Federal election 2025: Mark Carney and the Liberals will form minority government

OTTAWA—U.S. President Donald Trump, the elephant in the room of the 2025 Canadian election, agreed to meet Prime Minister Mark Carney in the days ahead after calling to congratulate the Canadian leader who squeaked through with a minority win, not the “strong mandate” Carney sought for their looming trade negotiation.

The congratulatory call from Trump came around midday, as Carney was still uncertain whether his election victory would tip into a majority win with a handful of seats teetering between Liberals and opposition candidates.

By late day, official results confirmed the Liberals remained three seats shy of a majority and are beholden to brokering deals with their political rivals to pass a Throne Speech, money supply bills for government operations, a late spring federal budget, and any legislation to implement Carney’s promised tax cut by July 1.

Read the full story from Tonda MacCharles

Jagmeet Singh is a champagne socialist who doesn’t drink; a hipster, with bespoke three-piece suits; a religious Sikh who never truly connected with Quebecers nor his party’s blue-collar base. He’s not a policy wonk. He never looked like or spoke like a politician. Singh just seemed like a guy who waltzed onto the federal political scene, wanting to make a difference, never unencumbered by the rules of the game.

Late Monday evening, flanked by his wife, Singh announced that his seven-and-a-half-year tenure as the federal NDP leader had come to an end.

Many New Democrats will welcome the chance for the party to hit the reset button. Singh’s leadership win in 2017 was full of promise after former leader Thomas Mulcair was ousted for running a disappointing 2015 election campaign, one that saw the NDP drop from its high-water mark of 103 seats under Jack Layton to 44, and the loss of Official Opposition status. New Democrats hoped they’d found their own Justin Trudeau, a hip, youthful leader who could energize the party’s base, bring in donors and new Canadians.

Read the full column from Althia Raj

VANCOUVER — One day after their worst election ever, federal New Democrats found themselves clinging to life with barely any seats, a defeated leader on his way out, and major questions about the party’s future in Canadian politics.

Polls suggested the NDP was in trouble, and the result in Monday’s federal election was worse: a drop from 24 to just seven seats, at most, with the loss of extra resources and privileges in Parliament since the party didn’t win enough ridings to be recognized officially in the House of Commons.

Now begins the process to reckon with the heartbreak that was evident in a Burnaby, B.C., hotel ballroom, as the NDP’s three-election leader Jagmeet Singh — who lost badly in his riding in the city — announced he will resign when the party chooses his interim replacement.

More from Mark Ramzy and Alex Ballingall

OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is not the prime minister. As of Tuesday morning, he was not even an MP.

At the nexus of those two outcomes, which just months ago would have been nearly unthinkable, is a maelstrom of questions: How are Conservatives processing the results? Can Poilievre stay on as leader after failing to form government and losing the seat he has represented for more than 20 years? And how can he helm a newly expanded caucus from outside the House of Commons?

Inside the blue tent, Conservatives appear divided on how to answer those questions, according to several who spoke to the Star on Tuesday. While the Tories increased their seat count more than any other party, posting breakthroughs in the GTA and elsewhere in Ontario where they sought to make key gains, they nevertheless failed to unseat the governing Liberals and stop the rise of Mark Carney amid the collapse of the NDP.

Read the full story from Raisa Patel and Alex Ballingall

Who can do the recount varies by province. In Ontario, judges of the Superior Court of Justice have authority to conduct a recount. A full list of eligible judges is available here.

A judge must conduct the recount within four days of receiving an application.

Recounts automatically happen when the margin of victory is less than one-thousandth of the totals votes cast.

For example, if there were 40,000 total votes cast in a riding, the margin of victory would have to be fewer than 40 votes to trigger a recount.

Recounts can also happen if a judge believes there was an error in the original counting.

Across the country, there are two races in which the final vote count is separated by fewer than 40 votes: Quebec’s riding of Terrebonne and Newfoundland’s Terra Nova—The Peninsulas.

Because they’re so close, a recount will be triggered automatically. 

Carney spent his first day back on Parliament Hill in meetings. In addition to Trump, he also spoke by phone with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Bloc leader Yves-Francois Blanchet.

Two of the other party leaders, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and Green co-leader Elizabeth May had called Carney to congratulate him last night.

A PMO spokesperson said that no date has been set for that meeting, and it is not clear where it will occur, in Canada or the U.S.

However the spokesperson said it is not likely to happen this week.

The PMO readout of their call says Trump congratulated Carney on his election. “The leaders agreed on the importance of Canada and the United States working together – as independent, sovereign nations – for their mutual betterment. To that end, the leaders agreed to meet in person in the near future.”

Prime minister Carney also had a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron today.

The two leaders discussed their “ongoing work to deepen defence and commercial ties.”

U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday, according to a statement just released from Carney’s office.

The statement said Trump congratulated Carney on his win and the two sides agreed to meet in the near future.

“The leaders agreed on the importance of Canada and the United States working together – as independent, sovereign nations – for their mutual betterment. To that end, the leaders agreed to meet in person in the near future.”

The day after a very late Canadian election, Toronto Star Ottawa deputy bureau chief Alex Ballingall and Ottawa bureau reporters Ryan Tumilty, Raisa Patel and Mark Ramzy, sit down with host Althia Raj on the “It’s Political” podcast.

Listen to the whole episode and subscribe here.

Corey Hogan was bleary-eyed and a little nervous the day after winning the only Liberal seat in Calgary.

Hogan, who was named a replacement candidate in Calgary Confederation a week into the campaign, said he has no idea what he’s supposed to do next as a new member of Parliament.

“I am the deer in the headlights,” Hogan joked Tuesday in an interview with The Canadian Press. “I refused to look up anything about the nuts and bolts of being an MP out of superstition, so last night I’m sitting there at 2 in the morning Googling ‘How do you get sworn in as an MP?’

Read the full report from The Canadian Press.

Elections Canada is reporting voter turnout in this election was 68.48 per cent, which is the highest turnout since 1993.

Vince Gasparro, the new MP for Eglinton-Lawrence, credits his victory to a “reinvigorated Liberal party with a new prime minister.”

Gasparro, a former finance executive who held a senior post in John Tory’s office when he was Toronto mayor, spoke to the Star on Tuesday after his win over star Conservative candidate Karen Stintz, a former city councillor and TTC chair, was confirmed.

“It feels great,” he said after final results confirmed he beat Stintz by 875 votes. Gasparro ran for the Ontario Liberals in the riding in the February provincial race, losing to a Progressive Conservative by 167 votes.

When Prime Minister Mark Carney triggered the federal election in March, the party asked Gasparro, a longtime Liberal who advised Paul Martin when he was prime minister, to resurrect his campaign. He still had a lease on his provincial campaign office and a squad of volunteers.

Gasparro credits the leadership of Carney, a former central banker, in standing up to U.S. President Donald Trump, and his threats of annexation and tariffs, with helping him best Stintz in a hard-fought contest.

“We built a team of Liberals but also disaffected Conservatives, New Democrats and Greens behind a prime minister who is fiscally responsible and socially progressive,” said Gasparro, who grew up in the riding.

Another riding that we flagged, Vancouver Kingsway, has been decided now that all votes have been counted.

NDP MP Don Davies maintained his lead with a margin of 310 votes with all polls now reporting.

An incredibly narrow lead for the Liberals in Terra Nova—The Peninsulas, in Newfoundland now that final results are in.

Liberal candidate Anthony Germain has won the riding with a 12-vote margin, which will trigger an automatic recount.

Canadians have entrusted the Liberals with a rare fourth consecutive mandate. This time, it will be the job of Mark Carney — the longtime central banker turned novice politician — to respond to U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and his threats to Canadian sovereignty.

For the Liberals, though, this is not the landslide victory that some polls had predicted. The party is projected to hold fewer seats than the 172 required for a majority.

We have the first result now in these closely watched final ridings.

Cloverdale—Langley City has been declared a Conservative win as MP Tamara Jansen is still ahead after the final votes are cast. She has a 769 vote lead.

Terrebone in Quebec where they have just a 35 point lead with all polls in.

And Terra Nova—The Peninsulas, in Newfoundland where they have a 46 point lead.

A Liberal majority is starting to move out the realm of the possible, but there are three ridings in British Columbia that could tip the Liberals into a majority if they move into the lead when the final ballots are counted.

Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge where the Conservatives lead with seven polls left to come.

Cloverdale Langley City where the Conservatives lead with two polls left to come.

Vancouver Kingsway - where NDP MP Don Davies is leading by 308 votes right now and there is one poll left to report.

Here’s another one in Ontario in the hotly contested new riding of Milton East—Halton Hills South.

Conservative candidate Parm Gill has won the riding over Liberal Kristina Tesser Derksen.

This is essentially a new riding made up of partly of Milton, which voted Liberal in the last election and Halton Hills, which voted Conservative.

That riding was decided by 298 votes

It seems the last votes counted as part of special ballots are now coming through, finalizing a couple of Ontario races we have been watching.

Hamilton East—Stoney Creek

Liberal incumbent Chad Collins has lost with the final to Conservative Ned Kuruc with the final votes now in. Kuruc has won the riding by 1,493 votes.

Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore 

Liberal MP Irek Kusmierczyk has lost his seat to Conservative Kathy Borrelli. With the last results in Borrelli has a 233 vote lead.

The Conservatives started this election with a different candidate in the riding, but the previous candidate Mark McKenzie was removed after comments on a comedy podcast emerged where he suggested Justin Trudeau should be put to death.

NDP MP Lori Idlout has been re-elected in Nunavut with a 77-vote margin. That is a riding that we have been waiting to hear about all day.

We just had a new result for the first time in hours as the vote counts were finished in Terrebonne a riding in Quebec.

Liberal candidate Tatiana Auguste has been declared the winner with all polls reporting, she has a 35-vote lead over the Bloc candidate who was leading until just now.

A 35-point lead will lead to an automatic recount.

This brings the Liberals to 169 seats, just three shy of a majority.

Mark Carney must have mixed emotions today.

He is ecstatic after winning Monday’s election. When the calendar flipped to 2025, the Liberal Party of Canada seemed more doomed than Romeo and Juliet. Justin Trudeau was less popular than gonorrhea. The early prediction markets called for a Pierre Poilievre landslide. That poor bastard ended up losing his own seat. That’s like choking to death on a macaroon at your bake sale.

But this Canadian election was always a reflecting pool into America.

Read the full column from the Star’s Vinay Menon.

Elections Canada said they believe all results will be published today, as the last few undecided ridings in the country have just a few thousands votes to count that could decide whether Mark Carney governs with a Liberal majority or minority.

“Our staff continue to count ballots and report on results until all results are published. We expect all results to be published today,” said Dugald Maudsley, an Elections Canada spokesperson. “This was a high-interest election. More electors than ever opted to take advantage of early voting options, including voting at advance polls and voting by special ballot.”

Maudsley said they received 10 to 15 thousand votes just before the 6 p.m. deadline on Monday, and are working to get through them and other votes that need to be tallied.

“It is important to note that in anticipation of a busy election day, we hired additional special ballot offices and added over 20 additional counting tables to help speed up the counting process.”

Special ballots or mail-in ballots go out before ballots are printed in a riding and voters write in their choice. As a results, they take a little longer to counts, Maudsley said.

“The increase in early votes, particularly special ballots, can increase counting times as the process is somewhat different than counting regular ballots used on election day.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived on Parliament Hill Tuesday morning uncertain whether his election victory would tip into a majority win, with several seats still teetering between Liberals and opposition candidates.

But Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet offered an olive branch to help the Liberal leader govern as if he had a majority for “about a year or more,” and called for a partisan “truce” and an alliance among parties in order for the federal government to get through looming negotiations with the Trump administration on trade and security.

Read the full story from the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief Tonda MacCharles.

The New Democratic Party is in dire straights after what may be its worst election performance in history.

The party had won or was leading in seven ridings as of early Tuesday afternoon — fewer than a third of its 24 seats going into the election. As a result, it will lose its official party status in the House of Commons, as well as the privileges attached to the designation.

Read the full report from the Star’s Kevin Jiang.

WINNIPEG - Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew is congratulating Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Liberal party for their election victory.

Wab Kinew says in a social media post that he looks forward to continued work building Canada with Carney’s federal government.

The Liberals were on track to add to their seat count in Manitoba, while the NDP were nearly shut out.

Much of the Liberals’ support in Manitoba is concentrated in Winnipeg.

Read the full story here from the Canadian Press

Is this election the beginning of change in Brampton?

It is often said the path to election victory runs through the 905, and on the face of it, the Liberals won 5 of 6 ridings in Brampton, but if you scratch a little deeper and look at the numbers, this night could have been very different.

Amarjeet Gill is the new Conservative MP in Brampton West, beating Kamal Khera who had been the Liberal MP since 2015. In Brampton’s six ridings, there were five Liberal incumbents, two of them running in newly drawn ridings. The other four won, but they were all in really tight races, separated by a few percentage points and the largest margin being just over 1,800 votes.

This proves that the time the Conservatives are putting into courting the South Asian vote in this area is working. Pierre Poilievre held large rallies in this area, and the ground game for many first-time candidates turned out to be quite strong.

Amandeep Sodhi is the new Liberal MP who won in Brampton Centre over another first timer, Taran Chahal, but she won by 176 votes.

If we go back to the polls sometime soon, could Gill’s win be the beginning of a blue wave in Brampton?

Brampton West: Amarjeet Gill (CON) 20,986 49.96

Kamal Khera (LIB) (Incumbent) 19,954 47.5

Brampton Centre:

Amandeep Sodhi (LIB) 18,491 47.85

Taran Chahal (CON) 18,315 47.4

Brampton-North Caledon:

Ruby Sahota (LIB) (Incumbent) 22,346 48.82

Amandeep Judge (CON) 21,809 47.65

Brampton South:

Sonia Sidhu (LIB) (Incumbent) 21,477 49.16

Sukhdeep Kang (CON) 20,844 47.71

Brampton East:

Maninder Sidhu (LIB) (Incumbent) 23,350 48.52

Bob Dosanjh Singh (CON) 21,533 44.75

Brampton-Chinguacousey Park:

Shafqat Ali (LIB) 21,168 48.75

Tim Iqbal (CON) 19,339 44.54

With just over 99 per cent of ballots counted, voter turnout in Canada’s 2025 federal election has surpassed the last two campaigns.

While Elections Canada has yet to finish its count and release the official numbers, the agency is reporting a turnout of 68.7 per cent as of Tuesday evening.

That means more than 19.2 million Canadians cast a ballot in Monday’s election.

See the Star’s full breakdown here. 

Conservative candidate Karen Stintz has conceded a close race in Eglinton-Lawrence won by Liberal Vince Gasparro.

Stintz, a former city councillor and TTC chair, told the Star on Tuesday that the loss surprised her because her team had “unbelievable identified support” and a great “ground game” to ensure those supporters got to the ballot box.

“I think that (U.S. President) Trump was a factor and the Liberals were able to capitalize on creating a ballot question, that ‘The bogeyman to the south was a real threat.’ The reality is, it was the last nine years of Liberal policies that have created the conditions in this country that I think made us vulnerable,: she said. “But they created the ballot question and that was how people voted.”

Stintz, who served as chief executive of Variety Village after leaving city hall, and resigned that job to run federally, said she doesn’t know what is next for her.

“I’m still processing and it’s going to take a couple of days,” she said, “but I’m not done yet.”

Gasparro told the Star that he won’t comment until one final poll result for Eglinton-Lawrence is reported.

Mark Carney’s Liberals won have won the 2025 federal election, completing a stunning comeback over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.

Use our interactive map to see how the votes broke down in each riding — and where the votes changed in the last four years.  

Final results for a handful of close ridings are pending, which will decide if the Liberals have won a majority or minority mandate from voters.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet is the only leader speaking publicly today.

He told reporters that he was disappointed in the overall result, but believes his party held off a significant challenge.

“We have controlled a wave with our bare hands so we are entitled to be proud, but I lost some very close friends and those people will get my attention first,” he said.

Blanchet said the threat from the U.S. and Liberals clever use of that threat drove away some Quebec voters. He said Canada will have to renegotiate a deal with the U.S., but he doesn’t expect this coming likely minority Parliament to last a long time.

He said he doesn’t expect a supply and confidence agreement between the NDP and the Liberals in the last Parliament.

“The marriage between the NDP and the Liberals brought the NDP from 25 to seven. I am not sure I would do try that another time.”

Even without a seat in Parliament, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre remains in the job of Conservative leader, at least for now.

Early Tuesday morning, the Star was able to declare that Poilievre will lose his riding of Carleton. The partially suburban, partially rural riding Ottawa-area riding has sent him to the House of Commons for 20 years, but Liberal Bruce Fanjoy claimed the seat.

Poilievre won the party leadership in 2022 with a resounding vote from the party’s base who support him.

The Conservative Party Constitution allows for a leader without a seat in Parliament, in fact, it even allows for the party to provide the leader with a salary if they are not receiving one as an MP.

The party constitution does require a vote of party members on Poilievre’s leadership at the next national convention, which should take place sometime in 2025. If more than 50 per cent of people at that convention want a leadership race than one takes place.

On April 12, 33 prominent Canadian business leaders, most of them active or retired CEOs, published an open letter in several newspapers endorsing Pierre Poilievre’s bid to become the next prime minister of Canada.

So, here we are, fresh from Mark Carney’s Monday victory in staying on as PM, and the business leaders must be disappointed.

But they shouldn’t be, because Carney has promised to do most of what they called for in their ad, headlined “Friends of Free Enterprise in Canada: Time for a Change.”

Read the full column from David Olive. 

Canadians won’t know until later Tuesday whether Mark Carney’s Liberals have won a majority or minority mandate from voters.

Elections Canada decided early Tuesday morning to pause the marathon counting of special ballots with a handful of ridings still too close to call.

The counting was to resume at 9:30 a.m. ET.

Read the full story from the Canadian Press.

The Canadian Press decision desk is projecting that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has lost in the Ottawa riding of Carleton.

Poilievre first took the seat in 2004 and won it six subsequent times.

Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy was leading in the riding by more than 3,700 votes with over 99 per cent of polls reporting.

Fanjoy, a political rookie, tirelessly knocked on doors in his bid to unseat Poilievre, saying the riding deserved better.

In an address to supporters after midnight, Poilievre acknowledged the Conservative party’s defeat at the hands of the Liberals in the general election, but indicated he would continue as leader.

Read more from the Canadian Press.

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper took to social media Tuesday morning to send Carney his “sincere congratulations.”

“I wish him, and the government he will lead, success as they navigate our country forward during these challenging times,” Harper said.

The former Tory leader also congratulated Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives on making “significant” gains in seats and in their share of the popular vote, as well as “bringing an entire new generation of Canadians to the Conservative Party.”

Harper had previously endorsed Poilievre and downplayed Carney’s role in avoiding a recession during the global financial crisis of 2008-09, when Carney served as governor of the Bank of Canada.

Diana Fox Carney has scored hat tricks in hockey, worked for think tanks and consultants, and gotten in hot water with the British tabloids. As Mark Carney’s Liberals won in Canada’s narrow, high-stakes federal election, his wife has been thrust into the spotlight. She has appeared alongside her husband on the campaign trail, door-knocked for him in his prospective Ottawa riding and occasionally introduced him at rallies. Fox Carney was not been as visible as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s wife, Anaida, but she has made an impression just the same. So who is she, really? Read the profile

Doug Ford issued a statement on Carney’s victory on Tuesday.

“I want to congratulate Prime Minister Mark Carney on his election victory. I also want to thank Pierre Poilievre, Jagmeet Singh and every candidate who put their name on a ballot for their service to our democracy,” the premier said.

“This election comes at a crucial time for Ontario and for Canada. Workers, families and businesses are navigating the economic uncertainty caused by President Trump’s tariffs and they are counting on all levels of government to work together to protect Canada,” he said.

As the federal Conservatives assess a campaign that saw leader Pierre Poilievre lose his Ottawa-area seat of Carleton, they are pointing fingers at the most powerful Tory in Ontario.

Premier Doug Ford, who had publicly blasted Poilievre for not using the Progressive Conservatives’ roadmap to re-election in the Feb. 27 provincial vote, was under attack early Tuesday.

“He couldn’t stay out of our business, always getting his criticisms and all his opinions out, distracting our campaign, trying to make it about him, trying to position himself as some kind of political genius that we needed to be taking cues from,” a furious Tory MP Jamil Jivani (Bowmanville-Oshawa North) told CBC’s David Common in a candid interview.

Read the full story from Robert Benzie. 

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow congratulated Prime Minister Mark Carney on his win in a Tuesday morning post on X.

“I look forward to working together to build more affordable homes faster, fight rising costs, and get Toronto moving by building more transit,” Chow said. “Faced with the tariff threat, the City of Toronto is ready to work with the federal government to protect workers and businesses.”

Chow thanked “every candidate that put their name forward here in Toronto and across the country.”

After a wave of election results overnight, there are still 16 ridings that have yet to be fully counted and called:

• Carleton
• Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam
• Kelowna
• Nunavut
• Terrebonne
• Longueuil—Saint-Hubert
• Terra Nova—The Peninsulas
• Eglinton—Lawrence
• Brampton North—Caledon
• Brampton Centre
• Kitchener—Conestoga
• Skeena—Bulkley Valley
• Cloverdale—Langley City
• Fleetwood—Port Kells
• New Westminster—Burnaby—Maillardville
• Vancouver Kingsway

The tightest Liberal-Conservative races include:

• Eglinton—Lawrence where Liberal Vince Gasparro is leading with 29,044 votes to Conservative’s Karen Stintz’s 28,509
• Brampton Centre, where Liberal Amandeep Sodhi is leading with 18,491 over Conservative Taran Chahal’s 18,315
• Kitchener—Conestoga, where Liberal Tim Louis is ahead with 29,588 over Conservative Doug Treleaven 29,217
• Kelowna, where Liberal Stephen Fuhr is pulling ahead with 26,061 over Conservative Tracy Gray’s 25,891

Elections Canada is slated to resume counting special ballots at 9:30 a.m. EST.

CBC and CTV are projecting the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has lost his Ottawa-area riding of Carleton.

Liberal Bruce Fanjoy is expected to win. Poilievre has held the riding since its creation in 2015. He held parts of the riding prior to this when it was under a different name and boundary. In recent days, the Conservatives dispatched staffers and volunteers to the riding for a last-minute blitz after internal polling showed Poilievre was vulnerable.

Poilievre can still lead the Conservative party without holding a seat.

Global reaction is pouring in after Prime Minister Mark Carney led the Liberal Party to victory in Monday’s federal election.

It is the party’s fourth straight election win, although it’s not clear if the Liberals will have a minority or majority government.

Here’s a look at what world leaders and other prominent figures are saying:

“I congratulate Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberal Party on their success in Canada’s election. I’m confident Mark will be a strong leader for the fundamental values and interests Canadians and Americans share.” - Former United States president Joe Biden.

“Congratulations to Prime Minister Mark Carney on your victory. In a time of global uncertainty, I look forward to continuing to work with you to build on the enduring friendship between our nations, in the shared interests of all our citizens.” - Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Read the full report from The Canadian Press

Keir Starmer, prime minister of the U.K., congratulated Carney on his election victory.

“With your leadership, and personal ties to the U.K., I know the relationship between our two countries will continue to grow,” Starmer wrote in a statement.

Carney attended the University of Oxford and was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. His wife, Diana Fox Carney, grew up in England.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, also congratulated Carney and the Liberal Party on their election win.

“I look forward to working closely together, both bilaterally and within the G7,” she wrote in a post to X.

“We’ll defend our shared democratic values, promote multilateralism, and champion free and fair trade.”

The Canadian Press has called a race — this time out in B.C.

The riding of Surrey Newton will remain Liberal, with incumbent Sukh Dhaliwal holding on against a challenge from the Conservatives. With 94 per cent of polls reporting, Dhaliwal leads by about 1,200 votes.

There are now 15 remaining uncalled races across Canada.

See the full results for the riding of Surrey Newton here.

Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy’s lead has widened once again. He’s now leading Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre by more than 3,000 votes — although the race has still not been called.

Check out the full results for the riding of Carleton as they are released, here

If you’re just joining us (why would you be joining us at 3 a.m.??), here’s why it might be taking so long to get a call in Pierre Poilievre’s Carleton riding:

• First, the riding was targeted by the Longest Ballot Initiative, an activist group protesting Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system. It had 91 candidates on it and reportedly measured nearly a meter long. Elections Canada said it would take them about five times longer to count the ballots because of their length.
• Second, Carleton had more advance ballots than any other riding in Canada. There were nearly 44,000 votes cast before election day.

As an added complication, Elections Canada warned that there could be a greater number of spoiled ballots in the riding due to the size of the ballots.

Across the country, we’ve got a few races that are separated by less than 100 votes. In these types of races, what would it take for a recount to happen? Here are your questions, answered.

How close does a race have to be to trigger a recount?

Recounts automatically happen when the margin of victory is less than one-thousandth of the totals votes cast. For example, if there were 40,000 total votes cast in a riding, the margin of victory would have to be fewer than 40 votes to trigger a recount.

Recounts can also happen if a judge believes there was an error in the original counting.

When does a recount happen?

A judge must conduct the recount within four days of receiving an application.

Who does the recount?

It varies by province. In Ontario, judges of the Superior Court of Justice have authority to conduct a recount. A full list of eligible judges is available here.

Minute by minute, we are chipping away at the final votes in Pierre Poilievre’s Carleton riding. We now have 24 polls left to be counted and the race is narrower than ever.

Liberal Bruce Fanjoy is leading, 49.6 per cent to 46.9 per cent. That’s a difference of 1,673 votes.

Donald Trump went on social media on Canada’s election day to endorse himself as the best leader for this country.

Canadians politely disagreed, handing victory to Mark Carney and the Liberals — a vote for stability amid the chaos Trump keeps wanting to wreak on Canada.

Perhaps Trump will want to let that sink in. Canadians don’t want to be the 51st state, as Trump argued again in that Truth Social post, and when they want to be led by a governor, they mean a former bank governor.

Read the full column from Susan Delacourt

In any normal federal election, if you were trying to sum up how things looked from the city of Toronto after all the ballots were cast, you’d have obvious local issues to look at. Mayor Olivia Chow summed a few up in a recent interview with the Star: funding for mass transit, for affordable housing, for the mayor’s school nutrition programs. The fate of those things will still affect us — the mayor appears to have a partner in “getting the government back in the business of building housing” in now-elected Prime Minister Mark Carney — but at least in the moment, they also seem like kind of a footnote.

Because this hasn’t been any normal federal election. It hasn’t even been simply an unusual federal election. It has been a one-of-a-kind unicorn of an election marked by a federal existential crisis that capsized every expectation of what this was about.

And made local concerns take kind of a back seat. Local loyalties, maybe, too.

Read the full column from Edward Keenan

If you’re looking for drama, these are the ridings where you’ll find it.

In Newfoundland, Terra Nova—The Peninsulas has only one poll not reporting and just 46 votes separating the Liberal and Conservative candidates.

Montreal’s Terrebonne riding has the Bloc and Liberal candidates separated by only 28 votes. The top candidates in Kelowna are separated by 66 votes.

These ridings — three of the 19 still up in the air — are part of the reason why the Canadian Press has been unable to project either a majority or minority government for Mark Carney’s Liberals. And so we wait.

So the Liberals are now up to 167 seats: Still five seats short of a majority government.

It dawns on me that, in an election that was supposed to be about delivering a strong mandate in order to respond to the most severe existential threat this country has faced in a century, neither man could clinch it. I wonder if anyone will learn the right lesson from that.

There is a band setting up at Liberal HQ, Carney was, I guess, the opening act.

We won’t know about the actual turnout until Elections Canada releases the official numbers, but the fact that Ontario recorded the biggest jump in advance voting compared to four years ago suggests turnout will be robust.

Just a few months ago, during February’s provincial election, turnout was low — even as Doug Ford’s Conservatives framed the campaign around the urgent need for a stronger mandate to protect Ontarians. That call to action barely moved the needle.

That’s likely because Ford’s re-election felt inevitable. Voters could stay home without consequence. This time, it was different. Voters seemed determined to show up — either to send the Liberals packing, or to elect a banker as prime minister, hoping he’ll be the one to “keep Canada strong.”

Still with us? It’s now closing in on 2 a.m., and we’re still watching Pierre Poilievre’s riding of Carleton.

Here’s where things stand at the moment: 221 of 266 polls are reporting, and Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy is leading Poilievre by just over 2,000 votes.

That’s basically where things have stood for most of the night. 

The Canadian Press has yet to call the riding either way. It is one of 18 seats across the country that haven’t been called.

We’re already getting language from Carney about working constructively with the other parties in Parliament. It seems like he’s not going to have much of a choice in the matter. While we’re still waiting on some ridings to be called, it looks like the Liberals will need support from another party — perhaps two parties — in order to govern.

It will be interesting to see what form that cooperation takes. We know that Justin Trudeau preferred to work on a vote-by-vote basis, but eventually signed a confidence-and-supply agreement with the NDP — that deal probably contributed to the NDP’s miserable results tonight. Could we see a formal coalition with the NDP? If so, will he need Elizabeth May to step up and become speaker? Or will he need to knock on the Bloc’s door?

Donald Trump couldn’t resist posting about the election in what he believes should be the 51st state. Mr. Trump will now be dealing with a governor — not a state governor, but the former governor of two central banks.

Mark Carney, the banker, has made it clear he’ll only engage with Trump if there’s genuine respect for Canada’s sovereignty — embodying the Canadian banking ethos of measured authority. Trump may find a Carney-led Canada a unique challenge. He’s used to the U.S. banker style: aggressively competitive, always chasing the deal — a reflection of a very different banking culture.

We might just witness a fable play out in real time: the banker and the bully.

• In Terrebonne, the Bloc Québécois leads the Liberals by 28 votes out of more than 56,000 ballots cast.
• In the Newfoundland riding of Terra Nova—The Peninsulas, the Liberals lead by 46 votes out of more than 40,000 ballots cast.
• The Liberals lead the Conservatives in Brampton Centre by 142 votes, with more than 33,000 votes cast.
• In Brampton South, the Liberals lead the Conservatives by 300 votes out of more than 40,000 ballots cast.
• The Conservatives lead the Liberals in Brampton North by a mere 174 votes, with more than 30,000 votes cast.
• In Nipissing—Timiskaming, the Liberals are ahead of the Conservatives by 25 votes, with more than 50,000 votes cast.
• In Kelowna, the Liberals lead the Conservatives by 56 votes, with more than 50,000 ballots cast.
• In Vancouver Kingsway, the NDP leads the Liberals by 315 votes, with more than 45,000 ballots cast.
• In Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, the Liberals lead the NDP by 325 votes, with 33,000 votes cast.
• In Fleetwood—Port Kells, the Liberals lead the Conservatives by 363 votes, with more than 22,000 votes cast.

Stepping on stage to chants of his name, Liberal Leader Mark Carney asked his supporters: “Who is ready?”

“Who is ready to stand up for Canada with me?” Carney said. “Who is ready to build Canada Strong?”

Speaking to a crowd at a central Ottawa hockey arena, Carney vowed to work with all Canadians — including other parties — in his new government.

“No matter how you voted, I will always do my best to represent everyone that calls Canada home,” Carney said.

He thanked the leaders of the other parties for their contributions to Canada while also weighing in on the race in Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s riding of Carleton, which has yet to be called but is led by Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy.

“I’m looking forward to working with Bruce Fanjoy,” Carney said. “He will be a great MP.”

He also reiterated that Canada can no longer rely on its trade relationship with the U.S. as President Donald Trump threatens Canada’s sovereignty.

“America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” Carney said. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, ever happen.”

Carney spoke of his trip to Gander early on in the campaign. He said the kindness Canada showed on 9/11 is reflected throughout the country.

“We become just by doing just acts. We become brave by doing brave acts,” Carney said. “When we are Canadian, Canada grows.”

He ended his speech on a patriotic note, saying his government will build a stronger country with Canadians.

“We will protect our workers and our business and above all we will build an independent future for our country,” he said. “We will build Canada strong, Canada free, Canada forever.”

Burnaby Central, Jagmeet Singh’s riding, has been called for the Liberals. What was projected to be a three-way race ended up being between only the Liberals and Conservatives, with the NDP leader finishing a distant third.

Mark Carney’s wife Diana takes the stage to introduce her husband.

“Thank you for choosing my husband’s vision for a positive, unified and above all a strong country,” she says.

She says her husband has grown over the campaign, but largely remained the same person.

“Consistent, compassionate, loyal and driven by an exceptionally strong set of values.”

It’s just after 10:00 p.m. in British Columbia, where I suspect Don Urquhart is watching the results with more than passing interest. Urquhart isn’t a candidate. He’s the editor of the Times Chronicle — and the journalist who found himself on the receiving end of a now-viral exchange with Pierre Poilievre in Oliver, B.C., in the South Okanagan–West Kootenay riding. The clip, featuring Poilievre calmly munching on an apple while dressing down Urquhart, went live in October 2023 — back when the Conservatives were leading the Liberals by 12 points. By January, that gap had widened to 23. And then it began to melt. At the time, conservative media celebrated the moment. Fox News said Poilievre was “batting down a reporter’s questions.” The Daily Mail praised him for “calmly tearing apart a reporter.” Megyn Kelly asked, “Can we get him in our country?” And The National Post called it a “masterclass in political jiu-jitsu.” Even Elon Musk weighed in: “Never heard of him before, but this interview is fire emoji. ”The apple moment will no doubt be studied as part of political history. But tonight, it also stands as a cautionary tale: in politics, tearing down a reporter may get clicks — and lose the bigger campaign.

If Poilievre does indeed lose his seat — which is looking increasingly likely — he will need to divide his time campaigning against Carney, campaigning against his critics in his party, and campaigning for his seat.

I’m not sure how that math works, but Poilievre clearly signalled that he’s not planning on going anywhere. And he has worked feverishly to ensure that that are no other powerbases in his caucus. I know Conservatives are taking stock of these results: They are far from the worst case scenario, but the current results raise the question: Can Poilievre, who has proved to be a deeply polarizing figure, ever do better than this?

At Liberal HQ, Mark Carney is expected soon, a crowd of supporters is taking the stage to stand behind him and cheer.

There are also a lot of supporters standing in front of Carney of course. The arena the Liberals are in tonight — or I guess now this morning — is the home of the Ottawa 67s.

Ottawa’s main convention centre was booked with the Conservative election night event today.

As Poilievre conceded the federal election, more and more polls came in from his riding — and they continued to look not great for the Conservative leader.

As things stand now — just after 1 a.m. in Toronto — Poilievre is trailing still Liberal Bruce Fanjoy by more than 2,000 votes. About 80 polls have yet to report.

His riding is one of 19 across the country that are too close to call.

As Elections Canada continues to count the ballots, the voter turnout rate was at 52.07 per cent with 65,527 of 75,482 polls reporting as of 00:50 a.m. Tuesday.

The overall voter turnout rate is expected to be higher than that of the 2021 election where 62.2 per cent of the registered electors cast their ballots.                                                                                                                                Elections Canada told the Star that the agency prepared to have a potential higher turnout in the election and hired close to 250,000 workers across Canada to work on election day.

Pierre Poilievre’s claim that he denied the Liberals and NDP a chance to form a coalition government is absolutely premature. As he talks, the projected seat counts actually puts the Liberals and NDP, combined, at a majority government.

We may be witnessing more than just a political defeat for Pierre Poilievre. If he loses his Ottawa seat — where he now trails Liberal Bruce Fanjoy by more than 2,000 votes — it won’t simply be the end of a campaign. It will be the end of a lifelong pursuit.

Poilievre has devoted his entire adult life to a single goal: becoming prime minister of Canada. Politics wasn’t just a career for him; it was his identity, his singular focus. Most politicians can pivot back to previous careers or forge new paths. For Poilievre, there was no other path.

It’s reminiscent of Olympic athletes who measure their lives in four-year cycles — only to face the devastating question, after a missed moment, of whether they have the physical, mental, and emotional stamina to start again.

A loss tonight wouldn’t just be a political setback. It would mark the collapse of a dream that, only a few months ago, seemed within arm’s reach.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has conceded the election to Mark Carney while saying his party denied the Liberals and the NDP the number of seats they needed to form a coalition government.

“We gave voices to countless people across this country who have been left out for too long,” Poilievre told the crowd at Ottawa’s downtown Rogers Centre.

He said Carney now has a “razor-thin” minority government.

Poilievre said his purpose in politics “will continue to be” to restore the promise that hard work can lead to a better life.

“I will continue to fight for them everyday and everyday we will never give up in fighting for the Canadian people,” he said.

Poilievre also currently trails in his Carleton riding by more than 2,000 votes.

It’s almost 1 a.m. and about half the polls in Pierre Poilievre’s Carleton riding are reported. Bruce Fanjoy, the Liberal challenger, is now more than 2,000 votes up on Poilievre.

Doing some back-of-the-napkin math, the best-case-scenario for the Liberal Party would mean keeping everything they’ve got and picking up 12 ridings that are not yet called.

If that happens, the Liberals would have a relatively narrow majority. But that’s pretty unlikely. What is looking increasingly possible, however, is that the NDP holds the balance of power in this Parliament. That would be an extraordinary stroke of luck for the moribund NDP.

Jagmeet Singh says he is stepping down as leader of the NDP and has conceded his riding of Burnaby Central.

Singh, appearing alongside his wife in a hotel ballroom, fought back tears while speaking to his supporters.

Echoing late party leader Jack Layton, Singh urged Canadians to choose “hope over fear” and “optimism over despair.”

He said his daughter reminded him of the future and what he was fighting for.

Singh was elected as leader in 2017 and led the party through the 2019, 2021 and 2025 elections.

He thanked and hugged supporters as he left the stage.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is expected to address his supporters in British Columbia after a dismal election night result for his party soon.

The party had 24 seats before dissolution and is now leading in only eight ridings, which would be four fewer than required for official party status.

Journalist-turned-Liberal-politician Evan Solomon – newly elected in Toronto Centre – released a post-win statement to the Star that said, “Tonight, Canada and Toronto Centre made a decisive decision to stand up against the politics of division and fear … Now the hard work begins!” With 65 of 187 polls reporting, Solomon had 21,010 or 61.5 per cent of the votes.

Jamil Jivani, the Conservative who won his seat for Bowmanville—Oshawa North, put the split on Canada’s right on full display in an interview with CBC by calling Ontario Premier Doug Ford “a problem for Ontario and Canada.”

Jivani said Ford tried to make the federal election about him and shouldn’t be a “hype man to the Liberal party.”

“He’s not doing a great job at running this province,” Jivani said. “Now he’s trying to exercise his influence over other levels of government, and it’s not like this guy is doing anything particularly well.”

“This guy’s a political genius because he beat Bonnie Crombie and Steven del Duca? And now we gotta sit around getting advice from him? No.”

Jivani’s friendship with U.S. vice president JD Vance was expected to hurt him in his campaign. With nearly all polls reporting, he is leading Liberal Bridget Girard by about 3,000 votes

As the results settle in Quebec, consider this: Pierre Poilievre came out clearly and unequivocally against Bill 21, the province’s ban on religious symbols for some public sector employees. It has been conventional wisdom in Quebec that opposing this version of laïcité is electoral suicide in Quebec.

And yet, it looks like Poilievre improved his standing in the province by some six points. Not only that, the Conservatives look set to pick up a seat from the Bloc Quebecois. Could this be a clear sign that opposing these identity issues in Quebec is not the third rail it was once thought to be?

In five separate 905 ridings in the Brampton and Milton area, Liberal and Conservative candidates are neck and neck – within a percentage point or two of each other – making them real nail biters at a moment when the country is waiting to see if Mark Carney’s Liberals will win a majority or a minority.

In one of the ridings, Milton East – Halton Hills South, Conservative candidate and former provincial MPP Parm Gill currently has 48.5 per cent of the vote, while Liberal Kristina Tesser Derksen has 47.6 per cent, with 155 of 201 polls reporting.

Ahead of Jagmeet Singh’s speech to supporters, several of his staffers appear on the verge of tears and are hugging one another. Whatever happens, it’s clear this is not the result they had hoped for.

When the dust settles on this election, the Liberal victory may have come in suburban Quebec, where the Liberals poached a block of seats from the Bloc Québécois.

Of the eight seats in play in the Montreal suburbs, the Liberals appear poised to take seven of them away from the Bloc.

The Canadian Press has called five Liberal-Bloc flips (Châteauguay—Les Jardins-de-Napierville, La Prairie—Atateken, Mont-Saint-Bruno—L’Acadie, Thérèse-De Blainville and Rivière-des-Mille-Îles) and the Liberals are well within striking distance in two more (Longueuil—Saint-Hubert and Terrebonne).

The only seat in the area where they looked competitive but came up short is Shefford, which stayed in the Bloc column.

The Liberals also took the Quebec City riding of Beauport—Limoilou from the Bloc.

With 99.37 per cent of polls reporting in Newfoundland and Labrador, the voter turnout rate was at 64.58 per cent, significantly higher than the province’s rate in the 2021 federal election at 52 per cent.

John Beebe, founder of the Democratic Engagement Exchange at Toronto Metropolitan University, said it was a good sign and an early indication that the overall voter turnout rate could be higher in this election.

As the Liberals celebrate what is undeniably a remarkable political reversal —staving off irrelevance in just four short months — they would do well to resist the temptation to interpret this as confirmation of their status as Canada’s natural governing party. This outcome reflects a volatile mix of circumstances, not a durable mandate. The public mood remains fluid, and any hint of triumphalism will be punished. Voters have given the Liberals a fourth chance —not out of renewed enthusiasm, but often in spite of mounting frustration.

Already tonight, there are hints of a narrative taking shape on broadcast that leans into Liberal inevitability. That would be a profound misread of the moment— and a costly one.

While supporters of freshly re-elected Beaches-East York Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith celebrated at the Lions Stone pub in the Beach, he took a moment to strike a more serious tone in speaking about the new Liberal government, where they came from a few months ago and demand from Canadians for a new approach.

“I would just say I think overwhelmingly Canadians understood that this was a moment that requires serious leadership and the ballot question really was, who is best placed to defend our economic and economic interests against Donald Trump. And, you know, if you asked me in December where we’d end up, I wouldn’t have guessed that we would have been concluding the night with a Liberal government. So I think that desire for serious leadership and stability, it goes a long way,” Erskine-Smith told the Star.

As the night drags on, Carleton remains one of the country’s most-watched ridings. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is still trailing his Liberal rival Bruce Fanjoy by more than 1,000 votes with more than 20 per cent of polls reporting.

And we may be in for the long-haul here — because of the length of the 91-candidate ballot, vote counting is expected to take five times as long here as other ridings.

Again, though, it’s important to remember those early numbers may be skewed by the large number of advance ballots received in the riding.

Liberal incumbent Marc Serré has lost his seat to a Conservative challenger in the riding of Sudbury East—Manitoulin—Nickel Belt.

It is a pretty shocking loss for the Liberals in Edmonton Southeast. Liberal leader Mark Carney was just in the city, his hometown, on Sunday, campaigning with their candidate and Mayor Amarjeet Sohi. He pulled out a huge crowd, and delivered remarks from the back of a pickup truck. But, with a majority of the polls reporting, the Canadian Press projects that Sohi has lost by a considerable margin. It’s a clear sign that Carney’s Liberals didn’t quite hit the heights that they had hoped for in the last days of the campaign.

Conservative candidate Jagsharan Singh Mahal will represent the riding in Parliament.

Elizabeth May, the Green leader, has expressed interest in the past in becoming House of Commons speaker.

Usually that desire is not supported by any other parties, but in a minority parliament that is this close she may have a better chance.

In a minority that is that tight, parties might not want to give up an MP to the speaker’s chair.

We have live results for Jagmeet Singh’s riding here, and Pierre Poilievre’s riding here.

Over in the comments of our live results map, one reader writes that “Jagmeet Singh is probably cooked.” Another is predicting a Conservative majority, with the Grits holding 146 seats as of now. 

That’s the last of my dispatches from the comment section for tonight, but stay in this file for ongoing analysis!

Thanks for all your thoughtful comments, and let’s do it again soon.

Editor’s note: But not that soon.

As of midnight, with 53,230 of 75,483 polls reporting, the Liberal Party was leading in 162 ridings with 42.6 per cent of votes while the Conservatives was ahead in 149 ridings with 41.9 per cent of votes. The Bloc Québécois followed with 23 ridings and the New Democratic Party were leading in eight. The Green Party was ahead in one riding.

It’s coming down to the wire in the Nova Scotia riding of Cumberland-Colchester, where the Liberals may have flipped a second seat in Atlantic Canada. 

Liberal Alana Hirtie is ahead by 350 votes with 219 of 222 polls reporting. Hirtie’s near victory comes on the heels of another Liberal flip in South Shore—St. Margarets. 

The story coming out of Atlantic Canada earlier this evening was a strong Conservative showing. But now that we’re getting to the end of counting, it looks like at least one of the Conservative flips in Newfoundland isn’t holding up. 

Liberal Anthony Germain in Terra Nova—The Peninsulas has taken back the lead over Conservative Jonathan Rowe, who had been declared the victor earlier in the evening. Germain’s lead, with 269 of 270 polls reporting, is only 46 votes.

At the Celtic Irish Pub on Yonge St., Liberal candidate Leslie Church celebrated a win in the Toronto—St. Paul’s riding — which turned red after short rendezvous with the Conservatives after a byelection last year. While the beer taps flowed, Church said the prospect of a minority Liberal government didn’t faze her.

“Regardless of how the results come in tonight, the number one priority here after the election is going to be to bring people together,” Church said.

“I think that we’ve been in a very tumultuous political climate for a number of months, and really with the threats at our doorstep from down south, what matters now is everybody working together across parties, across levels of governments. The scale of the challenge that we face to stare down Mr. Trump and his threats to our economy and our sovereignty is large enough that it’s going to take all of us working together, so I think we’re going to have to put an emphasis on finding unity, taking down the temperature, and getting to work.”

It’s a mystery to me how the Conservatives spent two years demanding an election without ever telling Canadians who would govern alongside Pierre Poilievre.

Who would have been his foreign affairs minister? His finance minister?

I understand why Mr. Carney made his campaign about himself — and not about the same “clowns” (to borrow the Conservatives’ own “Golf” ad language).

But shouldn’t voters looking for change have been told, the minute Chrystia Freeland put the final nail in Justin Trudeau’s coffin, exactly who would be ready to run the country? A clear signal that there was a government-in-waiting, ready to fix a broken Canada?

Elizabeth May will keep her seat in Saanich—Gulf Islands, the Canadian Press says.

It is the only seat that the Greens have won or are leading, with Kitchener Centre MP Mike Morrice currently trailing by less than 200 votes in his riding.

Green co-leader Jonathan Pedneault lost his bid in Montreal earlier this evening.

Conservative Harb Gill wins in the auto-city riding of Windsor West.

NDP MP Brian Masse has held this riding for 20 years, but lost tonight to the Conservatives.

Interestingly, the Conservatives are not typically in contention in this riding it is usually a NDP - Liberal battle.

