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Canadian Election Guide [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-27

With the Canadian election looming and with Americans (along with Brits and Australians) taking a newfound interest in Canadian politics (Hi BTW, welcome aboard) it's time for a primer on who the parties are and how they break down.

Polling in Canada is usually very accurate and has been very stable for the past two months in showing a lead for the Liberals with a comfortable lead of several points. Keeping in mind in the last two elections the Liberals under Justin Trudeau managed to win minority governments in spite of actually getting slightly fewer votes than the Conservatives by about a percentage point. This is due to two factors that are different in the Canadian system from the American; strategic voting and vote efficiency. Strategic voting is simply where at least some Liberal, NDP and Green voters are willing to switch votes to block the Tories which tends to benefit the Liberals while vote efficiency refers to the tendency of the Tories to rack up big majorities in a number of ridings in Western provinces and some other rural ridings while the Liberals win more narrow victories in the more numerous suburban ridings. Oddly, vote efficiency has actually tended to work against the Liberals in Provincial elections including over the past decade in Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The individual parties have pretty clear regional bases of support.

THE CONSERVATIVES;

The Tories are the easiest to break down. They are a typical conservative party which has moved to the right in the past decade. The two previous unsuccessful leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O'Toole generally adopted a more moderate stance and persona than the last Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper (PM from 2006-2015) who was known for being highly partisan. However after they both lost to Justin Trudeau the resentful conservative base pushed for a turn to the right under current leader Pierre Poilievre (AKA PP which I'm going to stick with herein because it's easier to spell and type) who was known for being aggressively partisan and embracing Trumpist populism including supporting the infamous anti-vax Trucker Convoy that occupied Ottawa for two months. He was even seen bringing them donuts and meeting their leaders for lunch. Taking over in 2022 he began a campaign vowing to end the carbon tax which he claimed would end inflation, and lower the cost of food and housing. He was vague on how exactly that would work but for the past two years his relentless repeating the slogan "Axe The Tax" at literally any opportunity was wildly successful and the Tories built up a double digit lead over Justin Trudeau's Liberals who had clearly worn out their welcome. But then Trump got reelected and his outrageous talk about using a trade war to destroy Canada's economy and possibly force an annexation made any flirtation with populism seem unpatriotic if not downright treasonous. Then Trudeau finally stepped down in the face of a caucus revolt and was replaced by Mark Carney, a former central banker who promised to be a calm technocratic steady hand to deal with Trump. He also scrapped the carbon tax on his first day in office thus robbing PP of his signature issue and he he has never been able to come up with a new slogan (not through lack of trying, he's fired off a new one every week to general indifference) nor change his partisan attack dog persona to the more reassuring technocratic steady hand Carney provides. PP by comparison while often compared to Trump could best be compared to the likes of JD Vance, Ted Cruz or Ron Desantis; looking like evil Milhouse Van Houten, he is smug, petty, hyper partisan, awkward, hostile towards the press and genuinely unlikable. He is unpopular with women and loathed by the left. Since Carney took over as leader in March the Tories lead in the polls had shrunk for a high of twenty points to a Liberal lead of several points which has not changed over the course of the election. Increasingly desperate PP has retreated to his right wing populist roots promising to solve the economy and trade through building pipelines and vowing to defund the CBC and turn it's studios into affordable housing and "end wokeness in universities" neither of which are actually polling well (even among Tory voters), and attacking the Liberals with his latest slogan about the "Lost Liberal Decade". One of the problems he has is that much of his base which are openly Trumpist which he himself happily encouraged which he can not now credibly backtrack from. It hasn't worked; the polls have remained static.

