Governor General Julie Payette dissolved the 42nd Parliament on September 11, 2019, at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's request, launching a 40-day campaign with voting day set for October 21. Trudeau was seeking a second mandate after winning a commanding majority of 184 seats in 2015, but his government had been severely damaged by the SNC-Lavalin scandal — a months-long crisis that cost him two cabinet ministers and an Ethics Commissioner finding that he had violated the Conflict of Interest Act. This was the 43rd Canadian general election, fought across 338 electoral districts. Turnout was 67.0%, down slightly from 68.3% in 2015. A record 4.7 million electors voted in advance polls, up 29% from the previous election.

Results

The Liberals were reduced from their 184-seat majority to a 157-seat minority — the lowest popular vote share (33.1%) for any party forming even a minority government in Canadian history. The Conservatives won 121 seats with 34.3% of the popular vote, capturing more votes than the Liberals nationally but winning 36 fewer seats — a result that renewed debate over the fairness of first-past-the-post. The Bloc Québécois staged a dramatic resurgence under new leader Yves-François Blanchet, surging from 10 seats to 32 and reclaiming official party status. The NDP collapsed from 44 seats to 24, losing 15 of their 16 Quebec seats to the Bloc revival and falling to fourth-party status. The Green Party achieved its best-ever result with 3 seats and 6.5% of the vote — surpassing one million votes nationally for the first time. The People's Party of Canada, contesting its first election, was shut out with 1.6%. Jody Wilson-Raybould won Vancouver Granville as an independent — the election's most symbolically charged result.

The Liberals were shut out of Alberta and Saskatchewan entirely, winning zero seats across the two provinces. The Conservatives swept all 14 Saskatchewan seats and 33 of 34 in Alberta, with the NDP holding only Edmonton Strathcona. The Liberal majority depended entirely on Ontario — where they won 79 of 121 seats — and Atlantic Canada.

Party Leaders

Justin Trudeau (Liberal) held power but lost his majority in a campaign defined by scandal. The son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau entered the 2019 election carrying two wounds that would have ended most political careers. The SNC-Lavalin affair — in which his office was found to have pressured Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to arrange a deferred prosecution agreement for the Montreal engineering firm — had dominated the first half of 2019 and prompted the resignations of Wilson-Raybould and Treasury Board President Jane Philpott from cabinet. Then, one week into the campaign, Time magazine published a photograph of Trudeau in brownface makeup from an event in early 2001, with additional images surfacing in the days that followed. He apologized but could not say how many times it had happened. Despite these crises, the Liberal campaign machinery in Ontario and Atlantic Canada held firm. Trudeau won Papineau with 51.1% of the vote, a margin of over 16,000 votes.

Andrew Scheer (Conservative) won the popular vote but could not translate it into government. Born May 20, 1979, in Ottawa, Ontario, Scheer studied at the University of Ottawa, completing his Bachelor of Arts there in 2008 after moving to Saskatchewan and winning elected office. He worked in constituency offices and as an insurance clerk before winning election in Regina-Qu'Appelle in 2004 at the age of 25. In 2011, at 32, he was elected Speaker of the House of Commons — the youngest in Canadian history. He won the Conservative leadership on May 27, 2017, edging out Maxime Bernier on the 13th ballot by fewer than two percentage points. His 2019 campaign centred on repealing the carbon tax, balancing the budget within five years, and attacking Trudeau's ethics record. The Conservatives gained 22 seats and won the popular vote by over 200,000 ballots, but Scheer could not break through in the Greater Toronto Area or Atlantic Canada, where the Liberals' seat advantage was decisive. He won his own riding with 63.1%. After the election, revelations that Scheer held dual Canadian-American citizenship — after having previously criticized Governor General Michaëlle Jean over her French-Canadian dual citizenship — compounded his difficulties. He resigned as leader in December 2019.

Jagmeet Singh (NDP) fought his first general election as leader and saw the party's seat count nearly halved. Born January 2, 1979, in Scarborough, Ontario, Singh studied biology at Western University and law at Osgoode Hall before building a career as a criminal defence lawyer. He won the NDP leadership in October 2017 but spent over a year without a seat in Parliament, finally winning a February 2019 by-election in Burnaby South with 38.9% of the vote. His debate performances — particularly a widely praised exchange on Quebec's secularism law — boosted his personal favourability, but the NDP was devastated in Quebec as the Bloc reclaimed francophone ridings wholesale. The party dropped from 44 to 24 seats, its worst showing since 2004. Singh held Burnaby South with 37.7%, a margin of roughly 3,000 votes.

