But the scale of the Conservative win was a little bigger than expected — thanks in large part to the party’s storming of Metro Vancouver.

All counting has not completed, with a few polls still outstanding in Fraser-Nicola, Langford-Highlands, North Island, Prince George-North Cariboo, Salmon Arm-Shuswap and Vancouver-South Granville. And the mail-in ballots won’t be counted for another two weeks. But, with Elections BC reporting 99.57% of polls, the Conservatives sit with 48.1% of the vote and 64 seats, the biggest victory by any party in British Columbia since Gordon Campbell’s B.C. Liberals swept 77 of 79 seats in the 2001 election.

The New Democrats took just 37.4% of the vote and 27 seats and David Eby announced his resignation. It was a wholly unnecessary own-goal as the NDP had a majority government and two years left in its mandate. That the NDP lost this election, and lost it so badly, makes this one of the all-time strategic blunders in Canadian political history.

The Greens won 11% of the vote and secured two seats, up from the last election in vote share though still below the party’s levels of support in 2017 and 2020.

CentreBC and OneBC took 1.6% and 1.5% of the vote, respectively. Only a single OneBC candidate cleared double-digits (in Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream with 11%), while leader Dallas Brodie took only 4% in her own riding of Vancouver-Quilchena. CentreBC’s Elenore Sturko in Surrey South and Andrew Weaver in Oak Bay-Gordon Head each got 10% of the vote, the only CentreBC candidates to reach that level.

The Conservatives were able to flip seats throughout the province, though primarily in Metro Vancouver. They gained 15 seats from the NDP in the area, including four in Surrey (sweeping the city), three in Vancouver and two in both Burnaby and Coquitlam. Flips were rarer elsewhere, with only one in the Fraser Valley and one in the B.C. Interior. Another four seats changed hands on Vancouver Island from the NDP to the Conservatives, though one also went the other way. The NDP was able to win Courtenay-Comox from the Conservatives, their lone gain of the night.

It was the shift in Metro Vancouver that proved decisive, as the NDP dropped 11.6 points from the last election. Most of that went to the Conservatives, who were up six points, but the Greens also made their biggest gain in Metro Vancouver with a four-point increase.

The shifts were more modest in the rest of the province, though the NDP still lost 3.1 points in the Interior and North and fell 4.7 points on Vancouver Island. The Conservatives were up 4.3 points in the Interior and North and 2.8 points on Vancouver Island, while the Greens were up less than two points in both regions.

The Green results are a little interesting, in that they made strong gains in the southern portion of Vancouver Island, finishing within 10 points of the NDP in the two Victoria ridings. Where they were projected to clear 20% of the vote in Victoria, Saanich and parts of Vancouver, they did, but they failed to hit 20% where they were projected to in Vancouver Island ridings further north and in Kootenay Central. The Greens’ gains were more concentrated and less broad-based than they could’ve been.

We have to wait for the mail ballots to be counted to have an official final tally. I have not seen data from Elections BC about how many mail ballots are still outstanding, but in the 2024 election the total of mail (and telephone-assisted) ballots was around 84,000. The NDP did very well in these votes, winning them by a margin of 22 percentage points over the Conservatives. But, on average, that represented a raw-vote advantage of only 206 votes per riding. That was in an election in which the NDP beat the Conservatives by a little less than two points overall. In an election where they lost to the Conservatives by nearly 11 points, the mail-in ballots are unlikely to be as lopsided toward them.

Nevertheless, we should keep an eye on the results in Ladysmith-Oceanside (Conservative lead = 89 votes), Kelowna Centre (132 votes), Cowichan Valley (150 votes) and Burnaby South-Metrotown (NDP lead = 66 votes). When we know how many mail ballots are to be counted in each riding we’ll have a better idea, but for now these look like the prime candidates for potential flips.

Pollsters under-estimated Conservatives, but caught the trend

The final tally of mail ballots will also have an impact on the total popular vote, so we can only rate the pollsters on the preliminary count. But the overall portrait is unlikely to shift dramatically.

So, how did the pollsters do?

On the whole, pollsters under-estimated the Conservatives and over-estimated the NDP. They were pretty close for the Greens, though not surprisingly most pollsters over-estimated the party since it did not have candidates in 20 ridings. The polls did a good job in capturing the trend and giving us an idea of what the outcome would probably be — a Conservative majority — but the errors were a little bigger than usual.

