King-Byng Affair

The King–Byng Affair (sometimes referred to as the King–Byng Thing, the King–Byng Wing Ding, or the Constitutional Crisis (1926)) was a Canadian constitutional crisis that occurred in 1926, when the Governor General of Canada, the Lord Byng of Vimy, refused a request by his prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to dissolve parliament and call a general election.

The crisis came to redefine the role of governor general, not only in Canada but throughout the Dominions, becoming a major impetus in negotiations at Imperial Conferences held in the late 1920s that led to the adoption of the Statute of Westminster 1931. According to constitutional convention in the British Empire, the governor general once represented both the sovereign in his imperial council and in his Canadian council, but the convention had evolved with Byng's predecessors, the Canadian government, and the Canadian people, into a tradition of non-interference in Canadian political affairs on the part of the British government. After 1931, the governor general remained an important figure in Canadian governance as a constitutional watchdog, but it is one that has shed its previous imperial duties.

In September 1925, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada, advised the Governor General, the Lord Byng of Vimy, to dissolve parliament and drop the writ for a general election, to which Lord Byng agreed. In the subsequent election, held on 29 October, Arthur Meighen's Conservative Party won 116 seats in the House of Commons to 101 for King's Liberals. Counting on the support of the Progressive Party, with its 28 seats, to overcome the Conservative plurality, King (who had lost his seat in the election) did not resign and remained in office as head of a minority government. Strictly speaking, this was not a coalition government, as the Progressives were not given any Cabinet seats and were thus not a part of the government.

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