Live Commentary
6:57am Wednesday The Liberals will hold a minority government after winning 169 of the 343 seats, three short of a majority. The Conservatives won 144 seats, the BQ 22, the NDP seven and the Greens one. National vote shares were 43.7% Liberals, 41.3% Conservatives, 6.3% BQ, 6.3% NDP 1.3% Greens and just 0.7% for the far-right People’s.
9:06pm There are still special ballots remaining to be counted, which are cast by mail by voters who will be away from their home divisions on election day. I expect these to favour the Liberals just like absent votes favour Labor in Aus. Counting will resume at 11:30pm AEST tonight. On current figures, the Liberals will be just short of a majority of seats. They’ve won or are leading in 168 (172 is needed for a majority). Poilievre lost his seat.
5:33pm NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has announced he will resign. The Liberals won Singh’s seat.
4:25pm I’ve done a write-up for The Conversation on the Canadian results, and also covered Trump’s slumping US ratings. Tory leader Pierre Poilievre is looking gone in his own seat of Carleton.
2:57pm Tory leader Pierre Poilievre is trailing the Libs by 51.6-45.1 in his own seat of Carleton with 145 of 266 booths in.
2:47pm The Tories have made a number of gains in British Columbia from the collapse of the NDP vote as it hasn’t all gone to the Libs in NDP-held seats.
1:52pm The Tories have gained Windsor West from the NDP because the Lib surge meant the anti-Tory vote in that seat was split between the Libs and NDP.
1:45pm The Liberals have won or are leading in 163 seats, the Tories in 147, the BQ in 24, the NDP in 10 and the Greens in one. Popular votes are 42.6% Libs to 41.7% Tories, 7.9% BQ and 5.4% NDP. With such a high two-party share, the smaller parties are doing well to win as many seats as they are. It looks as if the Lib vote was not as efficiently distributed as in 2021, as I predicted.
1:02pm The CBC’s results are back. The Libs lead by 44.0-40.9 on popular votes with 8% for the BQ and 4.9% NDP. Seats are 159 Libs, 143 Tories, 24 BQ, 10 NDP and one Green. On current counts, the Libs will be short of a majority.
12:40pm With some results from 319 of the 343 seats, it’s 158 Libs, 130 Tories, 23 BQ and eight NDP. If this holds, it wouldn’t quite be a majority for the Libs.
12:27pm CTV News results has the Libs leading or elected in 146 seats, the Tories in 113, the BQ in 24 and the NDP in five.
12:20pm The CBC’s results site has crashed! But they project the Liberals will form the next government, no projection yet for whether it’s minority or majority.
12:07pm The Libs are leading the seat count now by 108-79 with 16 BQ and 3 NDP. They lead the popular vote by 50.6-38.5. This is now looking like a Liberal landslide.
12:04pm The CBC has called a Lib GAIN from Tory in a Nova Scotia seat.
11:58am So far in Ontario, the most populous province with 121 seats, the Libs lead the Tories by 32-22 in seats although the Tories are leading on popular votes by 47.5-45.7. Rural booths are probably reporting first, so it’s likely there’s a pro-Tory bias in votes counted so far.
11:52am Libs leading in seats by 72-52 over Tories with 10 BQ and 1 NDP.
11:40am Libs now leading the seat count over the Tories by 37-26 on popular votes of 51.5-40.1. BQ leading in 12 seats and NDP in one.
11:29am With polls about to close in the large majority of Canada, Libs lead in seats by 22-10 and in popular votes by 52.2-40.4. Two Quebec seats were in Atlantic time and have reported results, with the BQ leading in both.
11:08am Liberal popular vote lead now just over ten points.
10:52am Liberals’ popular vote margin over the Tories up to eight points. I’ve read comments here from BTsays that pollsters had the Libs doing better with early votes than on election day. These votes won’t appear until later.
10:32am The CBC has called a GAIN for the Tories from the Libs in Long Range Mountain.
10:29am The Liberals are now leading the seat count by 22-9 and the vote count by 50-44. But they’re NOT 21 points ahead in Atlantic Canada.
