Tag: conservative party of canada

Political maps and data for Canadian electors!

Here’s something that should give every political nerd hours of material to pore over. The Stephen Taylor Data Project is releasing some political maps, graphs, and census data for your consumption during this latest Canadian general election.

This efforts is the culmination of months of spare-time effort to package historical election results in an easy-to-digest format for Canadians during this 44th general election. You can browse every general election from 2019 back through the year 2000 (7 elections) and look at historical trends on each, with every riding map broken down by polling division.

Canada’s 43rd Parliament as elected in the 2019 General Election

Furthermore, you can create maps of each riding based on the relative strength of the party in each poll of each riding

If you’ve ever wanted to understand Liberal voting patterns, appreciate Conservative strongholds on a granular level, be facinated by the NDP’s local strategy, or track the Green Party’s and Bloc’s ebbs and flows, now you can! We’ve even got Alliance and PC results from the days of yore to bookend a re-emerging trend of some vote-splitting on the right that began again in 2019.

The riding of Burnaby South by polling division, after the 2015 general election

In 2000, Joe Clark led the PC Party prior to their merger with the Alliance. This map shows where he was strong (green) and weak (red) in Calgary Centre.

I’ve also combined data from the last census – perfectly segmented by riding – to give insights on what motivates voters. For example, income and affordability are top-of-mind issues for a lot of Canadians during this election. This project helps you consider these factors in each riding and compare these trends both nationally and provincially.

The population distributions of Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River (left) and Nanaimo–Ladysmith (right)
The differences between rental vs ownership in the riding of Spadina–Fort York (left) versus the province of Ontario as a whole (right)

I’ve also put up historical polling data that you can browse and I have a visualization demonstrating the rise, fall, and sustained dominance of Canada’s various political parties, as elected by voters to Canada’s federal Parliament.

A streamgraph visualization of Canada’s history of elections.

You can take a snapshot of each map by clicking the camera icon 📷 at the top of each geographic visualization. The images I’ve shared in this post were created this way. Go ahead and take snapshots of your favourite ridings (and favourite elections!) and share these images on social media. If you’re writing for a news outlet and you find any of this useful, please link to this post and to the Stephen Taylor Data Project! If you’re an avid twitter user, please tweet about this project.

So, please take a look and I hope that you enjoy! This work is being made available to general public and to every partisan of every party. I believe very strongly in a more representative democracy and believe that when more data becomes available and accessible that describes the shape of the Canadian vote, the more responsive our candidates can be in meeting that representation.

The riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith in British Columbia, 2015 results

The project was coded using ReactJS, using both NoSQL (MongoDB) and relational (MySQL) databases to serve data through a common GraphQL layer facilitated by Apollo client on a Node.js server. Four gigabytes of GeoJSON files were constructed locally using some more of that server-side javascript magic. Those files are served via AWS S3, and are visualized for the end-user using the Leaflet library. Infographics SVGs are assembled using D3JS.

Maxime Bernier officially running in York Centre

It’s getting a bit sad isn’t it?

Maxime Bernier has announced that it’s official, he’ll be standing as the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) candidate in the upcoming by-election in York Centre. The former Harper cabinet minister who ran for Conservative Party leadership losing to Andrew Scheer tweeted that he had filed his paperwork to run for MP in the vacated seat.

Bernier left the Conservative Party in a huff after losing the leadership contest and after subsequently realizing that this meant that coming in second place meant that the party wouldn’t be under his control. Mad Max left the party to start his own and most saw it as an exercise in spite.

Maxime Bernier prior to failing the marshmallow test

Indeed, in the subsequent election, the People’s Party covered the margin between a Liberal win and a Conservative loss in about a half dozen seats.

Bernier has never faced a contested leadership in his new party, or even a vote for a leadership review after his complete washout as the leader of a party that won 0 seats in the last election.

The word is that Bernier misses his job as Member of Parliament and that the loss of his own seat in Beauce (that he won as a Conservative) was a particularly painful.

His bid for York Centre is unlikely to be successful, but he does have the chance (again) to be the spoiler for Conservatives who won the seat with Mark Adler in 2011.

Julius Tiangson will be the Conservative candidate in the race. He previously ran for the Conservative Party in Mississauga Centre in 2015. Ya’ara Saks will be the Liberal candidate.

The York Centre by-election is on October 26th and was called due to Liberal MP Michael Levitt resigning the seat to be the CEO of Canadian Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies.