GC Design SystemComponents
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Theme and topic menu
<gcds-topic-menu>

Also called: global navigation, theme-based navigation. The theme and topic menu is a navigation to the top tasks of Government of Canada websites.
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  • Figma

Theme and topic menu component preview

On this page

Coding and accessibility for theme and topic menu

Use the theme and topic menu with other components

Add the theme and topic menu directly to the header component by passing a child element with the slot="menu" attribute in the header. This will place the theme and topic menu in the header after the language toggle, signature, and search slots. Note: If applying the theme and topic menu to the front page of Canada.ca, use the home attribute to render with the correct styling.

Examples

Explore the different ways you can configure the component. Each example shows a working implementation and ready-to-copy code.

In this section

Optional attributes

These attributes allow you to customize or extend the component’s behaviour and presentation.

home

The home attribute sets the homepage styling. 
<gcds-topic-menu home>
</gcds-topic-menu>
Code builder Generate an instance of the component you need by selecting its code properties.
  • Explore by choosing different code values to generate the instance you want.
  • Get the code and pull it into your environment.
  • Add any copy you need to the component (like text for a label).
Note: The code builder uses English for all code elements, which follows standard practice.
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2026-05-20