10:06am The Liberals have now taken a three-point lead in popular votes.
10:01am The Liberals lead the Tories by 16 seats to 5, but the Tories lead in popular votes currently by 48-46. This isn’t looking like a 21-point Liberal popular vote margin in Atlantic Canada, but perhaps votes counted are mostly rural and/or the Liberals will do better once the pre-poll votes are counted.
9:44am In Newfoundland, the 2021 result was a Liberal win by 47.7-32.5 in popular votes over the Tories and the Liberals won six of the seven seats. Currently the Tories are leading by 52.1-42.5 in popular votes, although the Liberals are leading in four of the seven seats. Perhaps votes counted so far are more rural.
9:07am The first polls have closed in one of the small Atlantic provinces that’s 30 minutes ahead of the rest of Atl Can. The CBC results are here.
Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here.
Results for the Canadian federal election will be out today. First past the post is used to elect the 343 MPs, with 172 seats required for a majority. Polls in the 32 Atlantic Canada seats close by 9:30am AEST. At 11:30am AEST, the large majority of polls close simultaneously owing to staggered polling hours across three time zones. At 12pm AEST, the final polls close in British Columbia (43 seats).
Vote counting will initially be fast, but will slow down as election-day booths are exhausted, with the final booths being early voting centres, like in Australia. Elections Canada said 7.3 million had voted during the advance voting period from April 18-21, an increase of 25% from 2021. This represents about 25% of all eligible voters. Canadian media don’t attempt to use booth-matched results. Seat totals are reported as “won” (called for a candidate) and “leading”.
The CBC Poll Tracker was updated for the final time late Sunday (the last pre-election day), and it gives the governing centre-left Liberals 42.8% of the vote (up 0.5 since my previous Canadian article on Saturday), the Conservatives 39.2% (up 0.6), the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) 8.1% (down 0.5), the separatist left-wing Quebec Bloc (BQ) 6.0% (steady) (26.1% in Quebec), the Greens 1.8% (down 0.5) and the far-right People’s 1.3% (down 0.1).
Seat point estimates are 189 Liberals (down one since Saturday), 125 Conservatives (steady), 23 BQ (up one), five NDP (steady) and one Green (steady). The Tracker now gives the Liberals a 70% chance of a majority, down from 73% previously. They have a 19% chance to win the most seats but not a majority. The Conservatives have a 10% chance to win the most seats and just a 1% chance of a majority. The polls would need to be very wrong for this to occur.
The Liberal lead over the Conservatives in the Tracker has fallen from its peak of 7.1 points on April 8 to 3.6 points now. The most likely reason for this movement is that Mark Carney’s honeymoon from replacing Justin Trudeau on March 14 as Liberal leader and PM has faded.
On Saturday night, at least 11 people were killed when an SUV drove into a crowd of Filipinos in Vancouver. This was likely a racist attack against Filipinos, so it shouldn’t hurt the Liberals. In Liaison, Nanos and Forum polls conducted Sunday (one-day polls), the Liberal lead was respectively 2, 2.7 and 4 points.
Atlantic Canada has four low-population provinces, and the Liberals hold a 21-point lead over the Conservatives in this region in the Tracker. The early results from Atlantic Canada could give clues about how accurate the polls are.
The Liberal vote is more efficiently distributed than the Conservative vote owing to Conservative vote wastage in safe rural seats. At the 2021 election, the Liberals won 160 of the then 338 seats on 32.6%, with the Conservatives winning 119 seats on 33.7%.
However, there would have been many seats in 2021 where the Liberal’s margin was relatively low owing to a high NDP or BQ vote. With support for the NDP halved from 17.8% in 2021, the Liberal margin in these seats will increase, leading to more Liberal vote wastage and a less efficiently distributed vote.
UK local elections and a parliamentary by-election on Thursday
UK local government elections and aparliamentary by-election in Labour-held Runcorn and Helsby will be held on Thursday, with polls closing at 7am AEST Friday. I don’t expect results from the by-election for several hours after polls close. I previously covered these elections on April 19.