For those curious about the impact of advance poll numbers, another data point from Newfoundland and Labrador: Terra Nova—The Peninsulas, which had been called by the Canadian Press for the Conservatives early in the night, has just flipped to the Liberals.

The Conservatives have fallen more than five points from when those early results came in, with the Liberals rising by nearly that much.

Cumberland—Colchester has also moved from being declared for the Conservatives to lean Liberal.

Again, it is not every seat that will be affected by counting the early votes last. But it’s safe to say that it will lead some seats to flip from blue to red. I’m told the Liberal war room continues to be “optimistic.”

Liberal Anthony Housefather, who has been outspoken in his support for Israel both before and after the current war in Gaza, is fighting for his seat of Mount Royal. Conservative candidate Neil Oberman currently holds a narrow 60 vote lead.

Evan Solomon was almost guaranteed to win Toronto Centre — one of the safest Liberal seats in the country — but it’s an awkward full-circle moment for a journalist who has turned name recognition into electoral victory tonight. The former host of Power & Politics and Question Period has had to spend more time explaining where he lives than what he stands for.

NDP candidate Samantha Green didn’t waste time questioning Solomon’s ties to the riding, pointing out that he’s been living in New York and is currently couch-surfing while looking for a home here. Not quite the “deep roots” message voters in places like Regent Park, St. James Town, or Church and Wellesley might connect with.

Then there’s the irony no one’s missing: Solomon was fired from the CBC for brokering secret art deals - including with Mark Carney, who now becomes his boss if the Liberals hang onto power.

Slowly, the results in Poilievre’s Carleton riding are coming in. Very slowly.

We’re at about four per cent of polls reporting and Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy is still in the lead with 59 per cent of the vote. It’s important to note that those numbers may be skewed by advanced voting, which was expected to favour Fanjoy.

The Canadian Press has called Outremont for the Liberals, putting an end to Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault’s hopes of election to the House of Commons.

Jagmeet Singh’s riding of Burnaby Central has been seesawing all over in early reporting. At first, the NDP leader held the edge. Then Conservative candidate James Yan led. Now, with still only nine per cent of polls reporting, Liberal Wade Chang has taken the lead.

It’s shaping up to be a true three-way toss-up — and Singh is in third.

Former Liberal MP Paul Chiang’s resignation four weeks ago created an open race in the key 905 battleground riding of Markham-Unionville. At the moment, that key Liberal seat is leaning blue.

Conservative Michael Ma is leading by 1,100 votes in the race against Chiang’s replacement, former Toronto deputy police chief Peter Yuen, with 103 of 220 polls reporting.

Chiang, the former MP, withdrew from the race after he came under fire for telling a diaspora news outlet how people could collect a bounty Hong Kong had placed on a Conservative rival’s head.

The NDP are having, as we expected, a miserable night. Alexandre Boulerice is projected to win Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, while Heather McPherson looks set to keep Edmonton Strathcona and Lori Idlout is ahead in Nunavut.

I’m sure lots of New Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief that the party has some some serious leadership contenders in their caucus. But I think it’s clear that the NDP is going to fall behind official party status. It’s conceivable they could hold the balance of power, but even that isn’t even guaranteed.

To some degree, this is a product of circumstances. In an election about Trump, change, and the binary choice between Carney and Poilievre, Jagmeet Singh just didn’t fit. But, after two successive elections, it really felt like Singh had little new to add. He had no big ideas, no ambitious policies, and no new messages. If he doesn’t resign tonight, I expect he’ll step aside by the morning.

Former journalist Evan Solomon will be going to Parliament Hill. As a first-time politician, Solomon won his riding in Toronto-Centre with 55 of 187 polls reporting and 6,189 votes (60.9 per cent.)

At the time the vote was called, Solomon’s Conservative opponent, Luis Ibarra, had 2,461 votes (24.2 per cent.)

The ballroom is starting to fill up here at NDP HQ. There is a sense of disappointment as early results flock in, showing plummeting popular support for the party. But with results across B.C. — where half the NDP’s seats are — not yet clear, there remains hope that the party can maintain official party status.

It looks like the Conservatives will keep their seat in the key 905 battleground riding of King-Vaughan, where Conservative Anna Roberts is projected to win against Liberal Mubarak Ahmed.

The Liberals won the seat in 2015, then lost it in 2021, when the riding saw the lowest voter turnout in the country. Roberts currently has 10,106 votes to Ahmed’s 5,846 with nearly half of all polls reporting.

So surveying many of the ridings that the Liberals were targeting, it’s a lot of mixed signals.

They look set to seize many of those Bloc ridings they wanted, they’re projected to win Peterborough and have a sizeable lead in Winnipeg West.

But they’ve failed to take many others, and are on track to lose quite a few seats they weren’t worried about.

Now, does that mean that we need to be patient and see how these ridings shake out when all the vote is in? Or does the high-turnout, low-NDP, two-way-race dynamic make things less predictable than the Liberals thought? Is it possible that people weren’t quite as motivated by the fear of Trump that Liberal strategists thought?

In the last minority Parliament, the Liberals could win a vote with the support of the NDP or the Bloc. Now, it’s shaping up to be different. With current seat counts, the Liberals would need the Bloc’s support to pass anything. The NDP’s support would not be enough.

Early results show Jonathan Pedneault, the newcomer co-leader of the Green Party, trailing in the downtown Montreal riding of Outremont.The riding has been held since 2019 by recently-named Liberal Immigration Minister Rachel Bendayan, who was appointed in March.

Previously Bendayan served briefly as Minister of Official Languages.Taking the riding has long been seen as a longshot for Pedneault, who was a human rights advocate and war correspondent before returning home to join the Green Party. In 2022, he won the party’s leadership running on a joint platform with Elizabeth May – bringing a co-leadership model used by Greens in other countries to Canada.

After winning, the party was unable to change its constitution to allow two leaders, and he resigned in July 2024, only to return in January 2025, saying he felt compelled to re engage in politics after the election of U.S. President Donald Trump.Neither Pedneault nor May are currently leading in their ridings, which poses big questions for the future of the Green Party.

The cheers completely dissipated in Conservative headquarters when major networks declared a Liberal win.

But in the time since, the applause has returned, louder and louder, each time a Conservative candidate appears poised to mark a victory.

The families of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, and his wife, Anaida, have entered the room and are occupying the first rows of chairs. Chants of “bring it home” are rippling through the crowd.

Former Liberal cabinet minister Sean Fraser has been declared the winner in his riding of Central Nova.

He has about 1,000 vote lead with 190 of 229 polls.

Fraser stepped down in December and said he wasn’t going to run again, but he changed his mind in the first week of the campaign.

The Conservatives have flipped the riding of York Centre. Conservative Roman Baber, a former Ontario PC MPP who was kicked out of Premier Doug Ford’s caucus in 2021 over his objection to COVID-19 lockdowns, is projected to beat Liberal incumbent and former minister of mental health and addictions Ya’ara Saks.

Much of the race in the northwest Toronto riding focused on the debate over the Liberal government’s response to the war in Gaza.

It’s a big victory for the Conservatives, who on Monday night lost what had been their only foothold in Canada’s largest city when Toronto-St. Paul’s went back to the Liberals. With fewer than half of the city’s 24 ridings yet to be called, Baber is shaping up to be the Conservatives’ lone Toronto MP.

Peterborough which the Conservatives held with MP Michelle Ferreri has officially flipped to the Liberals according to the Canadian Press.

As predicted, it’s a tight race in Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond-Hill. Conservative MP Costas Menegakis is leading by 1,123 votes over Liberal incumbent Leah Taylor Roy, with 66 of 219 polls reporting.

Taylor Roy won her seat in 2021 by a narrow margin. Menegakis represented the neighbouring riding of Richmond Hill from 2011 to 2015 under the Harper government.

Liberal Jennifer McKelvie, a Toronto city councillor and deputy mayor, is projected to win in Ajax, with 89 of 226 polls reporting. McKelvie took a leave of absence from her job as councillor for Scarborough-Rouge Park to run.

While waiting my turn in the “green room” of a political show, I had a chance to chat with a seasoned Conservative strategist. When I asked how Erin O’Toole might feel about the party’s trajectory, she didn’t hesitate: ‘Erin O’Toole would have won this election.’

That was a surprising thought, but she elaborated that O’Toole’s brand of conservatism—strong but not perpetually on the attack—could have resonated differently, especially once the campaign context shifted.

In her view, O’Toole had the potential to become a ‘Captain Canada’ figure, much like Doug Ford did early in his tenure, and ride that wave all the way to the Prime Minister’s office.

I can’t help but wonder what former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is thinking as he watches the Tories fall short because of a party that couldn’t broaden its base.

The Liberal who launched massive political change when she resigned from cabinet last December, Chrystia Freeland has retained her seat in Toronto’s University-Rosedale riding. With 38 of 205 polls reporting, and 6,494 votes (64.5 per cent) the Star declared Freeland the winner. At the time, her nearest competitor, Conservative Liz Grade, had 2,290 votes (22.7 per cent.)

Freeland’s resignation sent “shockwaves” through the Liberal party and led to the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was already under fire for his declining popularity among Canadians. Freeland ran for Liberal leadership, but did not fare well against newcomer Mark Carney, who will lead Canada as its next prime minister. Still, Freeland played an undeniable role in the Liberal’s new political fortunes.

Churchill—Keewatinook Aski where longtime NDP MP Niki Ashton is behind in her riding with a lot of results already in.

The NDP are holding Winnipeg Centre, but its very close with just a few hundred votes.

The Conservatives are winning in Elmwood Transcona over the NDP. Elmwood has been an NDP riding for decades and the party held it in a contested byelection last year.

The Canadian Press is calling the first Liberal flip in Quebec, where they’ve taken Rivière-des-Mille-Îles from the Bloc Québecois.

Liberal Linda Lapointe will be headed to Ottawa after defeating the Bloc’s Luc Desliets in the riding on Montreal’s North Shore.

The Liberals are on track to take six seats from the Bloc in Quebec, all in the Montreal suburbs:  Mont-Saint-Bruno—L’Acadie, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, Shefford, Châteauguay—Les Jardins-de-Napierville, Thérèse-De Blainville and Rivière-des-Mille-Îles. If these leads hold, they would represent a collapse in support for the bloc in one of the country’s key suburban battlegrounds.

Liberal stalwart and former Toronto police chief Bill Blair has won his seat in Scarborough Southwest, with 33 of 195 polls reporting. At the time he was declared the winner, Blair had 4,763 votes (61.3 per cent) while Conservative Asm Tarun had 2,337 votes (30 per cent.)

Polls are starting to report in Burnaby Central, just east of Vancouver, where NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is in a tight race against both the Liberals and the Conservatives. The riding replaced Burnaby South, which Singh had held since 2019.

The narrow contest in the riding is a microcosm of how this election has gone for the NDP, which has not had a single seat called in its favour out of 134 decided races so far. Singh has dodged all questions about his party leadership but told the Star last week the NDP is “obviously going to do a review” of the campaign.

Singh, once an Ontario MPP, ascended to party leader in 2017 and won a by-election in February 2019 for a seat in Parliament.

Toronto—St. Paul’s ended its short flirtation with the Conservatives by electing Liberal Liberal Leslie Church. With 50 of 238 polls reporting and 4,161 votes (62.6 per cent) Church won the seat she lost last year by 633 votes. In this rematch – Don Stewart had 2,111 votes (31.8 per cent) when the vote was called.

As the final results roll in, Star readers are calling the Liberal win “a secure future” and “the best position we can be in.” It still remains to be seen whether this will be a majority or minority government, with 172 seats needed for a majority. 

As of now, the Conservatives have secured 142 seats. Follow our real-time results map here for the last few calls tonight. 

Mark Carney — often criticized for lacking the polish of a career politician — and his Liberals being projected to win appears to be the kind of change voters were actually craving.

Many Canadians seem tired of Justin Trudeau’s smooth but increasingly hollow rhetoric. They were just as fatigued, perhaps, by Pierre Poilievre’s relentless sloganeering. And hanging over it all is the shadow of Donald Trump, whose bombastic, soundbite politics left many Canadians wary of style without substance.

In that context, Carney’s unvarnished, substance-over-style approach feels almost refreshing. It’s not that he lacks political instincts — it’s that he channels them differently, betting that competence and pragmatism might matter more right now than charisma.

Time will tell whether tonight marks a real shift — from valuing performance to valuing quiet capability — or just a temporary reaction to the noise of recent years.

We’re finally seeing our first numbers trickle out of Pierre Poilievre’s Carleton riding, where vote counting was expected to take five times as long because of an unusually long ballot — complete with 91 candidates.

With only one of 266 polls reporting, Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy is slightly ahead.

Bhutila Karpoche, who had been considered the NDP’s best chance of cracking the Liberal stronghold of Toronto, has lost.

Liberal newcomer Karim Bardeesy is projected to win the riding of Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park. 

The seat looked like it might be competitive after Arif Virani decided not to run again for the Grits, but with 15 of 221 polls reporting, Bardeesy, the executive director of a think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, had a commanding lead with 60 per cent of the vote.

Karpoche, a former NDP MPP who left her provincial seat to run for the federal New Democrats on her home turf, was fighting it out with Conservative Wladyslaw Lizon for second place.

The Canadian Press has called Nepean for Liberal leader Mark Carney. With 40 of 229 polls reporting, he has nearly double the votes of his Conservative challenger Barbara Bal.

Despite a decent lawn-sign game by Conservative Ted Opitz, the Star has called the Etobicoke Centre race in favour of Liberal incumbent Yvan Baker. He won with 5,589 votes (59.4 per cent.) Opitz, who held the riding from 2011 to 2015, got 3,598 votes (38.2 per cent).

Liberal Julie Dzerowicz is projected to hang on to the west downtown Toronto riding of Davenport. With 18 of 223 polls reporting, Dzerowicz had more than 60 per cent of the vote.

The NDP’s Sandra Sousa and Conservative Francois Lavoie were fighting it out for second place, with both holding less than 20 per cent.It looks like a far less competitive race than in 2021, when Dzerowicz beat NDP candidate Alejandra Bravo by fewer than 200 votes.

Confirmed Liberal wins across the Greater Toronto Area right now. Incumbents Shaun Chen, Bill Blair, Julie Dzerowicz, Yvan Baker and newcomer Jennifer McKelvie.

Results are coming in at a trickle in the GTA, with only one or two polls reporting in many ridings. But let’s look at some early results in Whitby, where Liberal incumbent Ryan Turnbull is leading by 253 votes, with 10 of 237 polls reporting.

Though far too early to call, Turnbull has a strong start with 975 votes to Conservative candidate Steve Yamada’s 722. The Liberals would be happy to keep this seat.

Lost in this two-horse race is the NDP. With 83 of 343 races called by the Canadian Press, Jagmeet Singh’s party is still without a single confirmed seat. They’re leading in eight races — including five in B.C., where we’re just starting to see early results — but have seen their popular vote numbers crater. They are certainly at risk of losing their official party status.

Pierre Poilievre’s riding of Carleton is one of the few in the entire country that isn’t reporting any vote tallies. The Tory leader has held the riding for more than 20 years, winning seven straight elections.

However, conservative sources recently told the Star that the federal Conservatives had dispatched staffers and volunteers for a last-minute blitz of the riding after internal polling showed their leader was vulnerable.

Carleton is also one of the ridings targeted by the Longest Ballot Initiative, where an activist group has registered a multitude of candidates in the riding to protest Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system. The ballot in Carleton has 91 candidates on it and reportedly measures nearly a meter long.

We’re watching Carleton, and have the vote count updating minute to minute here. 

In a career defined by humiliating defeats, Maxime Bernier has endured one more. While the results are still early, the People’s Party leader is floundering in single-digits in his home riding of Beauce. Bernier has long tried to mimic Donald Trump’s illiberal and xenophobic politics, and has made particular hay out of attacking transgender people.

It seems that the last rump of his supporters in Beauce are finally tired of him. Voters across the country seem to agree: It looks as though his party could fall below 1% of the vote.

