Prime Minister Paul Martin requested dissolution on May 23, 2004, launching a 36-day campaign with voting day set for June 28. Martin had been prime minister for barely five months — sworn in on December 12, 2003, after a decade-long campaign to succeed Jean Chrétien — and entered the election with polls suggesting the Liberals were headed for a comfortable majority. Those expectations collapsed on February 10, when Auditor General Sheila Fraser tabled a report on the federal sponsorship program that would define the campaign and ultimately end Martin's political career. This was the 38th Canadian general election and the first fought under a new electoral map that expanded the House of Commons from 301 to 308 seats, with seven new ridings added in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia based on the 2001 census. Turnout was 60.9%, down from 64.1% in 2000 — the lowest in Canadian federal election history at that time and the fourth consecutive decline from the roughly 75% postwar average.

Results

The Liberals won 135 seats with 36.7% of the popular vote — a loss of 37 seats from their 172-seat majority in 2000 and the party's first minority government since Pierre Trudeau's narrow victory in 1972. The Conservatives, contesting their first election as a unified party after the December 2003 merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, won 99 seats on 29.6%. The Bloc Québécois surged from 38 seats to 54, winning 54 of Quebec's 75 seats on the strength of the sponsorship scandal — equalling their 1993 breakthrough result. The NDP nearly doubled its popular vote from 8.5% to 15.7% and gained 6 seats to reach 19. The Green Party won no seats but quintupled its vote share from roughly 0.8% to 4.3%, crossing the 2% threshold that qualified the party for per-vote public funding for the first time. One independent was elected.

The results produced the most fragmented Parliament in a generation. The Liberals held Ontario with 75 of 106 seats but were devastated in Quebec, where the sponsorship scandal handed the Bloc its largest caucus since the party's founding. The Conservatives dominated the Prairies with 46 of 56 seats and led in British Columbia, but were shut out of Quebec entirely and won only 24 seats in Ontario — far short of what they needed to form government.

Party Leaders

Paul Martin (Liberal) won the office he had pursued for more than a decade but inherited a scandal that ensured his hold on power would be precarious from the start. Martin had spent the years from 1993 to 2002 as one of the most consequential finance ministers in Canadian history, eliminating a $42-billion deficit through deep spending cuts and program restructuring, delivering five consecutive surplus budgets, and overseeing what was then the largest income tax reduction in the country's history. His success at Finance made him the overwhelming favourite to succeed Chrétien, but the rivalry between the two men and their competing organizations — the so-called "Board" (Martin) and the "Establishment" (Chrétien) — consumed the Liberal Party for years. When Martin finally won the leadership on November 14, 2003, with 93.8% support, and was sworn in as prime minister on December 12, his approval ratings were above 60% and a majority seemed certain. Then the Auditor General's report landed. Martin responded by establishing the Gomery Commission on February 19, 2004, to investigate the sponsorship program — a decision that demonstrated accountability but also ensured months of televised testimony about Liberal corruption. As the campaign progressed and Conservative support climbed, Martin shifted from positive messaging to an aggressive attack on Harper's character, warning that a Conservative government harboured a hidden agenda on health care, abortion, and same-sex marriage. The strategy worked — Liberal support stabilized in the final week — but the cost was a minority built on fear rather than enthusiasm. Martin won LaSalle-Émard with approximately 57% of the vote.

Stephen Harper (Conservative) led a party that had existed for barely four months into an election that came within reach of victory before slipping away in the campaign's final days. Harper had won the Conservative Party's inaugural leadership on March 20, 2004, on the first ballot with 56% of weighted points, defeating Belinda Stronach — the former CEO of Magna International — and former Ontario cabinet minister Tony Clement. The merger that created the party had been ratified only in December 2003, and the organizational challenge of uniting two rival parties, their donor lists, riding associations, and campaign infrastructures in time for a spring election was immense. Harper's platform — branded "Demand Better" — proposed $58 billion in tax cuts and spending over five years, increased military funding, and democratic reform including an elected Senate. By mid-campaign, polls showed the Conservatives ahead or tied nationally, and seat projections suggested Harper could win a minority. The momentum collapsed in the final ten days under the weight of controversial statements by Conservative candidates — including one MP comparing abortion to a terrorist beheading, another dismissing bilingualism, and a third declaring "to heck with the courts" on same-sex marriage — that collectively reinforced the Liberal warning of a hidden social conservative agenda. A Conservative press release accusing Martin of supporting child pornography backfired badly, and Martin's emotional response that Harper had "crossed the line" became a defining campaign moment. Harper won Calgary Southwest with approximately 68% of the vote.