Pre polls are counted centrally in each riding and not at the polling station where they were cast.
Normally counting of those votes can start an hour before polls close but because of the huge amount of advance votes this year they can start 2 hours early so this should reduce the time gap between annoucing the preliminary restults of election day and advance votes.
In Carleton (Poilievre’s riding) because there are over 90 candidates (I posted about this on an aearlier article) they are starting the advance vote count 6 hours before on the day polls close (but results won’t be posted until physical polls close should they complete the count before then)
Fingers crossed and good luck to Mark Carney and the Liberals.
#thegoodguys
The Vancouver attack doesn’t appear to have been motivated by racism. The man charged, himself of some sort of Asian ethnicity, was known to the police as having mental health issues.
But, as you say, it’s unlikely to be an election issue.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight. The only Canadian PM who ever impressed me greatly was Justin’s dad, and that was many moons ago.
However, I’ll take the opportunity to annoy Ven and say that I reckon that the only other ex-governor of a central bank of whom I’m aware that becam a Prime Minister, India’s Manmohan Singh, was the best PM his country has ever had.
On that basis Carney, having served as the governor of two central banks, should be twice as good as Singh. So go Carney!
Poilievre is a mini-me Trump who thought he was coasting to victory on the back of Trudeau’s electoral unpopularity.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/28/canada-election-carney-poilievre-trump/
If you’re having a bad day at any point in the near future, just think – it could be worse, I could be a strategist for the conservative party of Canada reading Donald Trump’s election day post about Canada.
Amazing how in Australia and Canada you can ruin the living standards of working class people and still be called centre left by some joker who doesn’t even work a real job but benefits more from their policies than any essential worker does.
I wonder when the definition of liberal progressivism will be updated to add openly engaging in class warfare like Albo and Tredeau have been (or Daniel Andrews sending the cops to steal ciggies and alcohol from people in social housing while the rich in South Yarra got to outdoor dine and have no curfew).
C@tmommasays:
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 5:26 am
Fingers crossed and good luck to Mark Carney and the Liberals.
#thegoodguys
Hell yeah good people leave people who work for a living dying in the streets while giving tax cuts and handouts to their rich mates. I want to live in this Labor dream world where you can just openly fuck with the lives of people society depends on to function and still unironically believe you’re a good person. Must be nice.
Good luck to Canadians helping fight to turn the tide against populist fascism by electing Mark Carney and the Liberals. The world is watching. No pressure or anything 🙂
In Canada as in Australia the Conservatives are shills for mining and energy company interests.
Gosh the crazy world of Wombo sounds even worse than The Crazy World of Arthur Brown in which I’ve been living since 1967.
“Rural seat vote wastage” – doesn’t occur here where the Nats, and LNP get outsized representation for their vote
First booth is in from Central Newfoundland. A bit like Australia it is a rural booth with a 144 votes.
Posted from previous thread
”
Dr Fumbles McStupidsays:
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 12:40 am
Trump helping out the Canadians with their election, maybe Dutton should request some help here too
_______________________________
U.S. President Donald Trump injected himself into the federal election on Monday, appearing to suggest Canadians vote for him when they go to the polls.
“Good luck to the Great people of Canada,’” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social.
“Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/donald-trump-election-canada-truth-social-1.7520212
“
Ven
He really has lost the plot hasn’t he!
27 weeks until the Virginia Gubernatorial and General Assembly elections. I can’t wait.
In early counting as per CBC
Liberals: 11
Tories: 4
Do pre-polls in Canada tend to favour the Tories like here?
So do Canadians just not publish any information about where the vote came from nor about swings from last election? The linked cbc.ca site does not even include gains/losses in its tabulation, although they report that in the riding pages.
The Conservatives are doing quite well in Atlantic Canada.
If this holds up around the country – this is starting to look like a conservative national win, or at least in minority.
Polling – looks like another stuff up along the lines of US 2016, Brexit 2016, Australia 2019, and now Canada today.
