What is meant by the term 'responsible government'?

Discover Canada defines responsible government in two complementary places. In its history chapter, the guide writes: This is the system that we have today: if the government loses a confidence vote in the assembly it must resign. Then in its government chapter, the guide adds the matching modern description: Cabinet ministers are responsible to the elected representatives, which means they must retain the "confidence of the House" and have to resign if they are defeated in a non-confidence vote. Together those two sentences are responsible government.

So the right answer to the test question is the option that captures both halves: a government that must answer to the elected representatives, and that must resign if it loses a confidence vote. Discover Canada uses the word "responsible" in this very sense — Cabinet ministers are responsible to Parliament, not to themselves and not only to the Crown.

The historical setting helps anchor the answer. Discover Canada says "the first British North American colony to attain full responsible government was Nova Scotia in 1847–48," and that "in 1848–49 the governor of United Canada, Lord Elgin, with encouragement from London, introduced responsible government." The first leader of a responsible government in the Canadas was Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, described by the guide as a "champion of democracy and French language rights." Fellow reformers Robert Baldwin in the Canadas and Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia were the other major figures pushing for the same system.

The principle is structural. Cabinet draws its authority from holding the confidence of the elected legislature; the moment that confidence is gone, the government must give way. Discover Canada calls this "the system that we have today" — the same one that operates in the federal Parliament and in every Canadian provincial legislature.

The question is asking for the substance of one of Discover Canada's most-emphasised institutional concepts. The right answer fuses two of the guide's exact phrases: ministers being "responsible to the elected representatives" and the rule that the government must "resign if they are defeated in a non-confidence vote."

Other answer choices each describe systems Discover Canada explicitly contrasts with responsible government. A government independent of parliament would not be answerable to elected representatives at all. A military government has no place in Discover Canada's description. And a government accountable only to the monarch is what existed under earlier colonial governance, before the reforms of 1847–49 — it is precisely what responsible government replaced.