As further evidence of PP's charm he has been carrying on public intra-party feuds with the Tory Premiers of Ontario (Doug Ford) and Nova Scotia (Tim Houston) both of whom recently won easy elections. During the past year as PP was riding high in the polls he and his staff had treated most of the Premiers with high handed arrogance and during the election both have taken their revenge in not only refusing to endorse PP but with Ford having a public lunch with Carney who he praised while claiming both he and his entire caucus were “too busy” to campaign with PP. Ford’s staff have also leaked reports of infighting and incompetence in the Tory campaign. Meanwhile Houston retweeted a Carney campaign ad and was then “too busy” to attend a PP campaign event that was literally happening in his own riding. PEI’s Tory Premier has also refused to endorse PP. Meanwhile Carney has made it a point to meet with all the Premiers and gotten a friendly response from the NDP Premiers of BC and Manitoba with the only Premier attacking Carney being Alberta’s hard right Danielle Smith.

As for the party's demographic and regional base they are again pretty easy to categorize. Like other conservative parties in the Anglosphere the Tories are popular with rural voters, social and religious conservatives, law and order types, and various conspiracy theorists and cranks. PP is also more popular with men but underwater with women and he actually is behind in every age group to some degree aside from millennium men. The Tory Party is actually more popular than their leader and the current polling has been remarkably consistent for the last three elections. The Tories' regional base is in the western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan which are both oil producers thus explaining the Tories obsession with pipelines and carbon taxes which their economic plans always rely on heavily. The two provinces have forty eight seats which the Tories currently hold all but four with the Liberals and NDP each holding two in urban Alberta. This is a fairly typical result for them and is likely to remain so although there is some polling to suggest the Liberals could pick a couple more seats in Edmonton and Calgary. The Tories usually win the numerous rural ridings here with massive North Korean type margins just for showing up which while no doubt fun for those candidates does not gain the party any additional seats and tends to distort the party's vote percentage nationwide thus their fabled "vote inefficiency". Besides those two provinces the party is also popular in rural farm ridings in central and eastern Ontario, south and central Manitoba, the British Columbia interior and southern New Brunswick. That's worth another fifty plus ridings that they can be expected to win easily. A specific case is in Quebec where they are favoured to win another ten or so ridings in Quebec City and some rural areas. But then there is urban and suburban Canada.

One difference most Americans (and many Canadians) don't fully grasp between the countries is that while Canada is still largely seen as the "Great White North", a land of ice and snow, forests and mountains, lakes and streams, which is geographically true, demographically it is long obsolete. Canada is in fact a more urbanized and suburbanized population than America and since the Tories have little support in most cities outside from their Alberta and Saskatchewan regional base (plus Quebec City) elections are won and lost in the suburban areas around the largest cities of Toronto and southern Ontario, Ottawa and the capital region, Vancouver and the lower BC mainland, Montreal and Winnipeg. In these areas the Trudeau Liberals have won the vast majority of seats in the last three elections with the Tories having only a handful including PP's own seat in an Ottawa suburb. There are more of these seats than all of Alberta and Saskatchewan combined and simply stated if the Tories do not break through the Liberals suburban fortress they can not win an election. It really is as simple as that. Polls have not shown PP has gotten much love there. And he may even be in danger in his own seat. Nationwide they won 99 seats in 2015, 121 seats in 2019 and 119 seats in the 2021 election. Current polls suggest a similar seat range.

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THE LIBERALS;

The Liberal Party of Canada is hands down the most successful center-left national political party in the English speaking world. No other comparable national party has won more elections or held power for as many years in the modern era and their ability to buck international political trends and survive has long been a subject of bemused debate among political Canadian scientists and more than a little annoyance from their foes. Much of this is a subject for another time but it's notable that the Liberals maintain support with two demographic groups that have long deserted the American Democrats or the Labour parties of Britain and Australia.

To start with, like the Democrats and Labour the Liberals are the party of urban Canada. They win with most immigrants, the educated and professional class, lawyers, public sector unions, women and specific to Canada; French speakers outside Quebec (inside Quebec it's more complicated and divided). This gives them a huge advantage in the urban ridings in the largest cities like Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, Winnipeg and smaller cities like London, Windsor, Hamilton, Kingston, Halifax-Sydney-Dartmouth, and the lower BC mainland. They have even maintained beachheads in the cities of Edmonton and Calgary in the Tory heartland of Alberta. Depending on how you consider the ridings there are over a hundred such ridings which is almost enough to form a minority government on their own assuming the liberals sweep them which they have essentially did in the last three elections under Justin Trudeau and they also did in the 1990's under Jean Chretien and the 1970's under Pierre Trudeau. The ex-urban ridings outside the cities are more of a battle ground being more evenly divided between the Liberals and Tories and can decide a close election but in the past three elections the Liberals have won the majorities here as well.