Of the 11 Conservative-leaning seats, 7 of them were won by Conservatives last time around and 4 were won by Liberals.
Paul going early on the classic early rural vote stuff, eh?
I’m listening to the CBC broadcast about the election and they just mentioned the rural booth thing.
Also talking about how first past the post should be replaced already (indeed!).
BLUE MIRAGE !
CBC anchor explaining basic psephology for viewers – makes me think no Antony Green equivalent or Canadian CBC viewers as interested in psephological basics as Australian ABC viewers are.
“CBC anchor explaining basic psephology for viewers – makes me think no Antony Green equivalent or Canadian CBC viewers as interested in psephological basics as Australian ABC viewers are.”
I’m genuinely surprised whenever we dip into other countries’ elections how true this is, and I have to assume it’s because a lack of compulsory voting plus the arcane parts of first past the post and the varying and often changing ways that votes get counted in the American system make it more difficult.
Even now every US election there’s this “hurr durr the Republicans are dominating the primary vote!” shit, even in elections like 2020 where they lose, before the West Coast comes in.
We are also probably expecting the conservatives to make SOME gains.
Remember that the Liberals are already in government on a substantial margin. The amazing comeback was to get back in the lead, not necessarily to get to a landslide.
Former leader of the NDP on the telly saying the Conservatives are overperforming
Conservatives surging on the betting markets
Liberals are going down IMO
It’s amusing (if that’s the right word) to hear about other countries’ polling and election night traumas.
One of the panellists is saying she still has trauma from 1997, when Atlantic Canada went badly for the Liberals and they all thought the Conservatives were going to shit it in, and it turned out to be a Liberal landslide for Jean Chretien. The colour map on Wikipedia for that Canadian election is indeed very regional with a couple of mostly green or blue provinces and the rest of the country mostly red.
The liberals of a leading at the moment
Some of these narrow margins do show the ridiculousness of FPTP – I imagine most NDP and Green voters favour the Canadian Liberals and the vote change seems to reflect this.
On the other hand, I wonder if when STV would make otherwise tactical voters feel safe voting for their preferred party that said party actually goes backwards if one party was more reliant on tactical voting than another e.g. if the NDP has a lot of Liberal leaning voters for who vote NDP tactically vs the equivalent for the Canadian Liberals
Not standardising when pre-polls are counted seems pretty disorganised.
The story of the night at the moment seems to be the minor party vote dying in favour of polarisation to the Libs and Conservatives (both primary votes well up on the last election) to avoid seats being lost to vote splitting, although they still managed to just show a seat where the Liberals are leading by 14 votes… and the local Greens have about 120 votes, so if the Liberals lose that one in the end the idiocy of FPTP will probably be to blame.
@JM From Qld: “Not standardising when pre-polls are counted seems pretty disorganised.”
Truly following other country’s elections makes me thankful ours ARE so well organised.
@Arky: the Liberals come into the election as a minority government, but polls were widely interpreted as compatible with a majority. That implies they will win seats. However a lot of their gain has been at the expense of the smaller parties NDP and BQ, whereas the Conservative vote is high enough that, with normal NDP and BQ numbers, they could win. So maybe you’re right that it’s not time to worry about a polling miss yet.
Also @Arky, just looking at the published results is so frustrating from their lack of psephological detail. I have been suspecting that the relevant detail is the more complicated voting system we use: we will probably come about a reliable answer somewhat later in the night if you just do everything naively, so to get there first you need to be statistically interesting. In Canada, it might be enough to be good enough because maybe the count runs faster. Dunno, just myattempt to come to terms with what I’ve seen.
JM From Qld says:
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 10:48 am
Not standardising when pre-polls are counted seems pretty disorganised.
It is standardised (with some exemptions) See my post right at the top .
@Felix: Sorry, I misspoke – a minority government yes, but a big margin over the conservatives, and the progressive “side” of Canadian politics had a majority with room to lose seats.