Here at the Liberal Party, the DJ is playing Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown is playing. I sincerely hope that this election is finally the sunset for Bernier and his miserable People’s Party.

Early votes are continuing to roll in in Mark Carney’s Nepean riding: With 10 of 229 polls reporting, Carney has about 66 per cent of the vote.

We’re starting to see our first results coming in from Ottawa’s Nepean riding, where Liberal Leader Mark Carney is comfortably ahead. He is not expected to have any difficulty winning the riding, which has been held by a Liberal since it was created 10 years ago. Prior to that it was part of a larger riding, called Nepean-Carleton, and was held by Pierre Poilievre for a decade.

Despite being considered a safe Liberal seat, there were some grumblings when incumbent Liberal MP Chandra Arya was disqualified (he was deemed “manifestly unfit”) from running for the Liberal leadership and subsequently had his Liberal nomination revoked two days before Carney declared his candidacy in the riding.

There is a close race shaping up in Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore.

Irek Kusmierczyk the Liberal incumbent is getting a strong challenge from the Conservative candidate Kathy Borrelli, with 40 of 282 polls reporting, she is leading by just over 100 votes.

One-hundred-and-seventy-two seats would just get you over the line. The Liberals would have to appoint a speaker in that scenario, making Parliament essentially a tie.

In every session, MPs resign and sometimes die, so a comfortable majority is probably north of 180 seats.

Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet is projected to win re-election in Beloeil-Chambly, on Montreal’s south shore.

Blanchet has won the riding twice, in 2019 and 2021, comfortably both times over the Liberals, receiving more than double the votes of second place finisher.

As of 10:20 pm, a total of 6,713 of the 54,852 reported polls have been counted, according to Elections Canada. The Liberals are currently leading in 133 ridings, the Conservatives in in 93, the Bloc Québécois in 17 and the NDP in three ridings.

Liberal leader Mark Carney is watching the results in a downtown Ottawa hotel with his family.

He is expected at the arena where his supporters are already celebrating a little later tonight.

So I’m still keeping my eyes on Atlantic Canada, in hopes that it’ll tell us a bit more about how this vote will shape as the night goes on. In Terra Nova—The Peninsulas, the Conservatives had been at just over 52% about two hours ago, with a quarter of the polls reporting. With most of the polls now in, the Conservatives are now down to 48%. The Canadian Press had previously called the riding for the Conservatives, but with the lead now at 36 votes, I suspect they will have to remove that riding from the decided column.

In Nova Scotia, Sean Fraser has regained the lead and — if the vote-counting follows the trend we’ve seen elsewhere — I suspect he’ll keep that seat. The Liberals also just hopped into the lead in Miramichi—Grand Lake, one of their target seats.

It’s important to note that returning offices can decide in what order they want to count these votes. While some ridings save advanced votes, which favor the Liberals in most areas, others seem to be counting them sooner. It makes projections very difficult.

The political fate of the Etobicoke North riding, long held by Liberal Kirsty Duncan who was first elected in 2008, has now moved into the hands of Rexdale-born John Zerucelli, a lawyer, business executive, lawyer, and public servant, according to his campaign site.

David McGuinty, the latest public safety minister, has been declared the winner in his Ottawa South riding. That was very much expected. He has a long history in the riding as does his brother Dalton the former Ontario Premier.

With major news networks calling a Liberal government, the next big question to be answered is whether Mark Carney’s party will get a minority or a majority. What happens in the 905 region — a vast, mostly surburban area that forms a horseshoe around the city of Toronto — will help answer that question. Those races are still too close to call. Many have only 1 or 2 polls reporting. Stay tuned.

Mark Carney is breathing a sigh of relief right now — not just because he’s slated to stay on as prime minister. While Carney has become a much better campaigner over the course of this election, it is not his default setting. I know that he’s been looking forward to switching from campaign mode to policy mode.

At his final campaign event in Victoria last night, Carney quoted ex-New York governor Mario Cuomo: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” “As the assembled media will tell you, I campaigned in prose,” Carney joked. “So I’m going govern in econometrics.” I think that’s a useful window into what we’re likely to see in the coming years.

Read more about Carney’s victory: Mark Carney leads Liberals to a stunning turnaround in a transformed political landscape

Only minutes after the major news networks called the election for the Liberals,  Housing Minister Sean Fraser, who had been trailing his Conservative challenger in Central Nova, pulled ahead in the vote count for the first time all evening. With 3/4 of the polls reporting, Fraser now has a razor-thin lead of fewer than 300 votes.

Carleton has been targeted by the longest ballot committee a group protesting for electoral reform by running dozens of independent candidates.

The ballot in Carleton is as a result almost a meter long and Elections Canada has warned results will come slower there.

The Liberals are projected to form government, the Canadian Press confirms.

The Liberal Party is projected by CTV and CBC to win the election and stay in power for a fourth consecutive term.

It is a stunning reversal of fortunes from just four months ago, when the Liberals trailed the Conservative Party in the polls by more than 20 points and appeared destined for a blowout loss. But Justin Trudeau’s resignation as party leader and prime minister – and a race upended by U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and threats to Canadian sovereignty – sparked a dramatic rise for the Liberals.

It will also set off a reckoning for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, whose polling lead had four months ago seemed insurmountable. Through the campaign, Poilievre largely remained committed to his message of a “lost Liberal decade” while some party insiders doubted his ability to win without pivoting.

They remember how Pierre Poilievre accused the mayors of Montreal and Quebec City of incompetence. Quebecers can be tough on their own mayors — just ask them during construction season — but they never gave the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition permission to do it for them. According to the polls and early signs, he and his party could be paying the price.

I was born and raised in Montreal, but I spent three years studying at Université Laval in Quebec City. It’s a special place — politically and otherwise. In and around Quebec City, the Conservatives are expected to remain solid despite Poilievre’s remarks, but the region is not without its tensions. It may not deliver major surprises tonight, but it bears watching.

Barring an unexpected surge, the Conservatives — entrenched in the area since the Harper years — seem poised to hold their ground, and perhaps even strengthen it. Yet while the electoral map may look steady, the ground beneath it is anything but simple.

One riding that could reveal cracks in the Conservative armour is Beauport–Limoilou. A traditional battleground, it remains fiercely contested. Although the Bloc’s Julie Vignola narrowly held it last time, the redrawing of the boundaries — incorporating a slice of suburban Beauport — has shifted the dynamics. Voters in Limoilou and Beauport live in different political worlds. The suburban side has long been more receptive to Conservative appeals, and the Bloc’s hold on the seat is looking increasingly fragile.

Montmorency–Charlevoix offers another glimpse into the shifting landscape. The riding now stitches together suburbs more favourable to the Conservatives with rural areas still loyal to the Bloc’s sovereigntist roots. Here too, the Bloc’s grasp is being tested. A slight shift in turnout, a modest change in mood, and the Conservatives could turn another seat their way.

In Louis-Hébert, Joël Lightbound’s gamble is also on the line. A Liberal voice critical of his own party during the pandemic, Lightbound has cultivated a distinct brand. His willingness to speak out has earned him personal credibility. Whether that credibility translates into votes — in an election where disillusionment runs high — remains uncertain. The high turnout in advance polls could be a good sign for him — or a sign that voters are looking for something, or someone, else.

The Quebec City region may not produce an electoral earthquake tonight. But Beauport–Limoilou, Montmorency–Charlevoix, and Louis-Hébert could still deliver tremors — hinting at deeper undercurrents across the province.

In Central Nova, former housing and immigration minister Sean Fraser continues to lag behind his fresh-faced Conservative challenger Brycen Jenkins. Fraser initially announced he wasn’t going to run again, only to reverse course and throw his hat back in the ring.

Fraser told me some months ago that he was convinced the Carney Liberals could keep that seat, but it would be a tough fight. I know the Conservatives were incredibly keen on taking down Fraser — he came to symbolize Liberal failures on housing and immigration, they thought.

And they might be right!

Still, the race hasn’t been called yet and the Liberals are slowly closing the gap.

The Canadian Press is calling South Shore—St. Margarets for the Liberals. This is the first seat to flip from Conservative to Liberal in the country.

South Shore—St. Margarets live federal election results

In Mississauga-Streetsville, longtime Mississauga councillor Sue McFadden is trying to unseat Liberal MP Rechie Valdez, an entrepreneur and TV personality elected in 2021. McFadden, who has won five council elections, campaigned for the Conservatives on issues including tougher penalties for crime.

Nobody knows how many times the words “most consequential election of our lifetime” have been used since Canada’s snap election was called in late March but we can add at least one last-minute entry from Toronto’s Eglinton-Lawrence Liberal candidate Vince Gasparro who, earlier this morning tweeted those very words while posing beside a ‘vote’ sign in a red jacket and sneakers.

Follow full results for the riding of Eglinton—Lawrence here

Pierre Poilievre ducks question about whether he trusts polls that show him trailing Mark Carney

With things wrapping up in B.C., all polls across the country have now closed and results will continue to roll in. Millions of votes have been cast and hundreds of seats are still up for grabs. The only thing left to do is wait. There are 43 ridings in B.C.

In addition to Jagmeet Singh’s seat in Burnaby South, there are a couple of interesting ridings here.

• Abbotsford—South Langley: This is a new riding with an unusually strong Independent candidate in longtime B.C. MLA Michael de Jong, who had hoped to represent the Conservatives before the party went another route.
• Victoria: Liberal Leader Mark Carney visited Victoria three times during the election including in his last event in the campaign on Sunday night. The NDP have held this riding for a long time, so it would be a major upset if they lost it tonight.

Early results show People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier trailing in his third attempt to retake Beauce, south of Quebec City. He previously held the riding as a Conservative for four terms, from 2006 to 2019. After leaving the Conservative Party and founding his own right-wing alternative party, he has run and lost twice, both times to his Conservative replacement, Richard Lehoux.

Bernier’s father held the riding as a Progressive Conservative for three terms in the 80s and 90s, as part of Brian Mulroney’s government and then in opposition to Jean Chretien’s Liberals. Like his son, he also quit the conservatives and sat as an independent before being named Canada’s ambassador to Haiti.

As the results come in from Châteauguay–Les Jardins-de-Napierville, keep in mind how, in 2021, it came down to the wire — a razor-thin victory for the Liberals with just 0.02 per cent separating them from the Bloc Québécois. Tonight, Nathalie Provost is trying to hold the seat, but under unusual circumstances.

Provost isn’t just another candidate. She’s a survivor of the 1989 Polytechnique massacre, a longtime gun control advocate, and a widely respected voice for violence prevention. Her candidacy should have been a strong statement — especially in a province where memory of Polytechnique runs deep.

But then came the stumble. Liberal leader Mark Carney, trying to highlight Provost’s candidacy on the trail, managed to both butcher her name — calling her “Nathalie Pronovost” — and confuse the Polytechnique shooting with the Concordia University shootings. Two gaffes in a single breath. Blanchet and the Bloc pounced immediately, framing it as proof of Liberal disconnect with Quebec’s history and wounds.

The question tonight is whether the misstep cuts into Provost’s support — or whether the sympathy and admiration she commands gave her an unexpected boost in a riding already too close to call.

If she pulls it off, it won’t just be because of the Liberal brand. It will be because Nathalie Provost’s personal story resonates more deeply than a leader’s mistake.

Keep your eyes out for what ridings stay orange — it is widely expected that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is toast after this collapse of a campaign. I’ve heard lots of names floated around in recent days: Alexandre Boulerice, the lone NDP MP in Quebec, or Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who is hoping to win her seat back in Berthier—Maskinongé.

I hear Heather McPherson, in Edmonton Strathcona, is a favorite of many New Democrats. You could also look to Matthew Green in Hamilton Centre and Niki Ashton in Churchill—Keewatinook Aski.

But if these MPs lose their seats, their odds of successfully mounting a bid probably goes down a fair bit.

Final voter turnout numbers are expected to be much larger than previous elections, experts say.

Reader Lisa says she saw lots of young people cast their ballots at her local polling station today. “From what I observed they seemed very excited to be voting!” Domestic issues like the cost of living, housing and jobs are top of mind for young voters, according to experts.

Here’s more on the youth vote, and how voter turnout is shaping up for this federal election.

The Liberals and Conservatives are headed for a seat swap in Nova Scotia. Liberal Housing Minister Sean Fraser is trailing in his riding of Central Nova, which now looks like it could be won by Conservative Brycen Jenkins. Meanwhile, Conservative Rick Perkins could lose his seat to Liberal challenger Jessica Fancy-Landry.

When the long-time federal Liberal riding of Toronto—St. Paul’s voted Conservative last year, many saw it as a flashing (blue) warning that voters were mightily displeased with the ruling party.

Now, not even a year after Conservative MP Don Stewart won his seat, the riding is in play once again. Last June, Stewart beat Liberal Leslie Church by 633 votes in a byelection called to replace longtime Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett. With polls closing, we’ll find out soon whether the riding will bounce back to the Liberals or stay Conservative.

Polls have just closed across much of Canada – including Quebec, Ontario and through to Alberta.

Ontario

Ontario has 122 ridings up for grabs, so obviously a lot of ridings have to go your way in Canada’s largest province if you want to win an election.

Here are some of the ones we will have our eyes on tonight:

• Milton East—Halton Hills South: This is a new riding that splits the former riding of Milton in half and encompasses parts of Liberal Adam van Koeverden’s former Milton riding and some of Wellington Halton Hills, which reliably sent Conservative Michael Chong to Ottawa.
• Markham—Unionville: In addition to being a bellwether riding, this seat just north of Toronto lost its Liberal candidate early in the campaign to foreign interference concerns. Liberal Paul Chiang, who was first elected in 2021, apologized after it was revealed he told a Chinese language media outlet that people could collect a bounty on a Conservative candidate Joe Tay, who is running in another riding Don Valley North.
• Toronto—St. Paul’s: Less than a year ago, the Liberals lost this seat in a byelection to the Conservatives when Don Stewart bested Liberal candidate Leslie Church, but 10 months can be an eternity in federal politics and polls predict this one will be back in Liberal hands again.
• Windsor West: This riding in Windsor is home to the Stellantis auto plant that was an early casualty of Donald Trump’s trade war where workers were laid off for two weeks. It’s also an NDP stronghold with longtime MP Brian Masse trying to hold his seat.

Quebec

Some ridings to keep an eye on:

• LaSalle—Émard—Verdun: Last fall, the Liberals lost what was considered a safe seat for them in this Montreal-area riding. The loss here, coming after the loss in Toronto—St. Paul’s, ratcheted up the pressure on Justin Trudeau to resign.
• Trois-Rivières: This city between Montreal and Quebec City could be a crucial swing riding in this election. The Liberals placed third in the 2021 campaign, but they were just 416 votes behind the first place Bloc Québécois and third place Liberal candidates.
• Berthier—Maskinongé: One possible bright spot for the NDP is in this riding where they have recruited former MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau. She was first elected in 2011, in what was then the Orange wave in Quebec where the party under Jack Layton’s leadership broke through in the province.

Manitoba

Manitoba actually has a mix of Conservatives, Liberals and NDP MPs in its 14 ridings.

Some ridings to watch:

• Elmwood—Transcona: One of the safer NDP seats in the country, if it goes another way that would be an indication of a big loss for the party.
• Winnipeg South: It’s a riding that is one of the more reliable bellwethers. Voters here tend to pick the party that forms government.

Saskatchewan

The land of the living skies, as the province describes itself on license plates, is also a very reliably Conservative place. The party has held all the seats here since 2019 when the lone Liberal in the province, Ralph Goodale, lost his seat.

Regina—Wascana, where Goodale was the MP, is one that could flip from the Conservatives and certainly the Liberals hope to take it back.

The other interesting riding in the province is Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, which the Liberals hope to pick up. The realignment of the ridings that Elections Canada did could make the riding more competitive.

Alberta

Alberta is another largely Conservative province, though there was one NDP MP and two Liberals representing ridings when Parliament was dissolved.