The best performer was Pallas Data with a total error of 5.8 points. Pallas under-estimated the Conservatives by about three points and over-estimated the NDP by about two, but was within one point for both the Greens and the other parties. The Writ’s projection ranks tied for second on this list, in part because of the adjustments made to take into account the number of candidates. Pollara Strategic Insights is also tied for second using its projected vote, which also took into account the number of candidates. (Prior to the results being known, I asked Pollara which set of numbers they wanted to be graded on, and they chose the projected vote.) Also tied for second was Forum’s last-minute poll.

Beyond this group, we have decent performances from Léger, Ipsos and Research Co., while the Innovative Research Group, the Angus Reid Institute and Mainstreet Research finished at the bottom of the pack (Mainstreet’s six-point over-estimation of the Greens was the biggest error of the night). Liaison Strategies did not put out a poll in the final week, but the poll conducted a little over two weeks before election day is included in these rankings because Liaison put out a poll during the campaign, which is my standard practice for any pollsters active during a writ period.

Why the Conservatives over-performed the polls and the NDP under-performed by such a significant amount is an interesting question. The mail-in votes might narrow the margins a little, but this could be a sign of the lack of enthusiasm on the NDP side for its voters to bother to cast a ballot in an election that the party had royally screwed up. Indeed, turnout sits at only 48.1% at the moment. It’s likely that a lot of New Democrats stayed home. (Oddly, the lower turnout means the Conservatives are winning a big majority with about 50,000 fewer votes than in 2024.)

I am pleased with how the projection model performed. It was effective in estimating the Greens and adjusting for the party’s lack of candidates. These adjustments also ensured that the Conservative vote projection was closer to the mark, though it’s clear that a lot of Green voters in ridings without Green candidates did not vote for the NDP, as the NDP did not over-perform its polls as expected.

The seat projection gave 59 seats to the Conservatives, five fewer than the party won, and 32 to the NDP, five more. But the result of 64 and 27, respectively, is well-within the confidence intervals. The Median Projection, which had fewer seats for the Conservatives, expected the NDP to beat its polls even beyond what the baseline vote projection did, based on how the polls have somewhat under-estimated the NDP in the last few elections. That did not happen. Nevertheless, The Writ was higher than some other projections for the Conservatives, so I think the result is acceptable (especially if the mail ballots flip a few seats to the NDP).

The seat-by-seat projection did quite well, surpassing the performance in the Quebec election. Only nine wrong calls were made for an accuracy rating of 90.3%. And in every one of those nine calls, the projection classified the seat as a toss. In the Quebec election, the model made correct calls or only missed in tosses in 94.5% of ridings. In the B.C. election, when including the tosses as “correct”, the model was 93 for 93, or 100%.

That’s actually a bit unusual — not a single Edge, Lean, Close, Likely or Safe call was wrong. It’s another argument for simplifying the classifications. I will have more to say on this soon, but I have developed a new way of calculating the probability of each party winning each seat, which will reduce the size of the confidence intervals and be a little more “confident” at the riding-level when it comes to classifying the race. It would’ve improved the projection in Quebec and I suspect it would have done the same thing in British Columbia. I’ll role out the adjustments to the model in the coming weeks.

For David Eby and the New Democrats, it didn’t need to be this way. Seeing good polls and the Conservatives in shambles under then-leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Eby decided to call an early election two years ahead of schedule. Instead of turning his razor-thin majority into something more comfortable, Eby appears to be on track to lead his party out of power.

The final update of The Writ’s B.C. Election Tracker gives the B.C. Conservatives the lead with 46% support in the vote projection, ahead of the NDP’s 40.9%. The Greens trail in third with 10.8%, followed by OneBC and CentreBC at 1.2% and 0.7%, respectively. These provincewide numbers translate into 59 seats for the Conservatives, leaving just 32 for the New Democrats and two for the Greens.

Compared to the 2024 provincial election, this represents a gain of 2.7 points for the Conservatives and a drop of four points for the NDP. It isn’t a dramatic shift, but B.C.’s elections are often decided at the margins. That net 6.7-point swing is enough to cost the NDP 15 of the seats it won in the last election, all of them going to the Conservatives.

The Median Projection, which takes into account potential polling error and the number of close races across the province, whittles down the Conservative advantage slightly to 56 seats against 35 for the NDP. But the picture remains the same — the Conservatives are heavily favoured to win this election, with enough cushion over the 47-seat threshold needed for a majority government to have some confidence in the outcome.

