Mapped Results of the 2021 Canadian Federal Election

Elections Canada has just released the official results of 2021 Canadian federal election.

The official voting results present the results of the election in much greater detail than the validated results that were shared immediately after the election. While the results themselves do not change, the official voting results provide more context by combining multiple data sources—including updated data on the number of registered electors, demographic information on candidates and poll-by-poll results—and presenting the data as a complete package, shared in multiple formats.

Elections Canada

This detailed CSV files of these results were released on April 7th and include the poll-by-poll tallies of the 338 ridings. Those polls are neighbourhood-sized slices of Canada of under 1000 electors (some neighbourhoods are bigger depending on the geography, of course). There are, by my count, 69997 polling divisions in Canada.

As I do, I stayed up all night to crunch through the data and plot it in map format. This, because I know you prefer not to consume your elections data via spreadsheet.

You can dive in by starting at the national map and clicking on any riding of your choosing.

Kitchener Centre was picked up by the Green Party

It’s still early so I haven’t done too much analysis on these maps yet (please tell me what you discover!)

As we all know, Justin Trudeau was held to a minority government with no significant change in the seats between the Liberals and Conservative parties.

The Liberals chipped away at a few urban centres with the Conservatives picking up strength in eastern Canada.

Edmonton Centre votes in 2021. Liberal strength is plotted from green (strong) to red (weak) polls.
Coast of Bays–Central–Notre Dame was a pickup for the Conservatives in 2021. Scott Simms, the Liberal incumbent was retired after 17 years in office. Conservative strength plotted from green (strong) to red (weak).

There were some peculiarities of note. Take Saint Boniface–Saint Vital in Manitoba, for example. I believe they have the distinction of running the most candidates for office in 2021.

Democracy scenesters or an inside joke?

Since the last election, I’ve added a couple of features that make the mapping tool more interactive. You can search for riding in the search bar above any map. Clicking the “✨ Related content” button at the top right of the screen will show you ridings near the local map you’re looking at, and you can also view the history of the riding at a glance and navigate through last 8 elections. Even if the riding didn’t exist during a previous election, those nearest to the current mapped view will show up along the timeline.

Cliiiick ittt….
Get that context!
The history of the Milton riding!

As always, you can size up a map how you like it and click the download image button. Share these maps on Twitter and Instagram. Print them on a t-shirt and wear them proudly to your next family reunion. You’ll be glad you did!

You’ll be the coolest person on twitter when you download these maps to share.
Simcoe North has never looked so good!

I hope you enjoy this project as much I as enjoyed making it. If you have any feature requests, just let me know on twitter @stephen_taylor.

If you want to use the maps on your website, I’d appreciate a link back to my site so that more people can discover the project.

Thanks, and happy exploring!

Related:

The Stephen Taylor Data Project

CPC leadership race mapped out. Where will 2022’s hopefuls look to dominate membership sales?

Original mapping project announcement

Conservative Party leadership map

I heard that you might be interested in a map of the last Conservative Party leadership race.

Erin O’Toole resigned this week as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada after losing a caucus vote invoked under the Reform Act. Thirty-five members of the Conservative Parliamentary caucus signed a letter to remove O’Toole as leader, sparking a subsequent vote that O’Toole lost 73-45.

Followers of the blog will remember that I launched a project during the 2021 Canadian federal election that mapped out seven previous federal elections riding-by-riding and poll-by-poll.

Now that a leadership race for the Conservative Party of Canada is about to get underway, I thought it would be a good time to review the results of the 2020 Conservative Party leadership race and map them by riding and throughout each round of voting.

National map showing the results of the 2020 Conservative Party of Canada leadership race
The Conservative Party Leadership map (2020)

Erin O’Toole’s faced three competitors in that leadership race, Peter MacKay, Leslyn Lewis, and Derek Sloan.

Derek Sloan was removed from caucus and was barred from running as a Conservative in the election that would follow.

Leslyn Lewis and Peter MacKay may again be contenders in the upcoming leadership race. MacKay published an op-ed in the Toronto Sun outlining the need for unity in the party, while Leslyn Lewis is said to be considering a run.

From this map, we can see that Lewis was particulary popular in the Praisies and in northern British Columbia, while Peter MacKay racked up votes in Eastern Canada and parts of Quebec. Erin O’Toole, however, won the race by delivering a strong ground game in la belle province.

Map of Erin O'Toole's campaign strength in Quebec
Erin O’Toole’s campaign strength in Quebec

The relative strength of each candidate is graphed for each riding through each round of voting.

These maps should be useful to campaign managers to candidates in the upcoming race and should also be interesting to observers of partisan politics, no matter their party.

I’d like to map out previous leadership races for each political party. If you’re holding on to this data and would like to see it mapped out, please get in touch!

Political maps and data for Canadian electors!

Here’s something that should give every political nerd hours of material to pore over. The Stephen Taylor Data Project is releasing some political maps, graphs, and census data for your consumption during this latest Canadian general election.

This efforts is the culmination of months of spare-time effort to package historical election results in an easy-to-digest format for Canadians during this 44th general election. You can browse every general election from 2019 back through the year 2000 (7 elections) and look at historical trends on each, with every riding map broken down by polling division.

Canada’s 43rd Parliament as elected in the 2019 General Election

Furthermore, you can create maps of each riding based on the relative strength of the party in each poll of each riding

If you’ve ever wanted to understand Liberal voting patterns, appreciate Conservative strongholds on a granular level, be facinated by the NDP’s local strategy, or track the Green Party’s and Bloc’s ebbs and flows, now you can! We’ve even got Alliance and PC results from the days of yore to bookend a re-emerging trend of some vote-splitting on the right that began again in 2019.

The riding of Burnaby South by polling division, after the 2015 general election

In 2000, Joe Clark led the PC Party prior to their merger with the Alliance. This map shows where he was strong (green) and weak (red) in Calgary Centre.

I’ve also combined data from the last census – perfectly segmented by riding – to give insights on what motivates voters. For example, income and affordability are top-of-mind issues for a lot of Canadians during this election. This project helps you consider these factors in each riding and compare these trends both nationally and provincially.

The population distributions of Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River (left) and Nanaimo–Ladysmith (right)
The differences between rental vs ownership in the riding of Spadina–Fort York (left) versus the province of Ontario as a whole (right)

I’ve also put up historical polling data that you can browse and I have a visualization demonstrating the rise, fall, and sustained dominance of Canada’s various political parties, as elected by voters to Canada’s federal Parliament.

A streamgraph visualization of Canada’s history of elections.

You can take a snapshot of each map by clicking the camera icon 📷 at the top of each geographic visualization. The images I’ve shared in this post were created this way. Go ahead and take snapshots of your favourite ridings (and favourite elections!) and share these images on social media. If you’re writing for a news outlet and you find any of this useful, please link to this post and to the Stephen Taylor Data Project! If you’re an avid twitter user, please tweet about this project.

So, please take a look and I hope that you enjoy! This work is being made available to general public and to every partisan of every party. I believe very strongly in a more representative democracy and believe that when more data becomes available and accessible that describes the shape of the Canadian vote, the more responsive our candidates can be in meeting that representation.

The riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith in British Columbia, 2015 results

The project was coded using ReactJS, using both NoSQL (MongoDB) and relational (MySQL) databases to serve data through a common GraphQL layer facilitated by Apollo client on a Node.js server. Four gigabytes of GeoJSON files were constructed locally using some more of that server-side javascript magic. Those files are served via AWS S3, and are visualized for the end-user using the Leaflet library. Infographics SVGs are assembled using D3JS.