Some ridings to watch:

• Edmonton Southeast: Current Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi, who was a Liberal cabinet minister between 2015 and 2019, is hoping to return to federal politics.
• Calgary Confederation: The Liberals are hoping to pick this one up as well and it would show them making broader inroads in Alberta. They are running Corey Hogan, who is currently a vice-president at the University of Calgary and also a member of the “The Strategists,” a popular political podcast. The Conservatives have a former United Conservative Party minister Jeremy Nixon as their candidate.

One thing that’s becoming clear as the vote totals in Atlantic Canada come in: This election is a two-way race. The NDP have doing even worse than the polls suggested, while the Greens are trending at the low end of where we thought they’d be in Atlantic Canada.

This is giving us some unexpected results — two surprise victories for the Conservatives in Newfoundland & Labrador, and strange swaps in Nova Scotia. We’ll see if this holds as Ontario and Quebec comes in. Does the Bloc recede, or do they split the vote?

Brampton is always an interesting city to watch, as it is a fast-growing city and its large South Asian diaspora is a bloc that both parties target and can change allegiances.

Conservatives can have success here. Former PC leadership contender Patrick Brown serving as the city’s Mayor and just a few months ago, all five Provincial ridings were won by Doug Ford’s PC Party of Ontario.

Even though Pierre Poilievre held large rallies here, looking at the polling, while the many PC challengers look to be competitive, the longtime Liberal incumbents seemed poised to hang onto their seats.

Sonia Sidhu (Brampton South) and Kamal Khera (Brampton West) have held their seats since 2015. Ruby Sahota has represented Brampton North since 2015 but is now running in the newly drawn Brampton-North Caledon. Maninder Sindhu is seeking third term in Brampton East. Shafqat Ali, who was previously MP in Brampton Centre, is now running in Brampton-Chinguacousy Park.

It is Brampton Centre which looks to be the closest race. The Liberal Candidate is Amandeep Sodhi, a 23-year-old recent University graduate who is taking on Conservative newcomer Taran Chahal, an accountant. That might be the Conservatives best chance of flipping a seat here

But if the Conservatives are to mount any sort of real gains in seats, this is an area to keep an eye on.

As polls close, I’m going to be watching results in Quebec and posting interesting developments here.

There are few places where the national narrative of a miraculous rise in Liberal voting intentions over the last few weeks plays out more dramatically than Quebec.

In early January, the Bloc Québécois were flying high in the polls, with 36 per cent support, while the Liberals were down at 21 per cent. Sixty days later, the parties had traded places and the trend continued. By early April, the Liberals were polling at 43 per cent and the Bloc was down at 24 per cent.

Throughout it all, the Conservatives haven’t budged much from their low to mid 20 per cent support.

So the Bloc’s seat count tonight will largely determine how well the Liberals do in Quebec. If the Bloc loses many of their 33 seats, they’re likely to go to the Liberals.

Ridings to watch

Other than the three-way race in Trois-Rivières, there are three leaders running in Quebec: Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet in Beloeil-Chambly, Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault in Outremont and People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier in Beauce – the riding both he and his father once held.

The room is slowly filling out over at Conservative headquarters in Ottawa. The mood is an interesting one here: some attendees assumed a clearer CPC sweep would be evident by now. In actuality, the party is doing better than expected in Atlantic Canada. But because expectations here are quite heightened, it’s hard to pin down a precise vibe.

Staffers here are tight-lipped on estimations for a final seat count. But they do say they’ve brought in a wave of new voters for the party.

The Canadian Press is calling another flip for the Conservatives, this time in Terra Nova—The Peninsulas.

That’s a second flip from red to blue in Newfoundland.

As we wait for the avalanche of ridings to report, here’s a thought for Chrystia Freeland: whoever wins tonight, the Liberal Party of Canada’s online boutique might want to start selling T-shirts that read, “CHRYSTIA WAS RIGHT ABOUT ALMOST EVERYTHING.”

When Chrystia Freeland delivered her resignation letter to Justin Trudeau on December 16 — just hours before the government’s economic update — she set in motion the drama that ultimately saved the Liberals from near oblivion.

Polls are scheduled to close in central, western and northern Canada relatively soon. Poll workers at each station will count the votes in front of witnesses. When they finish, the poll workers will give the results by phone to the returning officer. The officer then immediately enters them into the election results application.

With polls set to close across the 905 shortly, we will be watching the results in this key battleground region very closely. Many races in York Region are expected to be close. Liberal Leader Mark Carney spent a lot of time campaigning there in the last days of the race. Here are some key races in York:

• Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond-Hill is expected to be tight. One-term Liberal incumbent Leah Taylor Roy won her seat in 2021 by a slim 3 per cent margin. She is up against former Conservative MP Costas Menegakis, who represented the neighbouring riding of Richmond Hill from 2011 to 2015 under the Harper government.
• Markham-Unionville is an open race after Liberal MP Paul Chiang, elected in 2021, resigned in controversy early in the campaign. Chiang was replaced by former Toronto deputy police chief Peter Yuen, who will face off against Conservative Michael Ma.
• Also interesting is the riding of King-Vaughan, where Conservative Anna Roberts will be looking to hold on to her seat against Liberal Mubarak Ahmed. The Liberals won the seat in 2015, then lost it in 2021, when the riding saw the lowest voter turnout in the country.

Doug Ford says he is not interested in Pierre Poilievre’s job

There may be no other riding in Toronto that illustrates the inherent risk of political timing than Taiaiako’n–Parkdale—High Park.

Popular NDP MPP Bhutila Karpoche resigned her seat last fall to run federally – months before a newly-elected President Donald Trump became obsessed with tariffs and annexing Canada, leading many NDP voters to align behind new Liberal leader Mark Carney and, potentially, the Liberal challenger Karim Bardeesy, in Karpoche’s riding.

With the polls soon to close, this race is one to watch.

Ok, just to give you a bit of data about how the vote count is affecting the parties results:

In Terra Nova—The Peninsulas, the Conservative have declined about three points from 52 per cent to 49 per cent, with the Liberals gaining 43.6 per cent to 46.5 per cent. 

In Central Newfoundland (which the Conservatives are projected to keep), they slid from 62.5 per cent to 58.5 per cent, with the Liberals growing 35 per cent to 39 per cent. 

This is just to say that this seems to suggest that early returns favor the Conservatives, later polls tilt Liberal. This is roughly what we’ve seen in the 2021 election as well.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh chimed in on his social media with a motivational post quoting the late former leader Jack Layton: “Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.”

It’s a mantra Singh has invoked consistently, throughout his time as leader and even in this election, and it will resonate tonight as New Democrats anxiously await the consequential election results.

So far, the few New Democrats present at the party’s HQ in Burnaby are in positive spirits, even as early results from the Atlantic show the party’s support plummeted in the region.

New Democrats are cautiously optimistic they will maintain official party status tonight, and it may be in British Columbia where that will ultimately be decided.

Tonight’s election results don’t just determine the political landscape — they’re also a make-or-break moment for Conservative political operatives, like Jenni Byrne, the formidable strategist known for her influence and no-nonsense reputation. There’s also Kory Teneycke, who stirred controversy with accusations of campaign malpractice.

Their consulting businesses thrive on electoral victories, and a win boosts their brand and influence, while a loss can be a serious blow. This isn’t just politics; it’s a cutthroat business where tonight’s outcome will reverberate through their careers and the Conservative strategy playbook for years to come.

I think we’ll get a clearer sense of where Atlantic Canada stands very shortly. But we’re likely to watch four seats flip back-and-forth for a little bit yet. Still, it looks like the Conservatives are over-performing in some more rural ridings, but that the Liberals are still on track for growth.

And a little bit of caution to avoid reading too much into the results in Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Listuguj, given that only part of this riding has finished voting. (Most of the riding is in Quebec’s time zone.) I know that the Liberals know this would be a tough fight with the Bloc — particularly because redistricting made this riding more Bloc-leaning — but that they were confident they would keep Diane Lebouthillier in her seat. If she does go down to the Bloc, that would be a sign that things are going sideways for the Liberals.

Here at Liberal HQ, the feeling is very much “wait and see.” The huge TV screen in the middle of the room is switching between CBC and Radio-Canada’s live election coverage. Some Liberal staff are huddled in the arena bleachers, talking quietly. Otherwise, it’s just a bevy of journalists trying to figure out what’s going to happen. I don’t see any candidates from the Liberals yet on the floor of the rink.

What I’ve heard by texting some Liberals is that there is still optimism that they could even attain a majority government tonight, but as we all know, it’s early.

Elections Canada says that no polling locations in Ontario will be open past the scheduled 9:30 p.m. closure time. But as we said before, voters who are in line before 9:30 will be able to vote regardless of how long the line is.

The early results in Atlantic Canada aren’t a perfect barometer for the rest of the country, but they can serve as a canary in the coal mine. And if tonight’s signals hold, the Liberals can’t be pleased: the red wave hasn’t reached as far as they had hoped.

Meanwhile, the Bloc’s lead over incumbent Diane Lebouthillier in Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine hints that Québec, too, could deliver its share of unexpected twists.

Follow full results for the riding of Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Listuguj here.

Some voters across the country are continuing to experience difficulties accessing Elections Canada’s website, home page for the 2025 federal election.

For more information, voters are encouraged to check their voter information cards, contact local Elections Canada office or call Elections Canada at 1-800-463-6868 (toll free).

One phrase you’re likely to hear a lot as the night goes on: “Vote efficiency.” The Conservatives have been hopeful that the Liberal popular vote would be concentrated in urban ridings and places where the NDP is normally strong.

The Liberals think Conservative support in the polls may be concentrated in ridings they already hold. The NDP are hopeful they have vote efficiency: It’s how they’ll hang on to some of their incumbents.

While the Conservatives can boast of an early flip in Newfoundland (and may yet get another), the Liberals are giving the Conservatives a run for their money in the Nova Scotia riding of South Shore—St. Margarets, where incumbent Rick Perkins is in a virtual tie with challenger Jessica Fancy-Landry nearly with half the votes counted.

Follow full results for the riding of South Shore—St. Margarets here.

New Democrats got 17.3 per cent of the vote in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2021, for example, but only have five per cent of the vote in the province at this point.

It’s unlikely that will dampen the mood too much here at NDP HQ, however.

While New Democrats opened the election hoping to flip the Liberal ridings of Halifax and St. John’s East, the party pivoted its focus elsewhere as the campaign went on. It certainly appears the NDP will be shut out of Atlantic Canada for the second election in a row.

Things are very tight in Terra Nova—The Peninsulas, where the Conservatives are hoping to take a second seat in Newfoundland from the Liberals. With just over half of the votes counted, Conservative Jonathan Rowe is leading by a few hundred votes over Liberal Anthony Germain.

Get minute by minute results for the riding of Terra Nova here. 

There are 91 candidates on the ballot in Carleton, Pierre Poilievre’s Ottawa-area riding. A high voter turnout at the advance polls and the size of the ballot will affect the counting of the votes in the riding. It takes about five times longer to count the long ballots than regular-size ballots, Elections Canada says.

I think we’ll need to wait until some of these Newfoundland and Labrador seats finish counting to properly understand the tempo of the results, chiefly: do they tilt Conservative at first, then break Liberal later? But across all the votes counted thus far, the Liberals are nearly touching 50 per cent, a little bit behind where pollsters had them in Atlantic Canada over recent days.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, seem to be doing quite a bit better than where the polls put them.

As a marketer, I have to admit: I’m fascinated by polling. On so many levels, it’s remarkably similar to quantitative market research — you survey a large, representative sample to draw statistically significant conclusions about the broader market.

But in marketing, that’s where it ends. You don’t get the entire market of loyal and prospective consumers to actually show up at schools and community centres to fill out the questionnaire. In politics, you do.

And because you do, you find out — unequivocally — whether the research firm telling you that 43% of the market preferred your brand was spot-on, a little off, or wildly wrong.

Tonight, we’ll find out just how accurate the pollsters have been.

Here’s where the final national estimates stood:

Abacus Data:

Liberals 41% | Conservatives 39% | NDP 10% | Bloc 6%

Léger:

Liberals 43% | Conservatives 39% | NDP 8% | Bloc 6%

Mainstreet:

Liberals 45% | Conservatives 40% | NDP 7% | Bloc 6%

Pollara:

Liberals 41% | Conservatives 38% | NDP 10% | Bloc 6%

Conservatives wrap up ‘wild election’ asking voters to choose change

The Liberals have now lost two races in Newfoundland in the first two calls of the night.

They were hoping to pick up Central Newfoundland and hold onto Long Range Mountains.

Mark Carney had made a trip to the Central Newfoundland community of Gander in the first week of the campaign.

Early results show tight race in federal election as Tories take Newfoundland seat

Just a couple more hours until the NDP election night party will be starting.

Local NDP candidates, staff and volunteers will start trickling in after 7 p.m. local time, when polls close in B.C.

But we won’t hear or see from NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh for a while after, likely not until past midnight EST when we know the results of the 43 seats in B.C, the NDP’s only stronghold and where Singh hopes to keep his own seat.

Those results will be a critical marker of the NDP’s performance in this election, even if we have an answer on who will form government before then.

For now, Singh is watching the election results come in with his wife Gurkiran and their two little girls.

And the modestly sized, orange-lit ballroom, which has nearly as much space for media and broadcasters as it does for attendees to actually stand in, only has dozens of chattering journalists.

I can count nine Canadian flags in the room, including a large one likely to be used as a backdrop for photo ops, which was also present on March 23 when Singh launched his campaign.

Here’s where you can find the latest results for Jagmeet Singh’s riding, Burnaby Central.

The Canadian Press is calling the country’s first flip.

The Newfoundland riding of Long Range Mountains has been won by Conservative candidate Carol Anstey. The riding was previously held by the Liberals.

Get live results for the riding of Long Range Mountains in Newfoundland. 

Here at the Conservative Party of Canada headquarters, the convention space is far from full. Staffers say they expect tonight’s events to start out slowly before picking up as the night goes on. Two massive screens on either side of the stage are projecting election results. The party is cycling through every news channel — including CBC. Every time a favourable Conservative result pops up on screen, there’s a smattering of cheers.

Opinion | To survive Donald Trump and the threat of separation the next prime minister must unite Canadians

Elections Canada have started live-streaming the preliminary results of the votes from polling stations across the country. As of 8:10 pm, 516 polls out of 4,777 closed polling stations were counted.

There’s about a half an hour left to vote in Ontario. Readers in the comments are predicting a Liberal win, but are split between whether that will be a minority or majority government. 

Right now, the the Conservatives have secured 10 out of the 343 seats up for grabs. The Liberals have 22. You can check the Star’s live results map to look up your riding and see who’s in the lead.

Here at the Liberal election night party, there are giant screens and a stage set up on the covered ice of a hockey rink. For most of the past few hours, the place has had a cavernous feeling, with dark curtains and dim lights — and maybe the ice under the temporary floorboards — making it feel cool and empty inside. Every now and then a technician would test the sound, test-play a partisan Liberal video, or blast a few measures of Carney campaign music, including his oft-used Coeur de Pirate tune, “Carry On.”

But now the place is swarming with journalists, many of whom are frantically writing different versions of their stories, based on all the possible results of tonight’s election. Some are also from foreign outlets like the New York Times, reflecting perhaps the outside view of this election, in which Mark Carney has campaigned as a sort of anti-Trump, a technocratic antidote to right-wing populism that will bolster the Canadian economy and reject American attempts to “break us, so they can own us,” as he put it repeatedly on the campaign trail. We’re all watching the results trickle in, waiting for more action to get going here at Liberal HQ. The official start time of tonight’s event is 9:30 p.m. EST, so I expect things here to pick up over the next hour.

It’s a riding Small won by just 281 votes in 2021 and Conservatives will be happy to have picked it up again. With about a third of polling locations reporting, Small has about 63 per cent of the vote.