The model awards the Conservatives the most seats in 81% of simulations. As was demonstrated in the Quebec election, the model is a little too uncertain (I’ll be making some changes after this election is over) and is banking on the possibility for the NDP to win a lot of the toss-ups, as well as for the polls to be off by quite a fair bit, to give the NDP an 18% chance of coming out ahead. But, based on where the numbers are, it would require a significant polling error — and not just an error in the modelling — for the NDP to pull off the upset.

There is a very small chance of a minority (roughly 3%), which would require the Conservatives and NDP to finish within two or maybe three seats of each other, with the Greens holding the balance of power. Threading that needle is just a little too unlikely for a minority government to be considered a real possibility. The NDP would need to seriously over-perform the polls to get the seat margin down to two or three. Complicating matters is that if the NDP managed to do that, it would likely come at the expense of the Greens, decreasing their chances of winning a third (or even a second) seat. Stranger things have happened, but a minority is simply mathematically unlikely.

The last polls of the campaign have been very consistent. The Conservatives lead by five points in the projection, which isn’t an enormous margin. It’s possible to imagine a scenario where, with a five-point average lead, the Conservatives could be leading by eight or nine points in a few polls and the NDP pulling into a tie in a few others. But, instead, the Conservatives have led in every poll published in the last week of this campaign.

The party registered between 43% and 46% in the nine polls published by nine different pollsters in the last week, with the NDP landing between 37% and 43% (though only one poll had them over 40%). The projection has the Conservatives at 46% and the NDP at 41% in part because of the lack of candidates the other parties are fielding. With only a one-third slate apiece for OneBC and CentreBC, which combine for about 3% of the vote in these polls, and with the Greens missing 20 candidates, the Conservatives and NDP are likely to beat their polls for the simple reason that the other three parties won’t have enough candidates on the ballot to match their own polls.

That’s the issue for the Greens, who were between 11% and 13% in seven of the nine final polls. They are lacking candidates primarily where their support is weakest, but nevertheless it will be difficult to match their 11% to 13% consensus polling range. That would require averaging between 14% and 17% in the ridings where they do have candidates.

Are there reasons to expect some polling misses? B.C. is still haunted by the 2013 provincial election, when every poll had the NDP winning an election that was actually won by the B.C. Liberals.

Not really.

One of the culprits in polling misses is usually differing turnout rates by different voters — particularly older voters. While there isn’t unanimity on this front, the polls have generally shown a Conservative advantage among older voters that is equal to or greater than their advantage among the population as a whole. That wasn’t the case for every poll (Ipsos had the NDP leading among voters over the age of 55, Léger had it tied among this age group and Pollara had a tie among voters over the age of 65), but on balance there are no blaring warning signs in the polls that a surprise could be in store.

For the New Democrats, that means the early election call is setting up to be one of the biggest strategic blunders in Canadian political history. The election wasn’t an urgent necessity, but even if it had been the party seemed to have been caught flat-footed by its own election call. Eby has also struggled throughout the campaign to explain why the election was needed in the first place. The lead his New Democrats had prior to the writ drop evaporated as soon as the campaign began.

Eby has had the worst campaign of the three major leaders. Polling by the Angus Reid Institute and Research Co. suggests that between 40% and 50% of British Columbians say their opinion of Eby has worsened over the course of the campaign, compared to just 6% to 15% who say it has improved. In those two polls, along with one by Ipsos, Eby has a net negative approval or favourability rating.

But the NDP is not entirely cooked. The party is still projected to take 41% of the vote, is behind by just a couple of points in Metro Vancouver and is leading on Vancouver Island. The party’s support has also held firm in the Interior and North. If the New Democrats can eke out wins in the closest races, the outcome could be far more positive than the current projection. There are 15 ridings in which the NDP is projected to be trailing the Conservatives by five points or less. Flipping all of them (without losing any of the close races in which the NDP is favoured) would give the NDP the barest of victories with 47 seats. While that’s a lot to ask, flipping even five of them could spare the NDP a rout.

Of course, things could be even worse. The NDP is leading by five points or less in nine seats. Losing those would drop the party below 30.

The Conservatives are, in some ways, on track to win this election by default. With the exception of the shift in the polls that occurred after Findlay’s resignation and the early election call, the party’s numbers have been holding steady throughout the campaign. Once the candidate slates were known and the party’s support (along with that of the NDP) was boosted in the projection, the Conservatives haven’t budged much from a range of between 44.5% and 46%. Instead, the NDP has slipped behind. That has not bolstered the Conservatives as much as it has given a little more life to the Greens.