So far this sounds like the Democratic and Labour base but where the Liberals differ is in being one of the few modern center-left parties that maintain solid support in at least some rural areas. Specifically in the Atlantic Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and P.E.I. These provinces are notably different from the party's urban base being largely (but not entirely) rural and small town, white, less affluent and older. Exactly the sort of voters who have drifted away from the Democrats and Labour, yet the Liberals remain the dominant party here. Even in the disastrous 2011 election when the Liberal vote collapsed across the country and they dropped to third place for the only time in history the Maritimes remained largely loyal. Part of this is due to ancestral party loyalties in a region where tradition still matters especially in the French Acadian ridings in New Brunswick which are among the most loyal Liberals anywhere. However much is also down to the utter failure of the modern Conservative Party to relate to the Maritimes. The historical Tories did well here, especially in Anglo southern New Brunswick and Nova Scotia but as the latter day Tory party from the 1990's onward became an outwardly Alberta and Saskachewn based petro party they have had little attraction to the Maritimes where much of the economy is seasonal and there are plenty of retirees. The Liberals are seen as supporters of unemployment insurance and pensioners where Alberta Tories can not hide their resentment of a region they openly consider "moochers". Surprisingly this does not go down well. There are only thirty-two seats here, half of the city of Toronto or Montreal, not enough to form a government, but enough to provide a nice cushion assuming the Liberals win a near sweep as they have in the past.

The other Liberal friendly rural region is the Far North; the three Territories plus Labrador and another eight or so ridings in northern Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and B.C. These ridings are not only rural but fully wilderness with no cities at all aside from a couple mid size cities on the edge of northern Ontario, rather like Alaska or northern Minnesota. The Tories are rarely even competitive here with races being between the Liberals and NDP or the BQ in the Quebec riding. Seasonal employment is also a factor here along with a concern for climate change and the environment while the Tories are climate deniers but also Native people make up sizable minorities if not majorities. The Liberals are hardly free from criticism on native issues but such criticism has more credibility coming from the NDP rather than the hostile Tories especially PP who is on record lecturing Natives on their lack of a "proper work ethic". These ridings usually split between the Liberals and NDP although vote splitting in a few of them can benefit the Tories.

The other demographic the Liberals have maintained that the Democrats have largely lost are seniors with polls showing consistent double digit leads. Again part of this is a belief that the Liberals are supportive of pensions where the Tories are the party of austerity and there was no doubt a nostalgia for the Trudeau name which is still a revered figure among Liberals and now a preference for Carney's calm technocrat persona compared to PP's snide asshole persona. But there's also the Trump factor. Older Canadians are proudly nationalistic and polls have shown they are especially furious at Trump's annexation bloviating. The Liberals won 184 seats in their 2015 majority win, 157 seats in 2019 and 160 in 2021 with polls ranging from another minority or majority government.

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THE NDP;

The NDP are more or less Canada's version of Labour at least in it's 1930's roots and leader Jagmeet Singh has always been popular with the American online left who see him and the party as Canada's answer to Bernie Sanders but in practice he and the party's leadership are more centrist and closer to Keir Starmer and have been for decades. While the NDP was originally founded in Saskatchewan and Manitoba they have long since lost those ridings to the Tories and now don't really have a particular regional base they can rely on with their base instead being a couple dozen urban ridings in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Windsor and Hamilton plus a few ridings on Vancouver Island and the far north and couple others and that's about it really. They have never come close to winning power federally (although they have held power in half of the provinces and some of the largest cities) aside from the election of 2011 when they shocked everybody, including themselves, by coming in second place which turned out to be a fluke. They've lost ground in every election since.