Find the full results for Central Newfoundland as they update throughout the evening. 

Podcasts haven’t shaped the campaign here the way they have in the U.S.

While Donald Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast made waves and was amplified by traditional media, Canadian political figures haven’t leveraged podcasts to the same extent. Still, Jordan Peterson, a figure who often aligns with conservative views, appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and made a surprising pivot by highlighting Mark Carney’s strengths.

However, this wasn’t so much a departure from partisan politics as it was an attempt to position himself as a knowledgeable voice for his primarily American audience. By discussing Carney’s potential influence and global connections, Peterson might have inadvertently handed the Liberals a subtle advantage. Or he weirdly knew what he was doing.

So we’re starting to see results posted in a number of ridings, with thousands of votes in from some Newfoundland & Labrador ridings. Because these ridings are so big, and because we’re likely to see a big disparity between early and election day vote (which tend to get counted separately) it’s too early to draw any conclusions. But keep your eyes on those three blue ridings on the island of Newfoundland: Coming into today, the Conservatives only held one of those ridings. If they do, indeed, pick up two more, that could be a sign that the Conservatives are over-performing the polls or it could be a sign of the independent streak on “The Rock” — in particular, crab fishers have been upset about cuts to their quotas.

Worth noting, as we look to the rest of Atlantic Canada, that both Poilievre and Carney have campaigned in target seats in recent weeks. Poilievre just had a rally in Halifax, which looked like an effort to hold onto the three seats they have there; while Carney was just recently in Truro, as he tries to win back Cumberland—Colchester, and maybe two others.

The Liberals are far less ambitious in New Brunswick. Carney just held a rally in Fredericton with their star candidate, musician David Myles. (Who is running back because incumbent Jenica Atwin isn’t re-offering.) They think that if they pick up any seat there, it will be Miramichi—Grand Lake.

I know the Conservatives had been hopeful to win a seat on Prince Edward Island, especially with their pledge to “axe the tolls” on the Confederation Bridge, but I would be surprised to see that result come through for them.

A few readers in the comment section have asked about online voting. That’s not an option here in Canada.

The Elections Canada website does have voting resources, including a tool to look up your voting location and its hours — but their website isn’t working for everyone right now. We’re asking them what’s up, but in the interim, be sure to check out the Star’s guide on everything you need to know about casting a ballot.

First result being called by CBC. Phillip Earle the Liberal candidate in Labrador is being declared the winner with about a third of polls reporting.

You wonder what candidates are busy doing in the last couple of hours before the polls close? Getting their voters out, that’s what.

In downtown Toronto, University-Rosedale incumbent Liberal Chrystia Freeland is on social media telling supporters, “This election matters. Make your voice heard.” Ditto with her Conservative opponent Liz Grade, who was out delivering lawn signs over the weekend. “Now it’s your move,” she wrote on X as the sun was setting more quickly. “Get on the court and play — VOTE NOW!”

As early polling numbers in Atlantic Canada are coming in, we’re keeping a close eye on the Central Newfoundland seat held by Conservative MP Clifford Small. Small won his seat in 2021 by just 281 votes and Conservatives will be looking to edge out the Liberals once again. The Liberals held the six other ridings in the province entering the election.

With 17 per cent of polls reporting, Small is currently leading Liberal rival Lynette Powell.

With Neil Young publicly endorsing Mark Carney, don’t be surprised if “Heart of Gold” makes an appearance at tonight’s Liberal gathering. Carney also nodded to Quebec culture on “Tout le monde en parle,” citing Cœur de pirate as a favourite artist — making “Comme des enfants” another fitting choice. It’s a playlist less about marching to a slogan and more about surviving the journey. Which, starting tomorrow morning, might just be the real anthem we all need.

It’s also clear the Liberals learned from 2019’s misfire, when their hopeful anthem “One Hand Up” by The Strumbellas was clumsily adapted in French as Une main haute — a version so awkward it was widely mocked as meaning “Remove One Hand.” Hand-wringing ensued, a re-recording was promised, and the band politely distanced themselves from the whole affair.

Meanwhile, over in the Conservative camp, the echoes aren’t so golden. Toronto’s Martha and the Muffins are calling on Pierre Poilievre to stop using their hit “Echo Beach” at campaign rallies without permission. Despite sending a cease-and-desist request last month, the song apparently kept playing. They should have axed the song before it made news.

Elections Canada says its website is having technical problems and people in certain regions are reporting not being able to access the site. The official results that are flowing out to news websites via a back-end process are still operational and Elections Canada says it is working to restore full access for everyone as soon as possible.

The Liberal HQ party is at a hockey rink in Ottawa. The ice is covered, but the boards are still up and I imagine the Liberal campaign is happy with the imagery.

For a guy who repeatedly claimed he was “staying out of it,” Premier Doug Ford seemed to be a constant presence in the federal election campaign – mostly by seeming to help Liberal Leader Mark Carney.

As reported by the Star on March 20, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre finally reached out to the Progressive Conservative premier on March 17 for the first time ever.

In an interview published Sunday with Politico’s Jonathan Martin, Ford was asked why Poilievre didn’t “make the effort” to call him earlier.

“You’re going to have to ask him that. But I think it’s common sense when you’re in an election, you reach across to as many people as you can,” said the premier, noting the federal Tory leader also doesn’t have a relationship with Nova Scotia PC Premier Tim Houston.

“Not at all. Or local mayors. Or anyone. I don’t understand it,” Ford told Martin, who posited that “somebody put a gun to his head” for Poilievre to call.

“That’s exactly what happened,” said the premier.

Just a note we are seeing a lot of ridings starting to post results, but they are coming in a few polls at a time.

Ridings can have over 200 individual polls so when we only have a few it may not reflect what’s actually happening. A riding that is a mix of towns and rural areas may see different results from those two areas.

Some polls might have a concentration of one party’s supporters that can skew things in the early going.

Canadians have a wealth of platforms to follow tonight’s election results, from the Toronto Star to a myriad of networks. But a special nod goes to the folks at CBC, who are watching with an added layer of interest.

With Pierre Poilievre’s vow to defund the CBC, tonight’s outcome isn’t just political — it’s personal. And let’s not forget our friends at Radio-Canada, who are equally curious about how one could defund the CBC without somehow impacting them.

Results for the region are now expected to trickle in with 25 seats up for grabs. There are 11 seats in Nova Scotia, 10 seats in New Brunswick and four seats in Prince Edward Island.

Abacus Data CEO David Coletto told the Star during the campaign it’s difficult for either the Liberals or Conservatives to form a majority without a strong showing here.

The Liberals won all these seats in 2015, when they last won a majority government. A year ago they looked headed to lose these ridings.

In Nova Scotia, there are 11 seats up for grabs. Seven were in Liberal hands when Parliament was dissolved, three were Conservative and one — the riding of Halifax — was vacant and in the middle of a by-election.

Two Conservative ridings to watch tonight are Cumberland—Colchester and South Shore—St. Margarets. The Conservatives won these ridings pretty convincingly in the 2021 election, but they were previously in the Liberal fold and if the Conservatives lose we could be witnessing another Liberal Atlantic sweep.

Another interesting riding to watch will be Central Nova, where former cabinet minister Sean Fraser is running. In December, Fraser announced he would not be running in this election, but he changed his mind in the first week of the campaign and Carney visited him for an event.

In New Brunswick, there are 10 ridings up for grabs. When the House of Commons last sat, the Liberals held six of those ridings and the Conservatives held four.

Miramichi—Grand Lake is one riding worth watching tonight. The Conservatives picked it up in 2021, with MP Jake Stewart, a former member of the New Brunswick legislature. But Stewart announced in March he wouldn’t be running again, right after several stories emerged about him having lost confidence from some members of his riding association.

When Mark Carney first hit the campaign trail — first running for the Liberal leadership and then in the general election — he was awkward, somewhat uncomfortable, and just not attuned to the nature of retail politics. A prime example: When he first started working rooms of Canadians, he had a bad habit of shaking one voter’s hand while already turning to look at the next person in the reception line. Generally speaking, it wasn’t clear that he had the pizzazz nor the stamina to make this campaign work for him.

But over the past four months, Carney has learned the ropes pretty quickly. He is still not a natural speaker, but that’s become an advantage. His supporters now regularly offer him well-intentioned heckles — shouting things like “elbows up!“, “never 51!” and, infamously, “lead us, big daddy!” He’s learned how to roll with those spontaneous calls, and it’s made him seem more relatable, dynamic, and grassroots. These aren’t characteristics that anyone expected Carney to adopt. And I can tell you that the rooms of Liberals in Windsor, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Victoria who turned out to see Carney this weekend were some of the most energetic we’ve seen to date. By the end of it, Carney looked ready to keep going — even as the journalists travelling with him were ready to fall asleep on their feet. (Myself included.)

Poilievre, meanwhile, has been consistent: And Conservatives think that’s a huge asset. He looks and sounds today more-or-less as he did two-and-a-half years ago, when he was first elected leader of his party. Apart from some minor tone changes, Poilievre sounds the same in English as he does in French. His stump speech is virtually the same whether he’s in Petty Harbour, Newfoundland & Labrador or whether he’s in Nanaimo. He’s managed to reach people who had given up on politics and young voters who feel like they can’t get ahead. And his rallies have been huge. He’s packed warehouses, airport hangers, and union halls with thousands of working class voters who are extremely receptive to his message. While Poilievre has eschewed a lot of the normal aspects of campaigning, these rallies have been the oxygen for his campaign.

Poilievre’s strategy would have likely worked quite well against Justin Trudeau. But, as Carney told Poilievre during the debate: “Justin Trudeau isn’t here.”

Let’s spare a thought for the families of those Liberals who had announced they wouldn’t seek re-election.

Former Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Sean Fraser said he would step away to spend more time with his family — only to change his mind and seek re-election. Transport Minister Anita Anand initially declared her intent to return to academia, but reversed course a couple of months later.

Politics has a way of pulling people back in — especially when duty calls and the odds start looking better than before.

The Greater Toronto Area, or “the 905,” has long been a Liberal-Conservative battleground and will be a key region to watch as votes come in tonight. The GTA holds 34 seats — more than all four Atlantic provinces combined (with 32) and nearly as many as Alberta (with 37).

Largely suburban, the 905 is made up of the densely populated regions outside the city of Toronto, including Peel (12 seats), York (10), Halton (6) and Durham (6).

Wins and losses in the region often determine which party holds power and whether they end up with a majority or minority government.

The 905 has traditionally had low voter turnout. In King-Vaughan, only 48.6 per cent of voters cast a ballot in the 2021 federal election — the lowest in the country.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal Leader Mark Carney have both spent a lot of time campaigning in the region in recent weeks. Poilievre visited an auto parts plant in Vaughan and held a rally in Oshawa. Carney spent this past weekend in York Region, speaking at an art gallery in Aurora and a coffee shop in Newmarket.

A background note for readers outside of the GTA: “the 905” is a nickname based on the region’s most common telephone area code.

This campaign kicked off with the Conservatives trying to brand Mark Carney as a Justin Trudeau clone. They assumed that simply equating “Mark” with “Justin” would do the trick, much like their past successes at defining opponents early. But this time, the narrative didn’t stick.

One reason? The Conservatives’ own leader-centric mindset. They framed everything around their leader — and assumed the only way to define an opponent was through the same lens. Tying Carney to Trudeau seemed like an easy shortcut. But Canadians quickly saw that Carney isn’t Trudeau 2.0.

In reality, the head waiter may have changed, but the staff — the party machine and its architects behind the scenes — largely stayed the same. The miscalculation wasn’t about Carney himself; it was about thinking the same old playbook would work. The attack shouldn’t have been limited to Carney. It should have been about “Team Carney.”

The polls have closed in Newfoundland and the first results are expected shortly.

There are seven ridings in the province and before the election, all but one of them was in Liberal hands.

The one outlier was Central Newfoundland which the Conservatives held before the election. Conservative MP Clifford Small won it in 2021 with a tight margin of just 281 votes. The Conservatives will definitely be looking to hold onto that riding and I’m sure they hope to pick up other seats on the rock as well.

The riding includes Gander, famous for its response to 9/11 when dozens of planes were forced to land there. Liberal leader Mark Carney visited Gander in one of his first campaign stops.

Sometimes those looking for signs of a campaign’s strategy can simply look at lawn signs.

Take Don Valley West incumbent Rob Oliphant. One sign simply says “Re-elect Rob Oliphant” with the Liberal logo—probably designed and printed when the best hope was simply to hold on and avoid a wipeout. Maybe even leftovers from 2021.

But then, the winds shifted. A new leader emerged, and suddenly, there’s a bright yellow “Team Carney” sticker slapped on top. In a flash, the campaign shifts from survival mode to riding the wave of a new brand. Sometimes, evolution in politics is all about adapting on the fly — even if it means stickering your signs and hoping for the best.

Trump’s tariffs threats loom loudest in areas like Oshawa, where automobile manufacturing has been eroding for years.

“We are into this tariff situation which could lead to the biggest industrial crisis we have ever seen,” said Jeff Gray, president of Local 222 in Oshawa earlier in this campaign.

While most polls had Liberal Leader Mark Carney as the leader best suited to take on Trump and his tariffs, Oshawa has an interesting history as a riding. For the first 25 year of it existence, it was an NDP stronghold, held by former party leader Ed Broadbent. It flipped to the Liberal as Ivan Grose represented the area from 1993 to 2004. Since then, it’s been held by longtime Conservative Colin Carrie, who is after 20 years in the seat decided not to seek re-election this time.

New Conservative candidate Rhonda Kirkland was leading Liberal Isaac Ransom in the polls, and it was projected to be a seat held by the party.

Just north in the newly created riding of Bowmanville-Oshawa North, Jamil Jivani, who is the current MP for Durham is also projected to hold his seat. Jivani is a former broadcaster and right-leaning personality who is also known to be very close with U.S. vice president J.D. Vance, although he too has advocated for fighting the U.S. tariffs.

The growing 905 communities tend to flip flop between the Liberal and Conservative parties, and both have been courting votes in this area. This election has a few new wrinkles, as boundary changes have reshaped some ridings, meaning some sitting candidates are now running in new ridings, and it remains to be seen how that will play out.

For example, Conservative candidate Jamil Javani won the byelection in Durham but is now running in Bowmanville-Oshawa North, where he’s been polling ahead of Bridget Girard.

Liberal Juanita Nathan, a former public school trustee and Markham city councillor, is taking on Alicia Viangi in Pickering—Brooklin, which used to be half of Pickering—Uxbridge, held by Liberal Jennifer O’Connell since 2015, who chose not to seek re-election.

In Peel, the new riding of Brampton—Chinguacousy Park sees Shafqat Ali, the Brampton Centre Liberal MP since 2021, taking on Conservative hopeful Tim Iqbal, chief executive of a private business school.

In Oakville, Liberal Anita Anand who reconsidered her plans to leave politics, will be running in the newly formed Oakville East after her riding was shuffled to create two others. Anand will face off against Conservative candidate Ron Chhinzer, a former police officer. A large segment of the community is also putting their weight behind the local NDP candidate, Hailey Ford, which could serve as a challenge for the former cabinet minister.

This is the room where Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre is expected to deliver his victory or concession speech later this evening. Sound and light checks are underway before the space opens to the public in about an hour. That part in and of itself is interesting: anyone who wants to attend was able to register online. We’ll see who shows up!

A live election blog isn’t the ideal place for a deep dive into Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet’s recent declaration that Canada is an “artificial country.” Blanchet took heat for the comment but refused to apologize — instead doubling down, claiming he was simply stating a fact.

Still, it’s hard not to think of a concept from family law that might have resonated more with Quebec voters: the idea of two partners living separate and apart under the same roof for economic reasons.

Does that make it an “artificial” home? Maybe. But it’s a more nuanced analogy — and one that might have served Blanchet better, given Quebec’s complex relationship with the rest of Canada.