Yves-François Blanchet (Bloc Québécois) led one of the most remarkable party resurrections in Canadian federal history. A former Parti Québécois MNA who had served as Quebec's environment minister under Pauline Marois, Blanchet was acclaimed Bloc leader in January 2019 when no other candidates came forward — inheriting a party that held just 10 seats and had nearly been written off. He positioned the Bloc as the defender of Quebec's autonomy and its secularism legislation, Bill 21, which banned religious symbols for public servants in positions of authority. The strategy was devastating: the Bloc tripled its seat count to 32, sweeping francophone Quebec outside Montreal and overtaking the NDP as the third-largest party in the House. Blanchet won Beloeil-Chambly with 50.5%.

Elizabeth May (Green) led the party to its strongest result in history. A lawyer and environmental advocate who had served as a policy advisor to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on acid rain and ozone depletion before leading the Sierra Club of Canada, May had been Green leader since 2006 and became the party's first MP in 2011. In 2019, the Greens won three seats for the first time — May in Saanich-Gulf Islands with 49.1%, Paul Manly in Nanaimo-Ladysmith, and Jenica Atwin in Fredericton. The party surpassed one million votes and 6.5% nationally, nearly doubling its 2015 share. May stepped down as leader in November 2019.

Maxime Bernier (People's Party) failed to translate his national profile into seats. The former Conservative cabinet minister had narrowly lost the 2017 CPC leadership to Scheer before leaving the party in August 2018 and founding the PPC a month later. Running on reduced immigration, opposition to the carbon tax, and elimination of corporate subsidies, Bernier attracted significant media attention but only 1.6% of the national vote. He lost his own riding of Beauce — which he had held since 2006 — to Conservative Richard Lehoux by over 6,000 votes.

Campaign Issues

The SNC-Lavalin scandal was the election's inescapable backdrop. The crisis had erupted in February 2019 when The Globe and Mail reported that PMO officials had pressured the attorney general to intervene in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, a Montreal engineering firm facing bribery charges related to contracts in Libya. Wilson-Raybould refused and was shuffled out of the justice portfolio; she and Philpott resigned from cabinet and were expelled from the Liberal caucus in April. The Ethics Commissioner's August finding that Trudeau had violated the Conflict of Interest Act landed weeks before the campaign began.

Climate change and the carbon tax were central to the policy debate, with some observers calling it Canada's first "climate election." The Liberals had introduced the federal carbon tax in April 2019, with household rebates. Scheer pledged to repeal it. Trudeau faced criticism for declaring a climate emergency in June while simultaneously approving the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion — a $4.5 billion project the government had purchased from Kinder Morgan in 2018, alienating environmentalists without satisfying Western Canadian energy interests.

Housing affordability had become a mounting concern in Toronto, Vancouver, and other major centres. The Liberals proposed a first-time home-buyer incentive, the NDP pledged 500,000 new affordable units, and the Conservatives proposed extending mortgage amortization periods.

Notable Outcomes

Jody Wilson-Raybould's independent victory in Vancouver Granville — winning 32.3% of the vote against the Liberal candidate who replaced her — was the most symbolically resonant result of the night. Jane Philpott, who had resigned from cabinet in solidarity, ran as an independent in Markham-Stouffville but finished third.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, one of the most senior Liberals in Canada and Saskatchewan's lone Liberal MP since 1993, lost Regina-Wascana as the Conservatives swept the province. The shutout of Liberals across Alberta and Saskatchewan fuelled a surge of western alienation — the "Wexit" movement gained tens of thousands of social media followers within hours of the result, and polling found roughly a third of Albertans believed their province would be better off outside Confederation.

The Bloc's resurrection from 10 to 32 seats under Blanchet — accomplished in a single election with a leader who had been acclaimed just nine months earlier — was among the most dramatic party revivals in modern Canadian political history.