In 2011, Stephen Harper's Conservatives won a majority of seats (166 of 308, or 53.96%) in the House of Commons (HoC) in spite of the fact that his party received only 39.62% of the votes cast across Canada.  Based on the number of Canadians who actually voted for the Conservatives, an unbiased observer would expect the Conservatives to have won a minority government with roughly 122 (40% of 308) seats.  The same thing happened in 2015 when Justin Trudeau's Liberals with an even lower portion of the popular vote (39.47%) won 184 seats (54.44%) - based on the vote they should have had 133 seats. Not only did these parties obtain a false majority, but the opposition parties received far fewer seats than warranted. In 2011 and 2015 the Green party received 3.91% and 3.45% of the popular vote, which on a proportional basis rated 12 seats both times. If the 2011 election had resulted in a 122 seat minority for the Conservatives and 12 Green MPs, what's the likelihood that the federal government would have treated the climate change issue the way they in fact did? And if the 2015 Trudeau minority of 133 seats, also with 12 Green MPS, how likely would have been the approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline?

On April 5, 2017, Andrew Coyne wrote in the National Post:
"And to top it off they are not really a majority, in the sense of representing a majority of the public: the majority rule that is sacrosanct inside the chamber is disregarded utterly in the elections that fill it. And yet, presumably, that is why it is sacrosanct. It isn’t because a bill has the support of a majority of the people who happen to be standing about in that peculiarly decorated room that we view it as legitimate, but because of who they are thought to represent — because of a vague sense that they stand for a majority of the people as a whole. They don’t, but it doesn’t seem to matter. While it would be unthinkable for a government to try to pass legislation with the support of 39 per cent of MPs, it is business as usual to do so with the support of MPs representing 39 per cent of the people. And the more conscious we become of this contradiction, the more absurd the whole thing appears.
So we arrive at our present, even more absurd, pass: a government elected with just 39 per cent of the vote, using its “majority” to push through rule changes that would reduce what little remains of the House’s capacity to check its excesses, over the united opposition of the parties representing the other 61 per cent of the public. And the reason this has aroused so little popular fury is that people long ago ceased to look at the House of Commons as an effective check on arbitrary rule, or at MPs as anything but placeholders. So much so that the prime minister’s principal adviser could publicly reject a suggestion that party leaders be elected by members of their respective parliamentary caucuses, without a hint of awareness, on the grounds that this would leave the choice to a bunch of “people in Ottawa.”
Instead the checks on federal power have increasingly come from elsewhere — for example, the Senate. The ostensibly more independent Senate (independent from the next government, at least, if not the present) is already attracting more attention: lobbying of Senators, the National Post reports, increased threefold last year. The outrageousness of allowing a chamber full of unelected appointees to overrule the elected House of Commons is admittedly somewhat attenuated when MPs themselves are viewed as one step from appointees: the Senate may be less legitimate than the Commons, but it is arguably more effective, or about to become so.
The responsibility of the government to the Commons is by now a formality at best.
Still, the Senate has traditionally been seen as lacking the democratic credentials to effectively represent minority or oppositional views, especially those of the less populous regions. So much of the task of checking federal power has devolved to the provinces. But this is not how the country was designed to function. The federal and provincial governments were each made largely sovereign in their own sphere, and while there was some provision for the federal government to override the provinces, it was never envisioned the provinces would sit in judgment of the feds, still less set themselves up as some sort of parallel government, a la the ludicrous Council of the Federation.
And beyond the provinces stretch the vast archipelago of aboriginal bands, NGOs and activist groups, sometimes grandly named “civil society,” and the doctrine of “social licence” that has attached itself to it — the common-sense observation that politicians should keep one eye on popular opinion, elevated into a blanket permit for street-level obstructionism, within the law or without. The result: a popular prime minister can declare, following regulatory approval of a proposed twinning of an existing oil pipeline through British Columbia, his whole-hearted support for the project, yet the odds of it actually being built are, what, 5 to 1? 10?
This is the paradox of Canadian politics. The lack of legitimate checks on federal authority has rendered it not more effective, but less. The more powerful the Prime Minister has become within the precincts of Parliament Hill, the less power he has off it."