Caucus

What it means

Federal caucuses meet weekly while Parliament is sitting. Those meetings are where a party settles its position on upcoming business, distributes committee seats and critic roles, and hears from its own members about what is landing badly in their ridings. They are closed, and no record is published.

Caucus is also used more loosely as a label for party affiliation in legislative analysis — "the Bloc caucus voted against" simply means the Bloc Québécois members did. That second sense is how the word is generally used on this site.

Recognized party status in the House of Commons carries procedural entitlements — a share of questions in Question Period, committee seats, research funding, and speaking slots. Members who sit as independents, or whose party falls below the recognition threshold, have far fewer of these levers regardless of how many votes their party received.

Membership can change between elections. A member may be expelled from caucus, resign from it, cross the floor to another party, or sit as an independent and later be readmitted. This is why a party label is a property of a moment rather than a fixed attribute, and why historical vote analysis has to use the affiliation the member held on the day of the division.

A caucus is not the same thing as a party. A party is a registered organisation with members, riding associations, a leader chosen by its membership, and finances regulated under elections law. A caucus is only the party's sitting legislators, and a party can have members, candidates and a national organisation while holding no seats and therefore having no caucus at all. The two can also disagree — the caucus answers to the chamber's business and to constituents, the party organisation to its membership.