We’ll soon learn whether Blanchet’s stark framing connected with Quebec voters in those too-close-to-call ridings.

We’re just under 30 minutes away from the first polls closing in Newfoundland. Party leaders have spent their days voting and responding to U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion yet again that Canada should become the 51st state.

In a post on X, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre told Trump to “stay out of our election.” Liberal Party Leader Mark Carney wrote, “This is Canada – and we decide what happens here.” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Trump “doesn’t choose our future. We do.”

Poilievre and his wife Anaida voted in his riding of Carleton this morning, while Carney voted with his wife Diana Fox Carney in Ottawa this afternoon. Because Carney lives in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe neighbourhood — not the Nepean riding where he is running — he could not vote for himself.

Meanwhile, Singh stopped by a busy intersection in Port Moody, B.C. to pump up some NDP volunteers in his last public appearance of the election. He voted during advance polls in Burnaby, B.C.

Greetings from TD Place in Ottawa, where the Liberals are holding their election night party — a soirée which will, if the polls are right, be rebranded a “victory party” pretty shortly. Less than 20 hours ago, I was with Liberal Leader Mark Carney in Victoria, B.C. as he campaigned right down to the wire. And now, having gotten a bit of sleep, here’s where things stand as we await the polls to close and the first results come in.

The Liberals are feeling incredibly bullish about their odds tonight. According to senior Liberal sources, the campaign had identified about 28 seats across the country that they saw as crucial pickups — over the course of the campaign, I believe Carney has visited each of those ridings once, some of them multiple times. That list in the eastern half of the country includes the only Conservative seat in Newfoundland and Labrador, held by Conservative Clifford Small; two-to-three seats in Nova Scotia; and a seat in New Brunswick. The Liberals also expect their growth in Quebec to come exclusively from Bloc-held ridings: If you see ridings like Trois-Rivères and Rivière-du-Nord turn red, then the Liberals are adding a lot of notches in their column. And then you’ve got ridings scattered around Ontario including Peterborough, London—Fanshawe, and Windsor West, where the Liberals hope Trump-anxiety dominates the day. Those are the seats to watch early in the evening. “We’re not expecting a wave,” one Liberal told me this evening, but if you’re seeing them pick up these ridings, things are going according to plan for them.

A perfect sign of the vibes is what’s going on in Pierre Poilievre’s Carleton riding. A source near Premier Doug Ford told me weeks ago that their data shows Poilievre losing his seat — and, in recent days, the Liberals have allowed themselves to get that ambitious. I’m told Liberal staff and resources have been sent into the suburban Ottawa riding, as the Liberals hope Poilievre’s personal unpopularity, his promises to cut the civil service, and his support for the Freedom Convoy hurt him with his constituents.

Conservative finger-pointing has already begun

While some Conservatives I talk to remain optimistic that there are scores of shy Conservative voters out there who will, despite what the polls say, deliver Poilievre a plurality of seats, many seem to think they’re heading for a bruising defeat. Blame is already being assigned to campaign manager Jenni Byrne for picking fights with conservative premiers and politicians, including Doug Ford and Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston.

From the outset, the Conservatives went all-in on the idea that Poilievre himself would expand the Conservative base: cannibalizing the People’s Party, motivating non-voters, and winning over young Canadians. While he has successfully done that, it may not be enough. Poilievre’s caustic style has seemingly become a drag on his party — leading some Conservatives to wonder why Byrne failed to pivot weeks ago.

This dour mood will mean that if the Conservatives can hold their ground, it will be seen as a victory. If Poilievre can keep his seat and beat back a Liberal advances near Quebec City, around Winnipeg, and in Edmonton — while picking up seats at the expense of the NDP in British Columbia — Poilievre can spin tonight as a marginal win.

NDP and Greens try to hold their seats

Speaking of the NDP, this campaign has been a disaster for them. Leader Jagmeet Singh made so much of his campaign about what he doesn’t want — corporate landlords, cuts to healthcare, reductions in EI benefits — that he failed to make a case for what he does want. Squeezed on all sides, we expect him to slip into single-digits. Singh will be in an incredibly tough fight to save his seat. Still, the recent Ontario election shows the power of the NDP’s ground game in its ability to protect its incumbents. And the party is cautiously optimistic that it could return Ruth Ellen Brosseau to Parliament in Berthier—Maskinongé and elect popular MPP Bhutila Karpoche in Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park.

And finally there are the Greens: It’s a complete toss-up whether Elizabeth May can keep her seat in Saanich—Gulf Islands, where Carney was last night; and it’s also unclear whether Mike Morrice can hang on in Kitchener Centre. While co-leader Jonathan Pedneault campaigned hard in Outremont, it’ll be a tough climb for him to turn the riding green.

The Toronto band Martha and the Muffins is calling on Pierre Poilievre to stop using “Echo Beach” at his campaign rallies without their authorization.

Members of the group say they’ve been told the Conservative Party of Canada has been playing their 1980 new wave hit at some campaign events despite the musicians asking them to stop last month.

Representatives for the Conservative party did not respond to a request for comment.

Band member Mark Gane says he first learned Poilievre’s campaign had used “Echo Beach” after reading a story in a local Sudbury newspaper earlier this year. He says his manager then sent a cease and desist request to the Conservative party.

Read the full story from the Canadian Press here.

Canada still uses paper ballots, and all ballots are counted by two election workers in front of witnesses, usually the candidates or their representatives, according to information provided by Elections Canada.

These votes are then recorded on a paper document called the “Statement of the Vote,” which is then entered into Elections Canada’s results aggregation and reporting system. This allows the votes to be posted online and provided to media outlets in real time.

A returning officer validates the votes in each riding a few nights after election night and compares them to the reporting system and the Statement of the Vote. Once verified in front of the candidates or representatives, a certificate with the number of votes is given to the Chief Electoral Officer, Stéphane Perrault.

I voted in advance. When will my vote be counted?

Votes cast during the advanced polling days, between April 18 and 21, are counted at your local Elections Canada office on election day. Due to the record high turnout of advanced voting, there has been an adjustment for this election made by Perrault to allow advanced ballots to counted beginning two hours before polls close. These votes will be cast behind closed doors and will not be shared until after all polls have closed.

What if I mailed in my vote?

Special ballots, or mail-in ballots, are counted only after a verification process including matching unique identifiers to the voter’s application, their name, electoral district and signature of declaration on the envelopment. If any steps in the verification process fails, the vote is set aside.

Special ballots are “counted in waves,” or entered into the aggregation and reporting system in batches on election night and in the days following if necessary.

Special ballots returned to a local Elections Canada office will be counted there on election night after polls closed, while all those mailed to Ottawa’s main Elections Canada office will be counted there.

More information on how votes are cast and other questions about voting can be found on Elections Canada’s “ElectoFacts” page.

Voters casting their ballots at Lord Dufferin Junior and Senior Public School in Toronto—Centre have been taking their right to vote seriously.

“It’s just something that responsible citizens should do,” Justin Sahota told the Star.

When asked why it was important to exercise the right to vote, first-time voter Morgan Ficard, simply said, “because I have it,” and she knows not everyone can say the same. Though she missed past opportunities to vote while out of the country, Ficard, 25, said she was “really happy to be able to do something (that demonstrates) what I believe in and the people I want to protect.”

In response to a trade war with the U.S. and escalating trade tensions around the world, Canada’s political leaders are outlining their plans to mitigate the impact of tariffs on Canadian industries, seniors and businesses. The Star tracked these promises and more in an election promise tracker.

Here’s an overview of Liberal, NDP and Conservative promises on tariffs:

• Liberals: Promise to support retirees and seniors affected by U.S. tariffs includes lowering minimum retirement fund withdrawals and boosting the Guaranteed Income Supplement; strengthen Canada’s agri-food sector by cutting regulations and funding food processing; waive the one-week waiting period for employment insurance for those losing jobs to tariffs.
• NDP: Propose tax-free savings bonds to combat U.S. tariffs; a removing the GST from “essentials” like internet bills, home heating and children’s’ clothes; ban American companies from some federal contracts; mandate federal agencies buy Canadian-made vehicles.
• Conservatives: Pledge to cut sales tax on Canadian-made vehicles; set up a $3 billion fund for businesses impacted by U.S. tariffs; and enact five demands from the country’s energy sector, including streamlined regulation. They also promise to renegotiate the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement to pause tariffs.

The full promise tracker also covers commitments on jobs, tariffs, defence and the environment. Find the full promise tracker here.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh responds to United States President Donald Trump’s comments earlier on Monday about the Canadian election by posting on X, formerly Twitter, asking voters to “never back down.”

“He doesn’t choose our future. We do.”

Here is the view from the hotel ballroom in Burnaby, B.C. being set up to serve as the NDP’s headquarters tonight.

The election night event is expected to begin around 7 p.m. local time, or 10 p.m. EST. I’m told it’ll be quite a while before we see or hear from NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh tonight.

British Columbia, where the NDP holds half of its incumbents seats, is the westernmost province in Canada.

That means it’ll be a while before we find out the NDP’s fate tonight.

Liberal leader Mark Carney and his wife Diana Fox Carney who live in Ottawa’s leafy Rockcliffe neighbourhood, just voted in the Ottawa—Vanier—Gloucester riding where they are resident, as required by elections rules.

He is not running in that riding, which is currently represented by a Liberal, Mona Fortier who’s the incumbent. Carney is instead running in another suburban Ottawa riding, known as Nepean.

Carney, dressed, casually in a dark jacket and white shirt mimed a nervous reaction beforehand when he looked at cameras. Afterwards, he gave a quick thumbs up, thanked volunteers, and left.

The day after a Canadian election that has hinged on how best to combat American trade tariffs, U.S. President Donald Trump will travel to Michigan, a northern border state, to celebrate the first 100 days of his second term in office.

“This will be a historic rally you won’t want to miss,” the registration website for the rally promised.

Michigan is the beating heart of America’s automotive manufacturing industry, one that Trump has promised to resurrect with tariffs on foreign-made imports, including on Canadian-made vehicles.

This could be the first opportunity for Canada’s newly elected government to see the next step in Trump’s ongoing campaign to make Canada the 51st state — something he once again pitched on social media on Monday morning, as voters were headed to the polling stations.

The Liberals have opened up their election night HQ, here in a hockey arena in central Ottawa.

In the coming hours we can expect the place to get rammed with media and supporters, with Carney and others set to address the audience later tonight.

Conservative and Liberal party leaders have responded on social media to U.S. President Donald Trumps comments earlier Monday on Truth Social.

Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre posted to X telling Trump to “stay out of our election.” 

“The only people who will decide the future of Canada are Canadians at the ballot box,” he wrote, adding that Canada will never be the 51st state.

Liberal Party Leader Mark Carney posted a video to X addressing Canadians anxiety over current relations with the United States and the ongoing Tariff War. 

“This is Canada and we decide what happens here. Let’s choose to be united and strong.”

Neither NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, Green Party Co-Leaders Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault nor Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-F. Blanchet have yet to post a response to Trumps most recent comments.

MONTREAL - Voters are heading to the polls in Quebec, where the Liberals are trying to gain enough seats to clinch a majority government and the Bloc Québécois is hoping an eleventh-hour bump in support will be enough to claim the balance of power.

The campaign in Quebec has been a tough slog for Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet, who has watched his party lose ground to the Liberals as U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs and annexation dominated headlines.

Partway through the campaign, the Bloc appeared to be at risk of keeping fewer than the 12 seats it will need to maintain official party status. The Liberals seemed poised to win close to 50 of the province’s 78 seats, despite leader Carney’s imperfect French, which would have been the party’s best showing in decades.

Read the full story here from the Canadian Press

TORONTO - Voters across the country head to the polls in the federal election today, and as results start to roll in at night, parties will be closely watching the Greater Toronto Area.

The GTA, which includes the city itself and surrounding areas such as Peel, York and Durham regions, has an abundance of seats and could help turn the tide in what is widely seen as a two-horse race.

People in some ridings reliably vote in the same party every time, but the region also contains a lot of swing ridings, making the results anything but certain.

Full story here from the Canadian Press

BURNABY - After spending much of the election campaign working to keep staffers’ morale high in the face of grim polls, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh paused his campaign Sunday to confront a shocking tragedy — a vehicle attack on a Vancouver community event that left 11 people dead.

Singh left the Lapu Lapu Day event, a Filipino cultural festival, about ten minutes before the attack took place. He’d taken photos with families and danced with festival goers.

“I keep on thinking about the joy. I was there literally minutes before this happened, and I can’t stop thinking about, how much happiness was there, how much it was a family event,” Singh said in Penticton, B.C. on Sunday while holding back tears.

“People were so positive and so joyful, and then to have such a horrific thing happen … I keep on replaying it.”

Read the full story here from the Canadian Press

It was a busy morning at the polling station inside the Sheraton Hotel on Queen Street West, in the Spadina — Harbourfront riding, staff told the Star. By the afternoon the crowd had thinned out and the short line was moving swiftly.

Trouble from south of the border was top of mind for many voters as they entered the booth.

“The rise of fascism in other countries has been very terrifying, and I think it’d be irresponsible of me as a Canadian to not go out of my way and vote,” Nuvya Babbar told the Star. “As Canadians, we need to be leaders on the international stage when it comes to showing the world that we will not bend to the rise of fascism and these really toxic populist ideologies that sow a lot of discontent.”

Another voter, Matt Brown, echoed that sentiment, saying “picking a candidate that is best suited to deal with the United States and President Trump,” was his main priority.

Although she’s lived in the same home for 16 years, Allyson Bradley said she received two voter information cards with two different polling stations.

But when she arrived at Saw Mills Valley Public School in her riding of Mississauga-Erin Mills this morning at 9:30 a.m. she was one of many people told they were not registered to vote and had to re-register.

“It was absolute chaos. The line of people waiting to re register probably had 40 or 50 people in it,” Bradley said.

“About three quarters of us got rerouted to the you have to re register line, and I waited almost an hour to register.”

Bradley said when she did finally get to vote, she kept receiving misinformation from poll workers, like, “you had to mark your ballots with a black marker or it didn’t count, and there were, of course, no black markers at any of the little voting booths.”

Bradley’s husband, who also received two different voter information cards, took part in the advanced polls and had no issues.

The Star reached out to Elections Canada for comment but has not received a response.

Voters are designated to vote at the polling station stated on their voter information card. They can also find their designated polling station using Election Canada’s Voter Information Service online.

It’s just past 8 a.m local time from a busy intersection in Port Moody, B.C, where just over a dozen New Democrats and incumbent Bonita Zarrillo are waving signs - including one that says “BC Votes NDP to Stop Conservatives” - at passing cars.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is expected to make a whistlestop shortly. It’ll be his final public event before election night.

People here are optimistic about their chances in what is expected to be a tight three-way race in a riding that has been decided by only a few percentage points in every election since 2015. And they’re getting some encouraging signs with supportive honks from passersby.

Wait times are short as voters stream in and out of Swansea Town Hall Community Centre in Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park.

After casting her ballot, Connie Dejak told the Star she’s committed to voting in every election, but that it’s especially important this time around as she feels Canada has become “invisible” on the world stage.

If there’s a lack of “strong leadership at the helm,” Dejak said she believed there were two paths Canada could go down as a country: “We either become completely nonexistent, or we become very vulnerable to what’s going on in the United States,” she said.

“For the United States to believe that we don’t have a voice, we don’t have an identity, we don’t have a position within the world stage, is shocking,” said Dejak. “The level of ignorance to who we are makes me very nervous and compels me to vote even more.”

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and his wife Ana Poilievre just cast their votes this morning in his riding of Carleton, where the ballot is unusually long, with some 91 candidates listed. It’s already reportedly causing delays there.

Elections Canada has modified the counting rules to allow the counting of advance ballots in this riding to begin six hours before polls close today. In the rest of the country, because of the high turnout at advance polls, Elections Canada has provided for counting to begin of those votes two hours before polls close.