Now that the April 28th Canadian has been past for a week and the results are (mostly) finalized we can do a quick analysis of where this leaves things.
Barring a couple of recounts (more on that) the final count was; Out of a total 343 seats with 172 needed for a majority the Liberals won just short of a majority with 169 seats for a gain of 17 seats. The Tories got 143 seats for a gain of 23 seats. The Bloc Quebecois (BQ) got 23 seats for a loss of 10 while the NDP got 7 seats for a loss of 17 and the Green party kept one of their two seats. There will be recounts in five or six ridings but aside from one riding where the Liberal won by an unbelievable twelve votes and another by twenty nine it's unlikely to change anything. In conceding, Tory leader Pierre Poilievre called Liberal Mark Carney's win a "razor thin minority" but that's clearly cope as Carney has a mere handful of seats short of a majority. As a voting percentage the Liberals got 44% (an increase 11 points) to the Tories 41% (an increase of 8 points), the BQ got 6% (a drop of 1 point), the NDP got a pathetic 6% for drop of 11.5 points and the Greens got one point for a drop of one point so the Liberals do have a plurality of the vote unlike the previous two elections where they actually got a point less than the Tories. In addition the Tory Leader Polilievre actually lost his own seat as did NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
The Liberals should thus have the opening to have a fairly stable government which could easily last three or possibly four years since at least three of the opposition parties are not likely to be in any mood to force an election for at least a few years for reasons we'll examine as we go through the parties one by one.
THE LIBERALS;
It was clearly a good night for the Liberals who had been in power since 2015 and were suffering from the incumbency malaise common in most western democracies. In fact, polls over the past year regularly showed them with a twenty point deficit and even granting that these polls would have almost certainly narrowed in an actual election even if the Tory lead had halved they would still have had a comfortable ten plus point lead and more than enough for a comfortable majority govt. Much of their historic rebound is down to the Prime Minister finally stepping down in the face of byelection losses and a caucus revolt to be replaced by Mark Carney, a technocratic former Head of the Central Banks of both Canada and Britain. But more credit has to do with Donald Trump whose trade war and outrageous insults, lies and threats to annex Canada (and neighbouring Greenland) both worried and infuriated Canadians in ways not seen in living memory if ever. However it was not all good news for the Liberals as while they gained a number of seats they actually lost several mostly in Southwestern Ontario and a couple in Northern Ontario. For the most part these losses were mostly very close and were down to the utter collapse of the NDP vote which allowed the Tories to exploit vote splitting to slip through. These seats alone would have given them a majority. The long term question of what happens with those NDP voters who defected to the Tories, which about a quarter seem to have done, is one the Liberals will have to examine if they want to win these seats back next time. The acknowledged issue of a housing shortage, low vacancy rate and high rent especially in Ontario in particular is a genuine one that polls showed had a real effect and it's one they will have to deal with. And quickly as whatever Carney does will certainly take time to show results. Luckily whatever he does he should be able to get support from the NDP, Greens and BQ to pass votes in the House.
THE TORIES;
The Tories had another extremely frustrating night, they actually increased the vote total to better than what Stephen Harper had in any of his elections including 2011 when he won a majority and they had the (slightly) highest seat increase and yet they still lost. Pierre Poilievre even managed to lose his own seat in the suburbs of Ottawa he had held for twenty years. It's true that much of their vote increase came in safe ridings in Alberta, Saskatchewan and rural BC, Manitoba and Ontario, all seats they already had which does them no good electorally but it's also true that they gained those Ontario seats however narrowly some of them may have been. Pierre Poilievre losing his own seat was certainly embarrassing (and the source of endless amusement to the Liberals) but it's not really a fatal problem. The previous two unsuccessful Tory leaders, Andrew Scheer and Erin O'Toole, were quickly forced out after their narrow losses to Trudeau but there was little demand among his caucus for Pierre Poilievre to step down and he clearly has no intention to do so. Unlike Scheer and O'Toole, Poilievre has established an iron grip on the party and is surrounded by loyalists and he also has the devoted support of a Tory media and right wing social media network (including in America) which was not enthusiastic about the more moderate Scheer and O'Toole and which he has carefully courted and even tailored his image to. Unlike previous Leaders there are no obvious successors waiting in the wings. Plus it's not like he has anything better to do, he has literally been in politics his entire adult life and has never held another job. Finding another seat didn't take long as within days he had convinced one of his MP's in Alberta to step down causing an opening that he will run for in a byelection which Carney promised to call without delay. The riding in question, Battlefoot-Crowfoot, is in rural Alberta and is one of the safest Tory ridings in the country with the previous MP winning by over eighty points while another loss would be objectively hilarious it's just not going to happen.
