Legal resident

Residency is the act of establishing or maintaining a residence in a given place. Residency is a concept which heavily affects the legal rights and responsibilities that are available to a person, including eligibility to vote, eligibility to stand for political office, eligibility to access government services, responsibility to pay taxes, and on and so forth.

It is important in terms of politics, as in many jurisdictions candidates must maintain residency within the district in which they intend to run. Requirements vary by jurisdiction, and sometimes by the political office for which a person runs. The cutoff may be as little as a month or as much as several years. Once elected, the office-holder must remain resident in the appropriate district, or may usually be forced to resign.

To run as a candidate for election to the House of Commons of Canada, a candidate must have established residency in Canada — however, a person does not need to have established residency in the specific district where they are running. In most elections, in fact, virtually all of the major political parties run at least a few paper candidates in districts where they do not have a strong organization or a viable local candidate; a paper candidate may be from almost anywhere in the country.

As well, when a political party with representation in the House of Commons selects a new leader who is not a sitting Member of Parliament, it is common for a member of that party's caucus to resign his or her seat so that the leader can run in the resulting by-election. The leader may, at their own discretion, continue to represent that district for the duration of their career in politics, or may run in a district closer to their home in the next election. As of 2012, for instance, continued to represent the same district in British Columbia to which he was elected in 2000 when he first entered the House of Commons as leader of the Canadian Alliance, even though he was a resident of Alberta at the time of his initial election. Conversely, Joe Clark was elected in a by-election in Nova Scotia on the very same date as Day, following his reelection to his second stint as leader of the Progressive Conservatives, but held that seat only until the 2000 election and then stood in the Alberta riding of Calgary Centre.

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