Doerkson has managed to run a relatively clean campaign, positioning himself as a reasonable alternative to an unpopular government. It’s often said that governments defeat themselves, and this is perhaps a textbook case of just that. There’s no Doerkson-mania in British Columbia — both the Angus Reid Institute and Ipsos give Doerkson a mildly net-negative approval rating (Research Co. is more bullish) and roughly equal amounts of British Columbians say their opinion of Doerkson has improved or worsened over the course of the campaign. But that just speaks to the default nature of this victory — Doerkson and the Conservatives did not provide a reason for voters to go back to the NDP, but neither did they catch fire with the electorate.

As mentioned above, there are a lot of toss-up races between the Conservatives and the NDP. If those toss-ups fall toward the Conservatives, the party could easily clear the 60-seat threshold. If they fall to the NDP, then the Conservative majority might be modest.

If the party does secure a majority, it’ll be because of gains made in Metro Vancouver. The party is only projected to pick up two seats from the NDP in the Interior and two more on Vancouver Island, but it is projected to flip about a dozen in the Lower Mainland, with four of those alone being in Surrey. The NDP failed to secure a big majority in 2024 because of the inroads the Conservatives had made in Metro Vancouver. In 2026, deeper inroads look set to give the Conservatives the win.

The Greens have had a decent campaign, perhaps their best since the 2017 election when they won the balance of power. It’s unfortunate that they weren’t able to run a full slate, but the back half of this campaign has given the Greens some momentum, thanks in large part to the performance of new leader Emily Lowan in the debate.

Lowan ends this campaign with strongly positive net approval ratings: +10 according to the Angus Reid Institute, +12 according to Ipsos and +14 according to Research Co. Those are far better numbers than either Eby or Doerkson. Polls also show that roughly twice as many British Columbians say their opinion of the Green leader improved over the course of the campaign than say it has worsened.

This has boosted the Greens in the polls, from a low of 7.8% in the vote projection prior to the release of the first post-debate polls, to a high of 10.8% in the final projection. (The party would be closer to 12% if it was running a full slate.) The jump has been most dramatic on Vancouver Island, where the Greens have gained nearly six points in the last week.

But will it be enough to flip any seats? The Greens are likely to retain the two they won in the last election: Saanich North and the Islands and West Vancouver-Sea to Sky. The high end of the projection has them potentially winning a third seat (and in a very, very few simulations the Greens win a fourth or a fifth). The top targets would be Kootenay Central, Juan de Fuca-Malahat and Victoria-Beacon Hill, along with Saanich South where the Greens have a strong candidate in former BC coroner Lisa Lapointe. The polls have not been strong enough, though, to make the Greens the favourite in any of these ridings — if they do win more than two, it’ll be because of a local dynamic at play. But, even if the Greens do manage only two seats, they should be able to look positively at this campaign as a springboard to better things in the future.

Not so for OneBC or CentreBC, the two off-shoots from the Conservatives who had legitimate hopes for a breakthrough only a few weeks ago.

There are only 35 candidates running under the CentreBC banner and 33 running for OneBC. This has prevented both parties from being considered as “major” parties. Prior to the election call the two parties were polling as high as 5% apiece, enough of a base to make some trouble for the bigger parties. But the reunification of the Conservatives under Doerkson removed the need for CentreBC and the slide of the NDP has sapped what support existed for OneBC as right-wing voters who prioritize defeating the New Democrats flock back to the Conservatives. Now, the two parties are polling at 1% to 2% apiece and, because of the lack of a full slate, will struggle to even manage that.

Where could they have an impact? For CentreBC, the two ridings to watch are Surrey South, where leader and former Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko is running, and Oak Bay-Gordon Head, where former Green leader and MLA Andrew Weaver is running. Local dynamics that can’t be picked up by regional polling could boost either of these two candidates, but it would take quite a miracle to elect either of them in a polarized race.

For OneBC, the question will be whether leader Dallas Brodie can be competitive in her riding of Vancouver-Quilchena — again, a tough prospect when the race is between the Conservatives and NDP. The party is also polling 3-4% in the Interior and North, so in very tight NDP-Conservative races the amount of vote going to OneBC could be decisive. But, for both parties, the 2026 election could very well be the end of the road.

It looks like it could also be the end of the road for David Eby. It was a gamble — a big one — to call an early election two years ahead of schedule when the party had, prior to the implosion of Findlay’s version of the Conservative Party, largely been struggling in the polls under a leader with drooping approval ratings.