Note that in spite of his very French name Pierre Poilievre is not actually French and having lived and represented a riding in suburban Ottawa for basically his entire adult life in act he's actually originally from Alberta. In addition there is a vague tradition of not running candidates against a party leader who's running in a byelection which the Liberals will probably follow. It's a tradition that is not always followed as the Liberals themselves didn't follow as in when new Tory Leader Brian Mulroney first ran in 1983 but given that they only got twelve percent in the last election here they might as well let this one pass. For their point the NDP has never recognized this "tradition" and always run a candidate but they got only three percent here so we can assume Poilievre will be back in the House probably sometime in the Summer or Fall.
While Poilievre has imposed absolute control over his caucus that does not mean he isn't immune from infighting coming from the party's Provincial wings. During the campaign Poilievre's campaign carried on nasty and very public feuds with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston, both of whom recently won easy victories. After getting high-handed treatment from the notoriously arrogant Poilievre and his staff and watching him then blow a twenty point lead both Premiers took their revenge by refusing endorse or campaign with him on the grounds of being “too busy", refusing to allow any of their MPs to do so either, leaking their displeasure to the press and making friendly statements about working with Carney. PEI's Tory Premier also refused to endorse but being from PEI he did it more quietly. After the election Ontario MP Poilievre loyalist Jamil Jivani (he's also a close crony of JD Vance and he attended the inauguration) publicly attacked Ford for being a traitor and sabotaging their Ontario campaign.
These internecine fireworks have provided great entertainment for the Liberals but while embarrassing are not actual threats to Poilievre, but Tory Alberta is another matter. Even before the election results were in, the right wing in Alberta were already making threats about separating from Canada if the Liberals won and since then the calls have gotten more shrill and have been encouraged by Alberta's Tory Premier Danielle Smith. The issue of Western Separatism (which is really limited to the right wing in the petro states of Alberta and Saskatchewan) would take another article but suffice it to say these kind of threats have happened anytime the Tories have lost an election in the last thirty years but the difference this time is that Alberta Premier Smith herself comes comes from the far right and she has been cynically amplifying and using them to demand sweeping demands from the Federal government some of which even Poilievre probably couldn't agree to. To up the ante she quickly changed the law to make it easier to hold referendums including one on separation. She says she doesn't actually support, at least not yet, as long as Carney gives into her demands of massive pipeline projects, wholesale changes to environmental laws that amount to abandoning climate change targets and changes to the tax code. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has joined in albeit more cautiously.
This creates problems for the untested Carney but it also creates problems for Poilievre who is now going to be running in an Alberta riding. In the past he's been able to brush past this issue and indeed given that he mostly talks to friendly media and otherwise limits questions to four per press conference with no follow ups he's never even been asked about it but those days are over. Running in Alberta he's not going to dodge taking sides especially if there actually is a referendum. Alberta Separatists take up no more than a quarter of the population but the are all Tories who will definitely demand he support Smith who is in turn widely loathed in the rest of Canada as a prima donna who increasingly who is at the very least weakening the country and playing into Trump's hands and at the most as a traitor. Note she also attended the Trump inauguration and journeyed down to Mar-A-Largo to pay tribute to the Dear Leader along with the even more hated Kevin O'Leary. Poilievre was able to sidestep her so far but he clearly can't continue to do so as she escalates just as he is running for a seat in Alberta. In the 1970's and 80's during the wars over Quebec separatism Liberal Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien both were elected MP's from Quebec but everybody knew they were staunch Federalists who were committed to defeating the separatists and were widely respected but we can safely say Pierre Poilievre is no Pierre Trudeau.
