During the last decade, in Québec and elsewhere in Canada, the media have competed against one another to be the first to declare, on elections night, who would form the next government. Irrespective of whether they predicted that any political party would be able to obtain a majority of seats, they made their announcements within a few hours of the closing of the polls. In fact, their announcements systematically preceded any public statement by the leaders of the political parties involved. Indeed, media developed the unfortunate habit of substituting the entire set of constitutional rules and principles leading to the formation of government by a simplistic heuristic: “the political party that has won the largest number of seats has won the elections and has the right to form the next government.” Media present the issue as automatic, merely a matter of arithmetic. If this heuristic works well when a party has won a majority of seats, it is completely inadequate as a statement of the constitutional law and conventions related to the formation of government in our parliamentary system. This heuristic is most problematic when no party has won a majority of seats. In fact, as parliamentary practices demonstrate, knowledge of the number of seats that a party has won is not, in itself, sufficient to determine who will form the next government. Indeed, the fundamental principles of government formation are that (a) the incumbent Prime Minister (or Premier) has the right to be the first to seek the confidence of the newly elected legislative assembly, and (b) the Governor General (or Lieutenant Governor) has the duty to appoint the leader of the political party (or parties) most susceptible of commanding the confidence of the elected assembly to the position of Prime Minister (or Premier). Popular misunderstandings of the rules and principles leading to the formation of government may lead to a crisis of confidence in our democratic institutions. This is even more so if political actors adequately follow the proper constitutional rules, but act contrary to the erroneously stated rules by the media. This article thus aims at fleshing out the Canadian constitutional rules and principles applicable to government formation and at illustrating how constitutional considerations come into play in the variety of possible scenarios. A quick reference tool is appended to the text to facilitate consultations of the applicable rules and principles to those different fact situations.