For most of its history, the House had no written rule identifying days during a
session when it would not meet. If the House wished to adjourn for a period of time
during a session, it was necessary to adopt a special adjournment motion, even for
a statutory holiday.
Until 1940, sessions tended to be short, beginning in January or February and ending
in May or June of the same calendar year. During the years of the Second World War,
the burden of government business grew and session length increased; a pattern of
long and irregularly timed sessions established itself.
In 1964, the House adopted a Standing Order specifying certain days (mainly statutory
holidays) during a session when the House would not sit. Despite this, sessions
continued to be long and adjournments unpredictably timed.
The notion of scheduled adjournments again came to the fore in the early 1980s when
the motion to adjourn for the summer became the occasion for extended and rancorous
debate. In late 1982, the House adopted a series of measures intended to better
organize the time of the House and of Members who, along with responsibilities in
the House, were occupied with work in committees and in their constituencies. Chief
among these measures was the parliamentary calendar, providing for the first time
a fixed schedule of sittings and adjournments for the House and adding some degree
of predictability to the scheduling of sitting and non-sitting periods.
The calendar adopted in 1982 divided the year (assuming the House to be in session
for the whole year) into three sitting periods separated by adjournments at Christmas,
Easter and the summer months. Since its implementation, the calendar has undergone
some modification. The Christmas and summer adjournments were extended slightly
in 1991 and, within the three sitting periods, additional brief adjournments were
added in 1983 and 1991. These were for the most part clustered around existing statutory
holidays observed by the House, with the result that each of the three main sitting
periods was further broken down into two or three shorter sitting periods.
In the fall of 2001, the House again changed the Standing Order for determining
the calendar so as to empower the Speaker, after consultation with the House leaders,
to schedule the adjournment periods between the last Monday in January and the Monday
following Easter Monday. This was done so that, over the course of a Parliament,
adjournment periods could coincide with school breaks in different parts of the
country and thus allow Members with younger children to spend this time with their
families.