THE NDP;
While it was a frustrating night for the Tories it was an absolute disaster for the NDP who are roughly equivalent to the Labour Parties of the UK, Australia and New Zealand. In 2011 the NDP was the official opposition with 103 seats in the House, had won power for the first time in Alberta and all the very smart pundits were convinced they would absorb the shattered Liberals (who had an anemic 34 seats) and become Canada's second governing party as the UK Labour Party had done a century ago. Instead in a decade they have dramatically lost ground in every election as well as losing power provincially in Alberta and now they have dropped down to a pathetic seven seats and six percent of the vote for by far their worst results ever. It's true that they won only nine seats in 1993 and eight in 1958 but Parliament also had fewer seats than today. They lost ground and seats in every region including in former strongholds in Southern and Northern Ontario, Northern Manitoba and the BC Coast. They did easily hold on to their one seat in Montreal which was their only good news of the night along with one in Edmonton and another in Nunuvut but aside from a bare few seats in Vancouver and one in Winnipeg they don't really have any truly safe seats left. Like the Tories their Leader Jagmeet Singh also lost his seat in Burnaby BC coming in a distant third but unlike Poilievre he won't be sticking and immediately announced his resignation as Leader.
The collapse of the NDP had been predicted since the start of the campaign and while most of this benefited the Liberals as expected as left of center voters parked their votes with the Liberals as the party most likely to defeat the Tories and having reasonably similar policies however the Tories also ended up winning some of these seats due to vote splitting. More worrying for the NDP is that about a quarter of their vote that defected actually switched to the Tories following a trend which has been seen in America and Britain of some working class voters moving to the right. This is an existential question for the NDP who have always presented itself as the "Party Of The Working Class" and they do still have close links to labour unions, at least the union leaders, but the membership are more likely to vote Liberal or Conservative.
This election has also left the party in a structural crisis as they are broke and have no leader with Singh resigning with no obvious successor. It had long been assumed that this election (Singh's third) would result in a loss of seats and would be Singh's last with several possible successors ready to step up. Previously likely high profile candidates included popular Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante, former Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and recently departing MP Charlie Angus (who has been recently getting notice as a frequent guest on American TV) but after this disaster it's hard to see any of them taking on this thankless job especially Kinew and Plante who have actual power.
The scope of the NDP's collapse may have cost the Liberals a majority but it now provides protection for their minority government as their seven votes are enough to keep the Liberals in office which it's now in the NDP's best interest to do since they are too broke and leaderless will be in no shape to fight another election for the next few years. Carney made a pitch for those votes right out of the gates after the election by announcing he was planning to expand Dental Care to cover everyone. The popular Dental Care program (which the Tories of course opposed) was brought in by Trudeau as part of a deal with the NDP originally as coverage for retirees with the stated goal of eventually expanding it to cover everyone so Carney's announcement of doing so immediately was not entirely a surprise but it will allow the NDP to take enough credit and vote to support the government's first budget. In addition there are other non-policy perks Carney can offer. Under the rules of Parliament a party needs at least twelve seats to get "Official Party Status" which gives them certain privileges including the guaranteed right to speak during Question Period, seats on committees, office space and budgets for staff and research. With only seven seats the NDP has now lost all this and are now officially considered as "Independent MP's" in Parliament. Carney could ask the Speaker to grant them at least some of these privileges regardless and he probably will as an added incentive while the NDP rebuild. They're going to need it.