Jack Layton (NDP) fought his first federal campaign and established himself as a credible national leader, taking the NDP from the 13 seats won under Alexa McDonough in 2000 to 19 — the party's best result since winning 21 seats in 1997. Layton had won the NDP leadership on January 25, 2003, on the first ballot with 53.5%, but unlike the convention of new leaders entering Parliament through a by-election, he chose to wait for a general election. His campaign focused on urban issues that had been largely absent from federal debate — affordable housing, transit investment, homelessness, and public health care — messaging designed to connect with city-dwellers who felt their concerns were ignored by the other parties. The NDP's gains came primarily in Ontario, where the party won 7 seats after being shut out of the province since 1993, and British Columbia, where it held 5. Former NDP leader Ed Broadbent returned to Parliament as part of the effort, winning Ottawa Centre after a fourteen-year absence from the House. Layton won Toronto-Danforth with approximately 46% of the vote, defeating Liberal incumbent Dennis Mills by roughly 2,400 votes.

Gilles Duceppe (Bloc Québécois) presided over the most dominant Bloc performance since the party's founding, riding the sponsorship scandal to 54 seats — a result that matched the 1993 breakthrough under Lucien Bouchard. The scandal was uniquely devastating for the Liberals in Quebec because the sponsorship program had been specifically designed to promote federalism in the province after the 1995 referendum. The revelation that millions of dollars intended to counter the sovereignty movement had been siphoned to Liberal-connected advertising firms validated the Bloc's central argument about federal contempt for Quebec. Duceppe was widely judged the strongest performer in both the French- and English-language leaders' debates, projecting calm authority while the other leaders traded attacks. The Bloc won 48.9% of the Quebec popular vote and 54 of the province's 75 seats, leaving the Liberals with 21 and shutting out both the Conservatives and the NDP entirely. Duceppe won Laurier with approximately 60% of the vote.

Jim Harris (Green) led the party to a breakthrough in vote share, quintupling the Green result from roughly 0.8% in 2000 to 4.3% — nearly 582,000 votes — without winning a seat. Harris, who had won the leadership in February 2003, oversaw the first Green campaign to run candidates in all 308 ridings. The 4.3% exceeded the 2% threshold required for per-vote public funding under the new Canada Elections Act provisions, qualifying the Greens for annual payments that would help professionalize the party's operations. Harris ran in Toronto-Danforth and finished fourth.

Campaign Issues

The sponsorship scandal overshadowed every other issue. The federal sponsorship program, established after the 1995 Quebec referendum to increase Ottawa's visibility in the province, had spent $250 million between 1997 and 2001. Auditor General Sheila Fraser's February 10, 2004 report found that $100 million of that sum had been paid to Liberal-connected advertising agencies for little or no work — through false invoices, non-existent contracts, and transactions designed to circumvent standard oversight. Fraser called the program "scandalous" and said she was "appalled" by what her audit uncovered. Martin established the Gomery Commission nine days later to investigate, but the move cut both ways: it demonstrated willingness to hold the party accountable while guaranteeing months of damaging public testimony.

Health care dominated voter priorities — cited by 48% of respondents as the most important election issue, twice the proportion naming any other topic. The Romanow Commission had delivered its final report in November 2002, recommending $15 billion in additional federal health funding over three years to address wait times and preserve the public system. All parties promised increased health spending, but the debate turned on whether a Conservative government would introduce private-sector delivery — a charge Harper denied but that the Liberals exploited relentlessly.

Same-sex marriage had become a live constitutional question after courts in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec ruled that restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Martin government had referred the question to the Supreme Court rather than legislate immediately. The Conservatives pledged a free vote in Parliament on the traditional definition of marriage. Statements by Conservative candidates on social issues — particularly Randy White's declaration that a Conservative government should use the notwithstanding clause to override court decisions on marriage, saying "to heck with the courts" — intensified concerns about the party's social conservative direction and contributed to the final-week erosion of Conservative support in Ontario.

Notable Outcomes

The Liberal minority was the party's first since 1972, ending a string of three consecutive Liberal majorities dating to 1993. The fragmented result — four parties with at least 19 seats, plus an independent — produced a Parliament where the government's survival depended on day-to-day negotiations with opposition parties.

Chuck Cadman, a former Canadian Alliance MP who lost his Conservative nomination, won Surrey North as an independent — the election's most improbable individual result. His vote would prove pivotal: in May 2005, he voted with the government on a crucial budget confidence motion that passed 152-152, with the Speaker breaking the tie.

Belinda Stronach, who had sought the Conservative leadership just three months earlier, won Newmarket-Aurora by a margin of only 689 votes. She crossed the floor to the Liberals on May 17, 2005 — hours before the same budget confidence vote — and was immediately appointed to cabinet, a defection that made national headlines and helped the Martin government survive.

The Bloc's 54-seat result gave the sovereignist party a caucus equalling its 1993 record and more than a third of Quebec's federal representation, demonstrating that the sponsorship scandal had fuelled sovereignist sentiment in Quebec to levels not seen since the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord.