Results
0/343 seats called
The Liberals have won Canada’s election. Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, has conceded. (He has also lost his seat, see map of results below.) Mark Carney's Liberals will fall just shy of winning a majority, but will still be the party of government. The party has led the polls since March, as Canadians turned away from Mr Poilievre, who is seen as too Trumpian. Mr Trump’s anti-Canada rhetoric has also helped the Liberals to consolidate support on the left, at the expense of the progressive New Democratic Party (NDP).
Read our latest coverage of the results, our explanation for how a former central banker became “Captain Canada”, our leader on the political transformation the country has undergone and an analysis of why the country has always been prone to late swings in the polls. Pre-election forecast
Probability of winning the most seats
Liberals win a majority of seats
Conservatives win a plurality
Conservatives win a majority
Under Mr Carney’s leadership the Liberal Party has enjoyed a historic surge in the polls, surpassing the Conservative Party, which had led surveys of voting intention since April 2022. This spike has been caused by President Donald Trump, whose belligerence towards the country has prompted a wave of patriotism among Canadians. Although the swing in the polls this year has been particularly pronounced, Canada has long been prone to volatile election campaigns. Based on trends from the past 24 federal elections, The Economist’s prediction model assesses the likelihood of possible outcomes on election day, and says which party has the best chance of forming a government. Nationwide opinion polls give a good sense of Canada’s political climate but nationwide vote share will not decide the election. Under the country’s first-past-the-post voting system, parties win individual constituencies (known as ridings) by getting the most votes in that constituency. For the past two elections the Conservatives—whose votes are inefficiently concentrated in the west of the country—have won more votes than the Liberals, but fewer seats. Our prediction model considers the possible election dynamics in each riding and province to estimate the number of seats each party is likely to win.
Polling, voting intention, %
Partisanship is lower in Canada than in some other Western democracies. Many voters switch between parties based on their perceived competence, leading to substantial swings in polls—as evidenced by the Liberals’ remarkable recent surge. Before it, the Conservatives—Canada’s main centre-right party, led by Pierre Poilievre—held a commanding 24-percentage-point lead in opinion polls. Mr Poilievre convinced voters that under Justin Trudeau, then prime minister, the Liberals had let inflation and immigration rise too much. Mr Trudeau’s resignation undermined this line of attack, while its parallels with Mr Trump’s rhetoric made it seem tone deaf.
The left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP), historically Canada’s third force, had worked with the Liberal Party to pass legislation before withdrawing its support for the government last year. Now, it has ended up with just seven seats, down from 24 it held before the election.
The candidates
Mark Carney
Liberal Party
Mark Carney, a former governor of central banks in Britain and Canada, is the first Canadian prime minister never to have held elected office. Many Liberals see this as a boon: Mr Carney is not tainted by association with the government of Justin Trudeau. During the leadership campaign Mr Carney repudiated some of Mr Trudeau’s economic policies—blaming profligate spending for Canada’s vulnerability to American tariffs. He pitched himself as the best-placed candidate to negotiate with Donald Trump and deal with Canada’s perilous economic situation. This message—and Mr Carney’s impressive résumé—has resonated with many voters.
Pierre Poilievre
Conservative Party
Pierre Poilievre has led Canada’s main centre-right opposition party since 2022. Until recently he seemed to be on course for a landslide victory, having convinced voters that Mr Trudeau’s response to inflation and immigration was inadequate. The lifelong political activist has walked a fine line: adopting “common-sense” populist talking points while avoiding the type of right-wing immigrant-bashing that might spook moderate voters. Mr Trump’s election makes this balancing act harder to maintain. Mr Poilievre’s “Canada First” slogan may be the wrong one for the current mood.
Jagmeet Singh
New Democratic Party (NDP)
Vying for the support of progressive voters is the left-wing NDP, led by Jagmeet Singh. In exchange for backing the Liberals in confidence votes, Mr Singh extracted some policy concessions in the latest parliamentary session, expanding workers’ rights and access to health care. However Mr Singh withdrew from the agreement in September, saying the Liberals were “too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests”. The Liberals' surge in popularity could wipe out the NDP. Even Mr Singh may lose his previously safe seat.
Yves-François Blanchet
Bloc Québécois (BQ)
Quebec is home to the majority of Canada’s French-speaking population. Polls suggest the contest there is a three-way tussle among the Liberals, the Conservatives and the regionalist Bloc Québécois. The Bloc’s policy preferences at the federal level are broadly centre-left, and the party has supported Liberal legislation in the past. Yves-François Blanchet has led the Bloc since 2019.
Methodology
Our prediction model relies on the principle of uniform national swing, the idea that support for parties rises and falls across all ridings by the same magnitude. Although the federal election will be decided in each of Canada’s 343 individual ridings, there are few polls and scant other data on individual candidates that can help us predict results at a local level. Meanwhile, plentiful nationwide polls give a good indication of the political mood overall. Based on 24 elections, from 1949 to 2021, our model uses those opinion polls to estimate how individual ridings will swing.
The most important part of our model is the nationwide average of public opinion polls, which becomes more predictive as the election approaches. The model also considers the partisan tilt of each polling firm. Using our dataset of historic polls, we compare how the averages tend to move over time, as well as the likely difference between firms’ final polls and the results on election day. We find that polls have a tendency to move back towards the previous election result, as the parliamentary term progresses. Each time we run our statistical model, we produce 10,001 estimates of plausible election results nationwide. The closer we get to election day, the smaller the range of plausible outcomes becomes.
From these nationwide forecasts, we estimate the likely range of outcomes in each of Canada’s ten provinces, incorporating province-level polls where they are available. Some, such as Canada’s three prairie provinces–Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta–tend to move together. Others, such as Quebec, go their own way. For each of our 10,001 simulations, the sum of predicted votes across the provinces must add up to match our nationwide estimate.
Finally, we predict the vote share for each party in each riding by considering how they tend to swing from election to election. For each of our simulated scenarios, the ridings move in accordance with their province. Local dynamics, which we cannot account for, introduce substantial uncertainty. Using past elections as our guide, we simulate this uncertainty within and across ridings, to produce our final estimate of the election result.
Sources: National polls; CBC News; Elections Canada; Open Government Canada; The Economist