THE BLOC QUEBECOIS;
The BQ is a Quebec separatist party and they also did not have a great night having lost ten seats but they are in much better shape then the NDP and actually gained two seats from the Liberals. They are however similarly not interested in having another election for about the next two years. Unlike the NDP this is less due to their own losses but rather due their wanting to save their powder until the next Quebec election to be held some time by the fall of 2026. The BQ's cousins the provincial Parti Quebecois are technically separate parties but they obviously share the same membership, donors and campaign workers and they are going to want to allow the PQ, who are currently leading in the polls, to prepare for their election. As with the NDP there are some policy carrots the Liberal's can offer (including Dental care) to keep them onside and BQ Leader Yves Francois Blanchet quickly stated his willingness to work with Carney. The BQ obviously have their own agenda which is wildly different from the Liberals and NDP and are not the most reliable of partners. In the event of a PQ majority victory in 2026 they could easily turn on a dime but until then they have little interest to side with the Tories. The additional factor of Alberta separatists might seem to provide possible allies but the two groups hold each other with undisguised contempt. Western separatists are far right and historically anti-French openly referring to Quebecers as moochers who stand in the way of their sacred pipelines while Quebec nationalists are centre left on most issues and regard western separatists with sneering disdain with Blanchet dismissing they very idea saying that "having oil and gas does not represent a culture", comments that met predictable outrage in Alberta.
THE GREEN PARTY;
The Greens had two seats before the election including longtime Leader Elizabeth May on Vancouver Island and Mike Morrice in Kitchener, Ontario and they had hopes of perhaps gaining one or two more with former MP Paul Manly running in BC and Deputy Leader Johnathan Pedneault in Montreal. However when the smoke cleared May was the only Green left standing. Like the NDP the Greens vote total has also dropped in the last two elections from a high of over a million votes and three seats in 2019 to less then half that in the 2019 fiasco (when May had stepped down) and 240,000 in 2025. It's true that some of this latter drop was due to May's decision not to run a full slate of candidates so as to avoid the kind of vote splitting that might benefit the Tories but it's also true that many Green candidates got only a few hundred votes which are the kind of results the Greens used to get back in the 80's and 90's when they were considered a fringe party (full disclosure I ran as a Green in the 90's). May has been party Leader since 2006 minus two years when she stepped in 2019 only to be brought back after the disastrous 2021 election and she has been openly wanting to retire for real and electing any one of these other candidates as potential successors would have allowed her to safely do so but now that's unlikely. The Green's one seat doesn't carry a lot of leverage but she has expressed an interest in running for the Parliamentary Speakership and as Speakers normally only vote to break a tie and then traditionally vote with the government that could be slightly helpful to the Liberals and she’s generally seen as fair by anyone except Tory hacks. At any rate the Greens have no desire for another quick election and even less incentive to vote with the Tories on basically anything.
THE PEOPLE'S PARTY;
As a last note; this is a requiem for a lightweight. The PP is a far right populist party founded by Maxime Bernier, a former prominent Tory cabinet minister who ran for the Tory leadership in 2016, narrowly lost and then threw a hissy fit and stormed out to start his own party. If he had simply gone home and sulked he would undoubtedly have become the next Tory Leader and could easily have become Prime Minister by now but noooo. The PP gained plenty of media attention especially during COVID where Bernier supported the anti-vax trucker convoy (of course) and got the enthusiastic attention of the American online right including chummy interviews with Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk and Alex Jones. In the last two elections they took away enough votes from the Tories to cost them at least a half dozen seats. However Poilievre moving the Tories to the right took up the space Bernier had been occupying and the media tired of his antics and largely ignored him as he ran a culture war campaign against immigration and "wokism", denouncing Poilievre as a "fake conservative" and promising to end the trade war by ending support for the dairy industry. In exactly one riding in Milton, Ontario they cost the Tories a razor thin loss but otherwise they were not a factor and ended up getting fewer votes than the anemic Greens in spite of running more candidates. On election night I don't recall any networks even bothering to talk to Bernier. He and his zombie party insist they will trudge on since he can't return to the Tories and there's no real opening for him provincially in Quebec either and it's not like he has anything better to do but the People's Party is basically done.
One new result of this election is or the first time in Canada we are seeing election conspiracies coming from Conservatives whining about a “rigged election”. To be fair neither Poilievre nor any other prominent Tory is actually repeating them and it’s mostly being fed from sketchy social media accounts but post election polls show a quarter of Conservative votes are suspicious and this issue will need to be addressed but I’ll save that or another day.
