Fifty-One Days: How Little Ontario's Legislature Actually Sits

I keep hearing politicians talk about how hard they work. And then I look at the calendar.

Ontario’s legislature sat for 51 days in 2025. That’s it. Fifty-one days out of 365, and somehow the government House leader Steve Clark stood up and called it a productive year. I’d take that claim with more than some salt, because when you look at what actually happened during those 51 days, the picture gets worse not better.

The Ford government split those 51 days into a six-week spring session after the February election, then vanished for 19 weeks over summer, came back for a seven-week fall sprint, and broke again for 14 weeks over winter. If you’re keeping score that’s roughly 33 weeks of break and 13 weeks of actual sitting. The math isn’t hard, it just doesn’t look great.

What “sitting” actually means

Here’s the thing most people don’t realize about Queen’s Park. When the legislature is not in session ministers and the premier can pick and choose their public appearances. Opposition critics don’t get their daily slot to ask questions. No debates happen on record. Committee hearings which are supposed to let the public weigh in on bills just stop.

So when someone says “we only sat 51 days,” what they’re really saying is the government faced 51 days of formal scrutiny out of an entire year. That’s less people than you’d think would be comfortable with that ratio. (I’m not one of them.)

Question Period is the one time the premier has to stand there and take questions he didn’t write himself. Doug Ford, from what opposition MPPs have pointed out, barely showed up even during those 51 days. Liberal MPP Adil Shamji called the extended break “simply outrageous,” and honestly I’m not sure that’s strong enough language for a premier who ducked question period in a year where tariffs were hammering the auto sector and hospitals were running billion-dollar deficits.

The historical comparison

Ontario used to do better. Not spectacularly, but better.

Between 1987 and 2009 the legislature averaged about 84.7 sitting days per year. From 2010 onward that crept up slightly to 85.67 days. In 2018 MPPs actually clocked 106 days at their desks, which the government at the time bragged was part of a record legislative output.

That 51-day number isn’t just low for Ontario. It’s low for Canada, period. New Brunswick had the dubious honour of the fewest provincial sitting days in 2018 with 32 days. British Columbia managed 69. The federal House of Commons, which has its own problems with shrinking calendars, still managed 72 days in 2025 and that was the lowest since 1937.

My read on this is pretty simple. Ontario isn’t some tiny province with a part-time legislature. It’s the biggest province in the country, it spends over $200 billion a year, and it sat for fewer days than the federal parliament did during what everyone agreed was a historically unproductive year in Ottawa.

The time allocation problem

But it’s not just how few days they sat. It’s what happened during them.

In the final weeks of the 2025 fall session the PCs used time allocation to ram through 12 bills. For those unfamiliar, time allocation is a procedural move where the government caps how long a bill can be debated. Most of those 12 bills bypassed committee hearings entirely, had debate cut short, and skipped the traditional process where the public gets to have their say.

Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner put it bluntly: “They have a short sitting and they fast-track all their bills and they don’t give people an opportunity to give input on legislation.” I’d argue that understates it. The combination of a short session and heavy time allocation means the government is effectively controlling both how much time the legislature exists and what it does with that time.

Not a great look for accountability.

And then there’s the hypocrisy angle which the NDP was happy to surface. NDP MPP John Vanthof pulled up quotes from Steve Clark himself, back in November 2017, when Clark was the opposition House leader criticizing the Liberal government for using time allocation. Doing exactly the same thing he now defends. That’s politics, I suppose, but it doesn’t make the argument any less valid just because both sides have done it.

The government’s defence

Clark’s argument, for what it’s worth, goes like this: MPPs need to go back to their ridings, hear from constituents, do the work of implementing legislation. “I think it’s acceptable,” he said, “when you look at the tremendous amount of legislation that we were able to drive forward.”

Here’s where I’ll give him some credit. There is a real argument that sitting days alone don’t measure productivity. You can sit for 150 days and pass nothing meaningful. You can sit for 50 and get a lot done.

But that argument falls apart pretty fast when the way you “got a lot done” was by shutting down debate on all of it. The 23 sitting days of the spring 2025 session produced 10 pieces of legislation. The fall session fast-tracked 12 more. If you’re measuring output by bills-per-day, sure, it looks efficient. If you’re measuring it by “did anyone outside the PC caucus get to meaningfully participate,” the answer is basically no.

Where this is heading

The legislature came back on March 23 after its 14-week winter break, 102 days away from Queen’s Park. The 2026 calendar says they can sit Monday through Thursday until December 10. Whether they actually will is another question entirely.

The spring return has already been busy, at least on paper. The government is delivering its eighth budget, there are proposals to exempt the premier’s office from freedom-of-information laws (which, fair enough, is a whole separate article), and there’s talk of eliminating elected school board trustees. Plus the tariff crisis isn’t going anywhere, tens of thousands of layoffs in auto, steel, and aluminum are still rippling through the economy, and the OSAP cuts have students protesting at Queen’s Park.

Whether any of that gets the thorough debate it deserves depends entirely on whether the government decides to actually sit or to announce another extended break come June.

The Ontario Liberals pointed out on social media that they were supposed to get 99 sitting days in 2025. They got 51. The gap between what’s scheduled and what actually happens at Queen’s Park keeps getting wider, and I don’t think most people realize how few days their elected representatives are actually doing the job in the building they were elected to work in.

Fifty-one days. The local Costco is open more than that.

Sources and verification: The 51 sitting days figure for 2025 is confirmed by multiple sources including Global News and CBC News reporting from December 2025. Historical average of ~85 days comes from a Globe and Mail analysis of data going back to 1987. The 106-day figure for 2018 is from Ontario government claims reported at the time. Steve Clark, Mike Schreiner, Adil Shamji, and John Vanthof quotes are from CBC News and Global News coverage of the December 2025 adjournment. The 2026 return date of March 23 is confirmed by the official OLA parliamentary calendar. Federal sitting day count of 72 for 2025 is from Eh! News reporting. Time allocation of 12 bills is from CBC and Global News reporting. Some figures (exact 2024 sitting day totals) should be verified against OLA Hansard records.

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