Perhaps things were only going to get worse from here. The NDP’s chances of winning might have been even dimmer in 2027 or in 2028. The brief uptick in NDP support this summer could indeed have been the best chance the party was going to have at re-election. That being the case, perhaps Eby can’t be blamed for shooting his shot.

But a day in government is always better than a day in opposition, and the New Democrats could have had another two years in government. A lot can be done over that time — and a lot can change. The NDP’s re-election odds looked grim as it approached a decade in office, but there is no certainty in the future. The Conservative Party was falling apart under Findlay. It could’ve fallen apart again under her successor. An NDP defeat in 2027 or 2028 was not inevitable.

And neither is their defeat tonight. But the odds don’t look good. If the polls are right and the Conservatives do win, this election call will be one of the biggest unforced errors a sitting government has made in recent memory. And it’ll propel Lorne Doerkson to the premier’s office — somewhere that no one, including himself, thought he’d be just a few weeks ago.

Updated October 24 (5:45 AM PT) - With all the polls now in, the Conservatives are the heavy favourites to win today’s British Columbia election. The party leads by just over five percentage points in the vote projection and is favoured in 59 seats across the province, leaving just 32 for the New Democrats and two for the Greens. The model estimates an 81% chance of victory for Lorne Doerkson and the Conservatives, with the NDP’s chances largely resting on the potential for an under-estimation in the polls. That’s not impossible — the margin is just five points, after all — but the consistency in the Conservatives’ lead, as well as their strong numbers in Metro Vancouver, make it difficult to realistically see a path to re-election for David Eby’s NDP.

Note to Readers: These projections are presented using Datawrapper’s interactive charts. They are best viewed on a desktop. In most cases, you can click, tap or hover over the charts to interact with them.

Full regional breakdowns and tracking charts are available for subscribers below, as are complete riding-level projections. A full methodological explanation of how the vote and seat projection model works can be found here.

The Vote Projection is based primarily on a weighted average of all publicly-available provincial and regional polls. The weighted average is then used to project the outcome in all 93 ridings across British Columbia, taking into account local candidates. Those individual riding-level projections are then weighted by the number of eligible voters in each riding and past turnout to determine the provincial vote projection for each party.

The Seat Leading shows the number of seats in which each party is projected to be ahead. Parties are assigned a range of likely vote share in each riding based on past polling and modelling errors and 10,000 simulations are run to assign to each party a number of ridings in which they are in contention. The High and Low ranges take into account 95% of all likely outcomes, while the Median Projection shows the median number of seats each party wins in these simulations, which takes into account the tendency for parties to under- or out-perform their polls, as well as the number of toss-up contests across the province.

Wondering how to interpret the Seats Leading and the Median Projection? While the Seats Leading is The Writ’s “official call”, the Median Projection is an important guide to understanding the projections, in conjunction with the high and low ranges. Seat projections are rarely right on target, so the Median Projection should set expectations. In other words, if a party is leading in 25 seats but the Median Projection is 21.2, your expectation should be that the party will win around 25 seats, with a greater likelihood that the party under-performs that target rather than beats it.

The percentage of simulations in which each party wins a majority or a plurality of seats is shown below.

A full breakdown of the methodology behind the vote and seat projection model can be found here:

The table below includes all recent provincial voting intentions polls that are publicly available. You can click or tap on the name of the polling firm in the left-most column to go directly to that polling firm’s original poll release.

Vote and seat projections broken down by region, tracking charts, maps and detailed projections for all 93 ridings across B.C., as well as vote projections for smaller regions within the province, are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇

Read more

The Writ Drop is your weekly round-up of everything you might have missed in political and election news, federal, provincial and municipal polling.

Good morning everyone! It’s election day in British Columbia, so you should expect a final analysis from me later today. Then, tune in tonight for our live coverage of the results! Philippe J. Fournier and I will break down the results as they come in, starting at 11 PM ET / 8 PM PT. You can watch the livestream here:

As it will be a late night, I may or may not have a results analysis up tomorrow morning. If not, I should have something on Monday.

Here’s what you might have missed from me over the last week:

THE WRIT

• On Monday, I wrote about what the final polls of the Alberta referendum campaign were suggesting was about to happen. And most of them were right! Léger, Research Co., Pollara, Ipsos and Abacus Data put support for remaining in Canada between 74% and 78%. The result was 75%. Ipsos takes the cake as it had 75% support among decided voters, but all five of these pollsters did a great job. The Angus Reid Institute and Mainstreet Research, however, put support at just 66% — a sizeable nine-point miss.

