Category: Canadian Politics

Mapping the results of the 2025 Canadian Federal Election

Yes, it’s finally here. I’ve generated the maps for the 2025 federal election wherein Mark Carney’s Liberal Party elected enough MPs to form a minority Parliament defeating Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in a stunning upset that was precipitated by Trump tariffs and the sudden departure of Justin Trudeau from Liberal leadership and the Prime Minister’s Office.

This resource has the national, riding, and polling-level results and is highly interactive and educational. Wow!

Canada: economically depressed but elbows up
2025 Canadian General election results – National map

It’s no small task assembling spreadsheet data for 343 ridings and tens of thousands of polling divisions from Elections Canada with GIS data from Natural Resources Canada. Over the years, I’ve written quite a few NodeJS scripts and assembled quite a database which has survived the move between computers, cities, and cloud companies.

Enter the new era of AI.

Adapting old scripts to new data (and new ridings) was made into a task of hours instead of days in order to produce our maps. So please be my guest! Take a look at the vector maps that defined the 2025 Canadian federal election. Zoom in to a riding map to reveal poll-by-poll resolution to find out how your neighbours voted, or appreciate the gradients of partisan support that exist across economically diverse electoral districts.

My blog’s been a bit sleepy for a few years now and every once and a while I check in on what people are searching in order to arrive at stephentaylor.ca. The maps have certainly taken over long-tail search. There are 343 ridings now, after all.

Let’s take a closer look.

Mark Carney formed government winning 169 seats, falling just short of a majority government. He contested and won the riding of Nepean.

Nepean - 2025 Candian General Election
Nepean election results – 2025 Candian General Election

Next door in Carleton, Pierre Poilievre suffered a loss of his own riding that he had held for over 20 years.

Carelton results - 2025 Canadian General Election
Carelton election results – 2025 Canadian General Election

Though managing to increase the Conservative seat total in the 2025 Canadian general election to 144 seats, this long was particularly painful on election night. Poilievre would later go on and contest Battle-River–Crowfoot after the Conservative victor on election night, Damien Kurek, stepped aside for the party boss.

Battle River—Crowfoot results - 2025 Canadian General Election
Battle River—Crowfoot election results – 2025 Canadian General Election

Poilievre wasn’t the only federal leader to lose their seat on election night. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh led his party to its worse result since the party’s founding in 1961.

Until I took a closer look when writing this post, I hadn’t realized he’d lost every poll in his riding of Burnaby Central except for one.

Burnaby Central results - 2025 Canadian General Election
Burnaby Central election results – 2025 Canadian General Election

Justin Trudeau was a deeply unpopular leader who was propped up by Singh’s party who feared a profound election defeat. It turned out that when Trudeau left, Singh was left representing the era he helped defined – and Canadians punished the NDP. Historians will note that Singh didn’t just lose votes to the Liberals but a large chunk of his coalition voted Conservative in 2025. Indeed, parts of Windsor – like Windsor West – went blue for the first time.

Windsor West results - 2025 Candian General Election
Windsor West election results – 2025 Candian General Election

Conservatives predict that we’ll be into an election again soon enough. Carney will want to take advantage of a Conservative Party that is doing some soul-searching and feet-finding while the Trump uncertainty still exists over tariffs and the broader economy. Carney also sees himself as the international deal-maker. Those deals have yet to come to fruition but setting his travel schedule according to the Parliamentary and his government’s razor thin advantage there is going to get old soon for him if it hasn’t already.

Commissioner of Canada Elections is flooded with complaints

The Commissioner of Canada Elections has released statistics about complaints received during the 45th general election, which saw Mark Carney’s Liberal party elected as to a minority government.

The office responsible for ensuring compliance with and enforcement of the Canada Elections Act received 700% more complaints than in the previous election. That’s 650 complaints per hour during the campaign!

Canadians filed 16,115 grievances with the office. These ranged from allegations of foreign interference to reports of unauthorized election advertising, voters posting images of their ballots on social media, and failures by third-party advertisers to register. Third-party advertisers are allowed to promote during elections but must first file the proper forms with Elections Canada.

Amusingly—and perhaps predictably—the vast majority of complaints reviewed so far have been deemed out of scope for the Commissioner. That’s a more technical way of saying the complainants didn’t have a case.

Due to the high volume, most complaints remain unprocessed. As of June 25, the office had only reviewed 2,330 of the 16,115 complaints.

The Commissioner noted that many complaints were the result of a general ignorance of the law.

As an interesting aside, the office had expected far more complaints related to artificial intelligence and disinformation, but such concerns turned out to be overblown in the lead-up to the election.

In case you were worried: so far, the Commissioner has found no evidence that any of the complaints processed to date had an effect on the final results of the election.

Elbows Down for Mark Carney on the Digital Services Tax

A late-night, long-weekend post from the GC Newsroom X account indicates that the Government of Canada is backing down on the Digital Services Tax, following an explicit threat from U.S. President Donald Trump.

The US President threatened to immediately cease all trade negotiations with Canada until the tax issue was resolved.

During this year’s general election, Carney famously adopted an “Elbows Up” approach to Donald Trump, reassuring Canadian boomers that he would defend national sovereignty and stand up for Canadian interests.

For his part, Trump mused that Canada would be better off as America’s “51st state” and breathed life into the Liberal Party, instilling just enough fear in Canadians to buy into Carney’s promise to stand up to Trump.

But the election is over – and now Carney appears to have rolled over on a core Liberal policy.

The Digital Services Tax would have imposed a 3% levy on revenue from digital services like online advertising, social media, and user data sales by large tech companies.

It was originally set to be retroactive to 2022, with the first payments due on June 30, 2025. The tax targeted firms like Amazon, Google, and Meta, and U.S. companies faced an estimated $2-3 billion bill.

Both Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden have opposed the DST, viewing it as discriminatory against American firms.

On June 27th, this came to a head with Trump announcing the immediate termination of all U.S.-Canada trade talks, calling the DST a “direct and blatant attack” on the U.S. He threatened new tariffs within seven days, citing Canada’s refusal to pause the tax.

Earlier this month, Canadian Foreign Minister Francois Phillipe Champagne promised that the DST would go through as planned.

Rick Tachuk, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Canada advocated for a pause of the Digital Services Tax in an op-ed published just five days ago.

The Liberals promised to introduce the tax during the 2019 general election and the Parliamentary Budget Officer had projected it could raise $7 Billion from US companies over 5 years. Its implementation had been delayed to bring others – in particular the EU – onside.

Canada has faced renewed pressure from its primary trading partner since re-electing Donald Trump as President in 2024. Trump argues he’s simply correcting a trade imbalance between the U.S. and Canada. His trade policy has had significant effect on key Canadian industries such as steel, aluminum, and auto manufacturing.

Meanwhile Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – elbows up or not – is finding that Canadians are starting to question his ability to handle the pressure – given how quickly this collapse has come.