From the start of the election they saw a drop in the polls down to single digits as many of their softer supporters, repulsed by both Trump and PP fled to the Liberals once it became clear they had a reasonable chance of winning and they haven't returned. The Liberal and NDP voters tend to agree on most if not quite all issues (as do the Greens) and polls have consistently shown that they prefer it when the parties work together. They have also shown a willingness to switch their votes back and forth as they vote strategically to block the Tories. In 2011 this worked in the NDP's favour but what strategic voting giveth it can also taketh away and that is clearly happening now. The NDP won 44 seats in 2015, in 2019 (Singh's first as leader) they dropped to 24 in 2019 and 25 in 2021 with current polls giving dire warnings of the party dropping to less than half that number with polling in the single digits and Singh likely to lose his own seat in B.C. for possibly the party's worst showing since 1993 when they won nine seats or 1958 when they won eight. The NDP is clinging to the hope that even though their vote will certainly drop considerably, many of their individual MP's are popular enough to defy national trends and hold on. This in fact happened to the party in the last Ontario election this year where they actually got several hundred thousand fewer votes than the Liberals yet still won almost twice the seats to hold on to the Official Opposition.

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THE BLOC QUEBECOIS;

The BQ is a Quebec nationalist party which is in theory committed to Quebec separation but since it's first election in 1993, when it was feared by many that they would cause chaos in the House with obstructionist tactics, they have in fact acted like a responsible opposition party if one based solely on a single region and language. They obviously do not aspire to form a government but have at times voted to support the Liberal minority governments. Ideologically they are centrist and generally support Liberal economic and environmental policies, oppose conservative culture war politics but are suspicious of non Francophone immigrants especially Muslims. They are popular in rural Quebec, some ridings in eastern Montreal and the southern suburbs and Quebec City. The politics of Quebec is complicated with the Liberals being seen as the party of staunch federalism and immigrants and the traditional foe of French nationalism limiting their appeal among Bloc voters however even here the Bloc has seen some support bleeding to the Liberals in the face of Trump's threats. That these rivals are prepared to set aside their ancient feuds says much about how much Trump has united Canadians, at least of the non Tory variety. In the last two elections the BQ showed remarkable consistency in winning exactly thirty two seats and they would be happy to do the same again. Most of their suburban seats were swing seats with narrow margins and a swing of only a couple points could mean the difference between anywhere from forty to a dozen seats.

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THE GREEN PARTY;

Less than a decade ago the Greens had reached a high water mark with three MP's and a record six and half percent of the vote as well as provincially getting another in MP Ontario, holding the balance of power provincially in BC and New Brunswick and the Official Opposition in PEI. In fact they have completely supplanted the NDP as the default party on the left in the latter two provinces. Then the 2021 election happened with new Leader Annamaie Paul which turned into a complete fiasco. Paul spent most of her time in bitter internal feuds with her own tiny caucus over criticism of Israel (Paul proclaimed herself a Zionist and proclaimed that all candidates must also be Zionists which is not party policy) which led to one Green MP defecting to the Liberals calls for her resignation and her insistence that her critics were racists, sexists and anti-Semites, all in public. In the resulting election the Greens vote dropped more than half, Paul was crushed in her own riding and they lost another MP. They did catch a break winning a riding in Kitchener, Ontario after a Liberal candidate was forced to drop out but Paul had nothing to do with that. After that debacle Paul was finally forced out to be replaced with former long time Leader Elizabeth May. But the damage from Paul's reign of error has not been repaired and most of the provincial gains have also faded away. Early in this election May made the decision not to run a full slate of candidates in order to avoid vote splitting that might benefit the Tories. This might have been a selfless move but it had the effect of getting her disinvited from the Leader's debates due to not fielding enough candidates and it also means that their nation wide vote total will inevitably drop as well. They currently hold two seats and had hopes of winning back the seat in BC they lost last time with current polling suggesting they are on track to keep just the Kitchener seat with May in danger of losing her own. Like the NDP the Greens are relying on the fact that their individual MP's are usually popular locally.