• The B.C. Election Tracker was updated throughout the week and might still get a final update this morning. Keep an eye out!

• The Federal Vote and Seat Projections were updated with new polls from Liaison Strategies, Léger, Mainstreet Research and Nanos Research. The Liberals are currently favoured in an astounding 241 seats, with the Conservatives leading in only 66.

THE NUMBERS

• The Numbers: Alberta’s vote and the battle for BC - As the polls had predicted, the Remain side won the Alberta referendum in a landslide, as Albertans opted for the status quo in their province. But in next-door British Columbia, voters might be about to back a change of a different kind. This week on The Numbers, we break down the results of Alberta’s referendum and how the polls performed. We also take a look at where some of the last polls of the B.C. election campaign stand as the NDP’s David Eby looks to be in trouble as his party falls behind Lorne Doerkson’s Conservatives. Plus, we have federal numbers to dissect (what is going on with the Liberals in Alberta?) and new polls from elsewhere in the country, including a neck-and-neck race in Toronto — and Saskatchewan? WATCH OR LISTEN HERE

• Special Episode of The Numbers: The B.C. Projection Meeting - In this special, members-only episode of The Numbers, we go through all 93 of British Columbia's ridings and make a call ahead of tomorrow's election — will each seat go to the NDP, Conservatives or Greens, and will it be a toss up, a close race, or a sure thing? WATCH OR LISTEN HERE

ELSEWHERE

• I joined Tim Powers on his show on VOCM to discuss the B.C. election. You can listen to it here. (My segment starts at the 14:40 mark.)

• I was also on Radio West on CBC Radio to chat about the vote. You can listen to it here.

Now let’s take a look at some of the latest developments and new polls that I didn’t get a chance to get to this past week.

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This week on The Numbers, we break down the results of Alberta’s referendum and how the polls performed. We also take a look at where some of the last polls of the B.C. election campaign stand as the NDP’s David Eby looks to be in trouble as his party falls behind Lorne Doerkson’s Conservatives. Plus, we have federal numbers to dissect (what is going on with the Liberals in Alberta?) and new polls from elsewhere in the country, including a neck-and-neck race in Toronto — and Saskatchewan?

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The extended and bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription or a YouTube membership.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

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Updated October 20, 2026 - The Liberals are in a dominant position in the projection and are leading in 241 seats across the country and have a 16-point advantage over the Conservatives, who are at risk of losing as many as half of their caucus. The New Democrats would likely achieve recognized party status, largely at the expense of the Conservatives, while the Bloc could lose a few seats to the Liberals if the election were held today.

Note to Readers: These projections are presented using Datawrapper’s interactive charts. They are best viewed on a desktop. In most cases, you can click, tap or hover over the charts to interact with them.

Full regional breakdowns and tracking charts are available for subscribers below, as are complete riding-level projections. A full methodological explanation of how the vote and seat projection model works can be found here.

The Vote Projection is based primarily on a weighted average of all publicly-available national and regional polls. The weighted average is then used to project the outcome in all 343 ridings across the country, taking into account local candidates. Those individual riding-level projections are then weighted by the number of eligible voters in each riding and past turnout to determine the national vote projection for each party.

The Seat Projection shows the number of seats in which each party is projected to be ahead. Parties are assigned a range of likely vote share in each riding based on past polling and modelling errors and 10,000 simulations are run to assign to each party a number of ridings in which they are in contention. The High and Low ranges take into account 95% of all likely outcomes, while the Median Projection shows the median number of seats each party wins in these simulations, which takes into account the tendency for parties to under- or out-perform their polls.

Wondering how to interpret the Seat Projection and the Median Projection? While the Seat Projection is The Writ’s “official call”, the Median Projection is an important guide to understanding the projections, in conjunction with the high and low ranges. Seat projections are rarely right on target, so the Median Projection should set expectations. In other words, if the Seat Projection for a party is 25 seats but the Median Projection is 21, your expectation should be that the party will win around 25 seats, with a greater likelihood that the party under-performs that target rather than beats it.

The percentage of simulations in which each party wins a majority or a plurality of seats is shown below.

A full breakdown of the methodology behind the vote and seat projection model can be found here:

The table below includes all recent federal voting intentions polls that are publicly available. You can click or tap on the name of the polling firm in the left-most column to go directly to that polling firm’s original poll release. Rows containing polls conducted in a single region are highlighted in different colours.

