I just finished mapping out Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative election win from 2022. On June 2 of that year, the voters of Ontario returned the PC leader with a majority government with 83 seats. The Progressive Conservatives defeated the Ontario Liberals led by Steven Del Duca and the Ontario NDP which was helmed by Andrea Horwath. Both defeated party leaders would move on from provincial politics and have since become the mayors of Vaughan and Hamilton, respectively.
The results of this pandemic-era election were very much similar to the 2018 provincial election – another majority for the PC under Ford – but the election saw a strenghthened mandate for the Premier. One independent candidate was elected in Haldimand–Norfolk.
This is the sixth election I’ve mapped out for the province of Ontario. You can review all of those elections here and drill down on the results of this one using the provincial map.
Clicking/tapping on a riding will zoom you into the map for a poll-by-poll breakdown. You can dive into your own riding and find out how your neighbours voted! Hovering over ridings or neighbourhood polls will show a pie chart breakdown of the proportion of votes in a particular area. Expanding the tile at the bottom right and switching to the “Turnout” tab will show voter turnout rates on a riding level or can show poll-by-poll rates of partipation.
You can also use the search bar at the top of the page to search for any candidate or riding over the last 6 elections. Some candidates appear more than once and you can track their electoral history (no matter which riding they may have contested). Clicking on a riding will also show a “related content” button at the top of the page which you can use to find the results of nearby ridings. A few of those ridings are also summarized below the map.
Green party win in Guelph shaded by the strength of the Progressive Conservative vote (ironically the colour green showing strongest PC areas here). Mike Schreiner, the Green Party leader won the party’s only seat.
If you’re wondering how to take these screenshots to put these images in your own posts or tweets, click the camera at the top left of the map. This will download an image of the map.
Zooming around the map is a lot of fun. It’s vector-based, so zooming in and out is smooth and looks great.
Clicking the “Up to 2022 Provincial Election” button in the top right zooms the map out to the provincial riding context, while clicking on a riding zooms in to show the local breakdown.
A particularly strong neighbourhood poll for PC candidate Doug Ford in Etobicoke North.
I’ve integrated building footprints for all of Ontario (and Canada) into my map, so you can see grouping of houses on cul-de-sacs, apartment buildings, and in some cases even the house numbers.
Visualizing these building footprints in neighbourhoods for various polls is a new feature of this iteration of these maps. I’ve also extended this feature to my previous maps (both federal and provincial). It can be useful to consider different zoning and dwelling types when appreciating party strength in a riding.
Liberal leader Steven Del Duca did not have a great showing in his riding of Vaughan–Woodbridge.
I enjoy pulling these maps together for the broader political community and to help voters further engage with our democratic process. I’ll be mapping other provincial elections as that data becomes available from the relevant provincial elections agencies.
York South–Weston showing a diversity of voting preferences throughout the riding.
The second half of the Conservative Party leadership race is now underway. Midnight on June 4th represented the cut-off for new memberships sold for party members to be eligible to vote for the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
What’s the Pierre Poilievre news? Have Jean Charest and Patrick Brown merged campaigns yet? How’s Leslyn Lewis released her platform yet? Who is Roman Baber and what does he believe? Will Scott Aitchison end up endorsing anyone?
A source insider the Conservative Party told the CBC that the party expects to process over 600,000 new or renewed memberships sold by the leadership campaigns of Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest, Patrick Brown, Leslyn Lewis, Roman Baber, and Scott Aitchison. A few of those membership will have been sold generally via the Conservative Party website during this period.
At $15 per membership, this means the party expects to rake in over $9,000,000 in revenue from this leadership race. This is a welcome winfall after spending tens of millions establishing abandoned branding exercises of Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole.
Campaigns will boast (and inflate) their numbers for various reasons. Some will try to establish themselves as the front-runner of the race and the candidate-to-beat. Psychologically, people like voting for the winner, so it helps to project this sort of confidence early-on. This will be Pierre Poilievre’s strategy as he’s been running a bit of a scorched-earth campaign with Jean Charest. In a ranked ballot contest, winning down-ballot support is critically important. That is, unless you are looking to win over 50% on the first ballot, making everyone’s second choice a moot point.
