(click to enlarge)
On Monday, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decade-long reign came to an end in dramatic fashion as left-leaning voters flocked to the historically centrist Liberal Party and handed its leader, Justin Trudeau, a massive win. After winning just 34 seats in the last parliamentary elections in 2011, the Liberals steamrolled their way to a 184-seat obliteration on Monday night—the first time they captured an outright majority in an election since 2000.
The moose-shaped map above shows the winner of each electoral district, with each seat sized according to its population, rather than its land area. Unlike in the United States, red is the color of the Liberals and blue the hue for Conservatives, so that wide red swath you see in Canada's east is a huge reason for Trudeau's success. Below you'll find more maps and data galore!
Here's the same results in a more familiar form. The drawback, of course, is that you can't see the urban areas. The four seats that Liberals won in Alberta (the most in that province in over 20 years) are invisible, for example:
(click to enlarge)
Among those winning elections on Monday, there were a record 88 women, as well as 13.6 percent of what Canadian demographers call "visible minorities" (what we'd call "racial minorities" in the U.S.) and 10 indigenous Canadians (who are counted separately from "visible minorities"). You can explore select demographics of the new Parliament here.
The Liberal share of the vote doubled from 2011 to 2015. A large part of this increase came from supporters of the left-wing New Democratic Party strategically voting for the surging Liberals, who at the end of the campaign were the best bet to unseat Harper. However, the Conservatives's own vote share also fell dramatically. The support for the nationalist Bloc Québécois party dropped as well from its poor showing in 2011, but because no party dominated Quebec like the NDP did in 2011, the Bloc was able to gain a handful of seats back (from 4 to 10). That still leaves the BQ short of the 12 seats needed for official party status, though.
The current incarnation of the Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, is a successor to a pair of older right-wing parties that merged in 2003: The Progressive Conservatives (which carried the "Tory" mantle in its day) and the Reform/Alliance party. If you add the PC and Reform/Alliance vote together in older elections, 2015 was the second-worst showing for Canadian Conservatives since 1972—only 2004 was worse.
Part of the reason may be increased turnout: While population growth from 2011 to 2015 was only about 5 percent, turnout surged by 19 percent. That makes this the highest-turnout election since 1993, which just so happens to be the last time the Liberal Party swept to power after years of right-wing rule. You can also see from the graph above that while the Conservatives had won the last three elections in a row prior to this year's, they had done so with a minority of the voters, and only because the center-left vote had been split.
Pollsters in the Canadian election did very well this time around, capturing most of the switch from NDP to Liberals in the final days of a volatile campaign that saw each party leading at some point.
We'll leave you with results by electoral district for each party; you can see the giant-size version here for the top three parties and here for all five parties winning seats.
(click to enlarge)
Update: Thanks to 2011 data for 2015 districts kindly provided to us by David Shor, here are maps showing the changes in vote share for each party. Again, giant-size versions are here for three parties and here for five.
(click to enlarge)
Update 2: Here's a cartogram showing where each party gained seats, mapping old districts onto 2015 districts. It looks like an urban/suburban rebellion!
(click to enlarge)
Note: Post edited to reflect the fact that the Conservative Party's performance in 2015 was its second-worst since 1972, not its worst.