Vote and seat projections broken down by region, tracking charts going back to the 2025 election and riding projections for all 343 seats in Canada are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇

Read more

The Writ’s Alberta Referendum Poll Tracker, a weighted average of all the polls published on the independence question, has not shifted much over the last few months. On average, 69% of Albertans have told pollsters they intend to vote for Alberta to remain a province of Canada, while only 25% have said they will vote to begin the process toward independence. Just under 6% of Albertans have said they are undecided.

After the removal of undecideds, the tally for remaining in Canada comes to 73.5%, with 26.5% voting to leave.

The consensus that the Remain side will win has been very broad. After a relatively lightly-polled referendum campaign, seven pollsters put out new data in the last few days. We got numbers from Léger, Ipsos-Global News, Mainstreet Research, Research Co., Abacus Data, Pollara Strategic Insights and the Angus Reid Institute.

While there has been some variation between pollsters, the tightest set of numbers still puts the Remain side ahead by 32 points. The widest margin has been clocked in at 56 points. The chart below shows the final polls for each of the pollsters who put out numbers in this final week, after the removal of undecideds (which some pollsters did themselves; where they didn’t, I have done the calculation).

Five of the pollsters show support for Remain at between 74% and 78%, with support for Independence at between 22% or 26%. The two other pollsters, the Angus Reid Institute and Mainstreet, have Remain at 66% against 34% for separation.

It should be pointed out that the ARI has routinely had higher support levels for separation than have other pollsters. Mainstreet, however, hasn’t been in the field as frequently so we can’t say whether this is a ‘house effect’ or not. We’ll see tonight (or tomorrow morning) which portrait is more accurate, but pollsters have generally struggled to assess the level of support for right-wing parties in Alberta so it would not but surprising if the ARI and Mainstreet end up closer to the mark.

But it would be perhaps the biggest failure of polling — anywhere, ever — if the Remain side did not prevail in this campaign, and handily. There has been some hand-wringing about the potential for a surprise, with the case of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom cited as an example. But the polls at the end of that campaign gave the Remain side a lead of about two-to-four points — not 32-to-56 points. Polling can be imperfect, but it cannot miss by that much.

If the outcome is predictable enough, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some things to watch in the numbers.

Read more

Updated October 18 (8:17 PM MT) - A strong majority of Albertans tell pollsters they will vote to remain in Canada, with 69% choosing to remain against an average of 25% who support beginning the process to hold a binding referendum on Alberta independence. With the removal of undecideds, support for independence is only 27%.

This is largely a debate among United Conservative voters, as there is strong majority support for remaining in Canada in both the urban centres of Calgary and Edmonton, outside of the two cities, among all age groups and among both men and women. Only among UCP voters are opinions split.

Note to Readers: These projections are presented using Datawrapper’s interactive charts. They are best viewed on a desktop. In most cases, you can click, tap or hover over the charts to interact with them.

On October 19, Albertans will be voting on 10 referendum questions, including several on immigration and constitutional issues. But there will also be a question related to Alberta independence, though asked in a roundabout way. The wording of the question is:

“Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

The Writ’s Alberta Referendum Poll Tracker aggregates all of the polls published during this referendum campaign. The chart below shows the current polling average, encompassing all polls, regardless of question wording, that include results on Alberta separation in general or the referendum question in particular. The chart on the left shows the current average with undecideds shown, while the chart on the right is after the removal of undecideds.

The table below includes all publicly available polls on Alberta independence conducted since the beginning of 2026. Note that the question wording is not always consistent between pollsters (Léger, for example, has included an option of Alberta joining the United States in its questionnaire, which has been grouped into the “Independence” column below). When both a generic independence question and the exact wording of the referendum question is included in a poll, the latter result is shown in this table.

You can click or tap on the name of the polling firm in the left-most column to go directly to that polling firm’s original poll release.

The method used to calculate the polling average is similar to the methodology described here for The Writ’s Vote and Seat Projections. No adjustments are made to the polls, however, to take into account any potential turnout effects.

The polling averages broken down by region, demographics and voting intentions, as well as tracking charts going back to the beginning of this year, are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇

Regional, demographic and partisan polling averages

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The Writ Drop is your weekly round-up of everything you might have missed in political and election news, federal, provincial and municipal polling.