Poilievre’s campaign has been focused on exciting new members who have never before been active within a political party. His support of the trucker rally and position against vaccine mandates has attracted new people who have felt like they’ve been outside of the political process, while overtures to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin enthusiasts have inspired younger support. Pierre Poilievre’s principle campaign proxy Jenni Byrne has claimed that the campaign has sold 311,958 memberships. Byrne, perhaps knowing that campaigns inflate their numbers also called for transparency from the party on the process.
The softer side of Pierre. The candidate and his family. (via Pierre Poilievre)
Jean Charest for his part will be looking to rally the anybody-but-Pierre vote. For the former Quebec Premier, that number may be large or small, but will exist given Pierre is the perceived front-runner. Charest will be banking on Poilievre to be running at under 45% on the first ballot and will hope to gather second choice support. Boasting strong second-place numbers will rally support for this purpose behind Charest. At this time, Charest’s campaign has not released their numbers.
Jean Charest cracks a smile during a recent leadership debate (via Jean Charest)
For his part, former PC Party of Ontario leader and current Brampton mayor Patrick Brown boasted early on June 3rd, a total of 150,000 memberships were sold by his campaign with a day-long push later in the day to nudge this total higher. Brown has shown himself to be a formidable organizer in the past, shocking the Christine Elliott campaign during the 2015 PCPO leadership race – a campaign whose success was seen to be inevitable at the time. Brown has been selling memberships to new Canadian communities and hopes to diversify the party base by adding new membership to its rolls. We shall see how many of those new memberships from Brown were added versus renewed.
Patrick Brown and his wife Genevieve Gualtieri vote in Ontario’s 2022 election (via Patrick Brown)
Leslyn Lewis is the only candidate in the 2022 Conservative Party leadership race who ran in the previous contest versus Erin O’Toole. Lewis stunned the O’Toole and McKay campaigns with a stronger-than-expected showing on the first ballot, showing exceptional strength in the prairies. She has also positioned herself as the standard-bearer of the small but disproportionately active contingent of social conservatives in the party’s base – all other candidates declared themselves to be pro-choice on the issue of abortion. Lewis’ position against vaccine mandates suggest that her down-ballot support will eventually go to Poilievre. Her campaign has not yet released their numbers.
Leslyn Lewis and Peter MacKay (via Leslyn Lewis)
Roman has yet to release his numerals. Roman Baber – the former PC MPP who was kicked out of Doug Ford’s governing caucus in Ontario for standing against lockdowns – will likely be a long-shot for leadership as he is not very well-known in the federal party or in the rest of Canada. Rising to national prominance on a single issue has its own shelf-life as well. However, Baber has since taken strong conservative-pleasing stances against communism and against leftwing authority, so he may surprise if he has a good ground game to sell memberships.
Roman Baber campaigns in Vancouver, British Columbia. (via Roman Baber)
Finally, Scott Aitchison, has been congenial-as-a-brand during this leadership race. Hope is an emotion that spurs people to act politically, though fear and anger are stronger. And potential for change is the glue that holds it all together. Will Aitchison’s strategy help him? If he’s running #2 or #3 in this race, down-ballot support has the potential to crown him victorious. However, running at the end of the pack, as many suspect he is, may show a missed opportunity to grab more attention by taking more contentious takes on hot-button issues and personalities.
Scott Aitchison showing that Conservatives can be nice. (via Scott Aitchison)
But yet for the front-runners, this post-cutoff period of the leadership race will likely see more congenial behaviour. Such a shift in tone from Poilievre may indicate less confidence on the first ballot. Candidates will also downplay their more woolly and outlandish appeals to members as they’re not able to chase any new sign-ups. The rest of this game will be about projecting a perceived position in candidate rank, and gathering that all-important down-ballot support from others; appealing to voting blocs banked with other candidates becomes all-too-important.
Some of you may be up to more interesting things on the Victoria Day long weekend, but given that we’re into the most important period of a provincial election in Ontario at the moment – I thought I’d take some time and mash-up, clean-up, and mark-up data from Elections Ontario of the last provincial election to give us some important historical context for the vote coming up on June 2nd.