The polling had a clear declining trend for the Liberals so I never expected them to do as well as the polling averages that still incorporated older figures – but they were still enough ahead that it would indeed be a serious polling miss if they actually fail to hold onto minority government. We may also see a different vote trend among pre-polls when those get counted.
Lib lead up to 9.2%, presumably more urban votes coming in later in the count. Should hit double digits soon, and may get fairly high if the early counting does indeed favor Liberals.
Not going to hit a 21% Atlantic lead, but hard to know what the Atlantic polling error means for the overall error.
Very few Con seat gains to this point (one?).
I’d say the Liberals are happy (but not ecstatic) with the results so far
@ChrisC – my bad – I was going off CBC saying individual locations can chose when they count pre-polls, including at the end of the count.
@Voice Endeavour:
We simply don’t know enough about Canadian polling and sample sizes.
I’d be more interested in knowing how the overall lead in Atlantic Canada compares to last election. Unless there are major regional differences and there may be, presumably the Conservatives would need to see some kind of swing towards them to have a shot. Merely having less a swing against them than might have been is a bit irrelevant in terms of who is going to win.
As per early voting
Elected/leading
Liberals: 23
Tories: 10
Others: 0
I’m not sure that analysis by the NDP leader will hold up. The vote totals now look quite positive for the Liberals.
As per CBC, all the ridings declared till now are ‘Hold’
Libs: 19
Tories: 5
@Ven, that’s not correct. As per CBC, Long Range Mountains (Newfoundland) is CON FLIP from LIB.
Since you can still vote in much of the country, and I suppose a lot of working-age voters will have to wait till the evening to vote anyway on a workingday like today, I wonder if you get much in the way of strategic holdouts, who pick between NDP and LIB or other pairings based on early results.
The progress of Polymarket’s next Canadian PM market over the last few hours (red Carney, blue Poilievre):
@Ven – they did call one riding flip (Long Range Mountains, what a great name incidentally) but the Liberals only won it with 44% of the vote last time so it wasn’t exactly the safest seat.
I looked at it a little bit and the Liberals won that seat with 73% of the vote back in 2015 although it was already back to 47% by the 2019 election. That was the Justin Trudeau landslide after 10 years of Conservative government. I can’t imagine any Australian seat swinging that far in 10 years without independents being involved.
@William:
“The progress of Polymarket’s next Canadian PM market over the last few hours (red Carney, blue Poilievre):”
That suggests a really great election betting arbitrage opportunity to swindle low pseph information voters in the first half hour of election counts going forward.
But it only works where the rural vote does NOT presage an actual conservative victory. You would need balls of steel that the polling will hold up to “buy the dip” as our stockmarket friends say.
Riding names being location based makes them way too long, lol.
CBC really needs an Antony
The actual results in the seats in Atlantic Canada compared to the 338Canada projection is disappointing for the Canadian Liberals. I’ve heard some people say that the count won’t be going well for the LPC if the results in Atlantic Canada are mimicked in the rest of the country
Omar Comin’says:
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 8:24 am
Gosh the crazy world of Wombo sounds even worse than The Crazy World of Arthur Brown in which I’ve been living since 1967.
==================================================
A very crazy world in which Canada has a Labor party that was formed to look after the rich. Which would pretty much put the Conservatives out of business if it was true.
Omar Comin’says:
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 8:24 am
Gosh the crazy world of Wombo sounds even worse than The Crazy World of Arthur Brown in which I’ve been living since 1967.
I dunno man I worked my entire life but can’t afford basic shit like food and housing and on top of that now I’m being told by people who get paid to sit at home that I should be grateful for the crash in living standards/total absence of housing for anyone but the wealthy/Jim Chalmers tax cuts for people on 6 figures as “cost of living relief” because your feelings matter more than my life does.
Not sure why you people think you can put people in positions where theyre forced to reckon with their mortality and have them not figure out the neo-liberals putting them there are just as mortal as they are.
“CBC really needs an Antony”
Agree. They’re waffling about irrelevant individual polling place seat results and confusing everyone.