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List of prime ministers of Canada

Open-knowledge reference entry

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 24, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

The prime minister of Canada is the official who serves as the primary minister of the Crown, chair of the Cabinet, and thus head of government of Canada. Twenty-four people have served as prime minister. Officially, the prime minister is appointed by the governor general of Canada, but by constitutional convention, the prime minister must have the confidence of the elected House of Commons. Normally, this is the leader of the party caucus with the greatest number of seats in the house. However, in a minority parliament the leader of an opposition party may be asked to form a government if the incumbent government resigns and the governor general is persuaded that they have the confidence of the House.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “List of prime ministers of Canada” as open-knowledge reference entry. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 119-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, prime and ministers can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as open-knowledge reference entry. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow List of prime ministers of Canada primary sources, List of prime ministers of Canada archive and List research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “List of prime ministers of Canada” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.