As with my previous mapping efforts, I’m sharing these as a non-partisan resource for all political volunteers who find a lot of use for political maps in campaign offices. If you appreciate that effort, write a nice tweet about the project, or better yet blog about it – if you still do that kind of thing.
The 2018 provincial election saw the end of the 19-year Ontario Liberal dynasty with the election of the newly-minted Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford after the dramatic ouster of Patrick Brown from the job just months earlier. Ford won a majority government in 2018 and is now looking to increase his seat total in this year’s contest.
Patrick Brown’s former riding of Simcoe North was easily retained by the PCs in 2018
Ford struggled – as all government leaders did – with administration during the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve just seen Alberta Premier Jason Kenney fall to populist discontent within his own party due to his own balancing of individual liberties versus public health during the crisis. Ford has faced similar criticism but looks to have wealthered the storm. Calling an election during a downtime in COVID cycles – and as Ontarians are off to the cottage – will likely see Ford return to the Premier’s Office when all of the votes are counted. We’re also expecting lower-than-usual voter turnout which usually favours incumbents.
As I’ve mentioned, the Ontario Liberals were wiped-out in 2018, being reduced to 7 seats. Putting the results on the map shows us their Toronto and Ottawa urban strongholds and where they may seek to increase their totals this year with their new leader Steven Del Duca.
The Liberal electoral map in Toronto looked quite different in 2018
Over on team-orange, this is NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s fourth election as head of her party. With falling Liberal fortunes in 2018, the Ontario NDP more than doubled their seats to 40. The riding distribution shows NDP strength in Toronto, Kingston, London, Niagara region, and Windsor.
The NDP won every poll in London–Fanshawe in 2018. Seeing the NDP win every poll in a riding is a rare sight.
Organized labour could also be a factor in redrawing the map. Labour Minister Monte McNaughton’s work in his portfolio has split up Progressives and the dreaded Working Families Coalition. Many of the founding members of the coalition – including the Ontario Pipe Trades Council, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers – have endorsed the re-election of Progressive Conservatives and a refreshed mandate for Ford as Premier.
Monte McNaughton’s won the riding of Lambton—Kent—Middlesex. The NDP won one poll on the western edge of the riding
By most accounts, Green Party leader Mike Schreiner impressed the province during the Ontario Leaders debate. His opposition to highway 413 and greenbelt issues may translate into additional seats for the Greens. With a split on the left between Liberal and NDP support, we could see Ontario progressives rally with strong green representation in some ridings. However, it’s more likely that this will clear the way for additional Progressive Conservative gains.
Green Party leader Mike Schreiner won Guelph in 2018. Here, his strength in the riding is mapped by poll from maximum (green) to minimum strength (red)Schreiner won most of the polls
I’ve mapped out areas of strength in each riding for each candidate that ran in 2018. Whether your party was successful or not in your local riding, you can see where it’s strength is growing or declining and these maps can help you focus on neighbourhoods where you can get out the vote. Whether you’re actively campaigning or not, you can also use these maps to see the distribution of party strength geographically within a riding using these strength/weakness settings for the poll-by-poll maps. How did your neighbours vote? Find out!
The NDP carried the riding of Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas in 2018. You can see their urban vs rural strength mapped here.
There’s a search bar at the top of the app as well so you can easily zoom around the province if you know the riding you want to look at but can’t exactly remember its geospatial position. Future updates will include a method to jump around to neighbouring ridings and to look at the results of previous Ontario elections in context. I’ve already added these features to my federal maps, so do check those out as well if you believe that the 2021 federal election provides some helpful context for this current provicial election.
The many minds of Kingston and the Islands. CFB Kingston is to the east, Queen’s University and the Prisons are to the West and the Liberal cottages are on the nicer part of Wolfe Island
Hopefully you find this to be a useful resource if you’re colouring in maps in a campaign office, or if you just can’t get enough of Canadian politics. If you are neither, I hope you’ll still find the visualization of Ontario electoral politics to give you some bearings on the priorities of your community.
