, this works out to about 25 weeks per year of Parliament being in session. Put another way, the entire length of a typical NHL season is roughly equivalent to the amount of time each year that Parliament Hill spends in recess.

But this is well below what used to be considered a typical schedule for a Canadian parliamentarian.

Across the latter decades of the 20th century, the House of Commons routinely logged as many as 160 sitting days per year.

Even in the election year of 1984, MPs managed 139 days. The year 1979 was bookended by two federal elections, and it managed to log 94 sitting days.

In 1964, Parliamentarians sat for an incredible 214 days — nearly three times higher than the 2025 total.

That year saw one of the only times that MPs spent more time in the House of Commons than Canadian children spent in school.

Although, a disproportionate amount of that time was spent on the Great Canadian Flag Debate, a seemingly endless parliamentary tug-of-war over the choice of a new Canadian flag.

If Canada is increasingly leaving its Parliament empty, it’s mirroring a problem that’s even more acute at the provincial level.

This year, the Ontario Legislative Assembly sat for just 51 days, thanks to a summer break that extended into October. The province’s MPPs are currently on a winter break that is scheduled to last into March.

When the B.C. Legislature opened for its first 2025 session in February, it marked the end of a 278-day drought of legislative sittings.

The phenomenon of increasingly vacant parliaments is also being mirrored in the United States, where the U.S. Congress has been hitting all-time lows of inaction.

In 2023, for instance, the U.S. Congress passed just 34 bills into law, the lowest rate of legislative productivity since the Great Depression.