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THE PEOPLE'S PARTY;

The only other party worth a mention, and only just barely, are the People's party which is Canada's answer to the sort of far right parties like the English Reform, French Rassemblement national, the German AfD and the Austrian Freedom Party with the notable difference being that they have never come close to actually electing anybody. Formed by Maxime Bernier, a former Tory cabinet minister who ran for the leadership of the party in 2017, lost narrowly and stomped off in a huff to start his own party. As it turned out, if he had just and sulked until after the 2019 election he would almost certainly have become the next leader and might even be Prime Minister now but noooo. At any rate the People's Party generated plenty of media attention and support from the Trucker Convoy but few votes in the past two elections. The one effect they did have was to coax PP to move to cover his right flank although he probably would have done that anyway. By the time of this election Bernier has dropped from view and has been largely forgotten about. They are not going to win any seats and probably won't even be spoilers then we can all go back to ignoring them again.

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WHAT TO WATCH FOR ON ELECTION NIGHT;

Canada, like America, has multiple time zones with results in the east being known before those in the west. In the past elections were usually decided by the time they got to Winnipeg however since the 2000's they have mostly gone down to the line in BC. There are 338 seats with 170 needed for a majority. In the 2021 election the Liberals won 157 seats to 121 for the Tories, 32 for the BQ, 25 for the NDP and two for the Greens. The Atlantic provinces have 32 seats and the Liberals hold all but eight of them and a sizable lead in the polls. They can reasonably hope to win up to four of them back and if they do that will be a good start for them. Quebec has 78 seats with the Liberals holding 35 to the BQ's 32 and the Tories 10. About a dozen of the BQ seats are considered vulnerable and the ones in and around Montreal could fall to the Liberals but a few in and around Quebec City could fall to the Tories. The Liberals are looking to add around ten seats here, if they do they are in good shape. The NDP have one seat here which is considered reasonably safe with hopes of regaining another where a popular former MP Ruth Ellen Brousseau is running again. If the NDP wins these two it will be the first and possibly last good news they get that night. In vote rich Ontario the government will be decided although whether or not it's a majority may not be. There are 121 seats with the Liberals previously winning 78 (they've since two through defection or expulsion and another in a byelection), the Tories 37, the NDP five and the Greens one. Assuming the Liberals hold their seats which is likely they are looking to add another half dozen seats which is possible however in Northern ridings if the NDP's vote collapses vote splitting could allow the Tories to actually win seats here even if they lose them everywhere else which could cost the Liberals a majority. The NDP could be reduced to just a couple seats while the Greens should hold on to their one seat. There will be little suspense in the western provinces. In Manitoba's eight seats the Liberals might be able to gain two or three seats at the NDP's expense. In Saskatchewan to Tories hold all the fourteen seats with the Liberals hoping to win a seat in Regina they have won in the past and where a former provincial leader is running. Most of Alberta's thirty seven seats are solidly Tory with the Liberals and NDP each holding two seats each in the cities of Edmonton and Calgary. The Liberals have been polling their best here since Trudeau's 2015 win and are hoping to double their seat count. By this point the Liberals should probably have secured at least a minority government with BC's thirty three seats deciding if it's a majority. Otherwise the election could be decided here either way. In 2021 the Liberals won fifteen here seats with the Tories and NDP each winning thirteen and the Greens one. Polls have shown the Liberals with a notable lead while the NDP vote has cratered which if true means that both the Liberals and Tories could both end up gaining seats at their expense. The leaders of both the NDP and Green Parties are here and both are considered vulnerable.



A final note about the Northern Territories. There are three seats here with the Liberals holding two and the NDP one. Being geographically large wilderness areas, sparsely populated with many not having phones they are almost never polled. A pollster once told me that the Yukon is polled literally once a year and the other two not at all. The last Yukon poll showed a Tory lead but that was last year and is useless now. Thus any projections here are based mostly on vibes, the assumption that incumbents have an advantage and the fact that Carney himself is originally from the Northwest Territories (although he's running in Ottawa) so it’s assumed the Liberals will win at least two of these seats and the NDP the other but it's mostly guess work.

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