Good morning everyone! I hope you enjoyed the long Thanksgiving weekend. But gird yourself, we’ve got lots of voting to get through over the next seven days!

Here’s what you might have missed from me over the last week:

THE WRIT

• The Alberta Referendum Poll Tracker was updated on Friday with a new poll from the Angus Reid Institute. With those numbers (from a pollster that has recorded higher support for separation than most other pollsters), the aggregate now shows 27% support for independence before the exclusion of undecideds. Expect more updates to the tracker over the weekend.

• The British Columbia Election Tracker was updated a few times during the week, notably with polls from Léger, Research Co., Pallas Data and Ipsos. The B.C. Conservatives are holding their advantage and are projected to win 51 seats to the NDP’s 40. I wrote a deeper dive into the poll numbers, and some of the problems facing the New Democrats, in a pre-debate analysis. READ HERE

• The Federal Vote and Seat Projections were also updated with new polls from Liaison Strategies, EKOS Research, Nanos Research and Abacus Data. The Liberals hold a 15.4-point lead over the Conservatives in the vote projection. A Léger poll published Friday afternoon has not been added to the model yet, but it also showed a 15-point Liberal lead.

THE NUMBERS & LES CHIFFRES

• The Numbers: Will Eby’s snap call be a blunder for the ages? - Little more than a week remains in the B.C. election campaign that the NDP’s David Eby set in motion, two years ahead of schedule. The leaders debate took place last night and things could still change. But the polls are not looking good for the New Democrats. Are they about to lose this election and give Lorne Doerkson and his B.C. Conservatives an unexpected victory? This week on The Numbers, we break down the latest polling numbers out of British Columbia. We also set up Monday’s referendum on Alberta independence, take a peek at new federal polls and chat about the mayor’s race in Toronto, where the race seems to be tightening. Then, we close with a short Quiz (it’s back!) and an extended mailbag segment that is available for our members. WATCH OR LISTEN HERE

• Les chiffres : Le courrier des membres — spécial postélectoral - Pour cet épisode spécial du balado Les chiffres, Éric et Philippe répondent à vos questions sur l’élection québécoise du 5 octobre dernier. Nous faisons un retour sur une campagne mouvementée : victoire minoritaire du Parti québécois, déroute complète de la CAQ et plusieurs victoires surprises du PLQ. Quelles leçons tirer des résultats? Quels défis attendent les partis à l’Assemblée nationale? Et que nous réservent les prochaines années? ÉCOUTEZ ICI (RÉSERVÉS AUX MEMBRES)

Now let’s take a look at some of the latest developments and new polls that I didn’t get a chance to get to this past week.

Read more

This week on The Numbers, we break down the latest polling numbers out of British Columbia. We also set up Monday’s referendum on Alberta independence, take a peek at new federal polls and chat about the mayor’s race in Toronto, where the race seems to be tightening. Then, we close with a short Quiz (it’s back!) and an extended mailbag segment that is available for our members.

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The extended and bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription or a YouTube membership.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Overcast

• Pocket Casts

• Podcast Addict

• RSS Feed

One leader could seal the deal and win the election. Another leader could save himself from a humiliating, self-imposed defeat. And a third could shake up the race entirely.

The debate will feature David Eby of the NDP, Lorne Doerkson of the Conservatives and Emily Lowan of the Greens. It’s starting at 6:15 PM PT and will be moderated by the Angus Reid Institute’s Shachi Kurl.

And (with only a little hyperbole) it could decide the outcome of this election.

As it stands, Doerkson is on track to become the next premier of British Columbia — unexpectedly, considering he became the leader of the B.C. Conservative Party less than four weeks ago. Eby’s early election call has backfired rather spectacularly, turning an almost sure-thing against Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Doerkson’s predecessor, into a steep uphill climb. As of yesterday’s update to the B.C. Election Tracker, the Conservatives are now the two-to-one favourites to win this election.

The projection awards the Conservatives 44.8% of the vote, putting them roughly two points ahead of the New Democrats. That gives them the lead in 51 seats, with just 40 remaining to the NDP (and two to the Greens). While there are many close races between the Conservatives and NDP that will decide the outcome, the NDP only wins the most seats in 31% of simulations.

Why is the NDP so high? I’ve seen some questions about why the NDP could be projected to take nearly 43% of the vote when every recent poll has them at 42% or lower. The reason is that the Green vote has to go somewhere. The Greens are not running candidates in 20 ridings but are averaging about 10-11% in recent polls. Because the party does not have a full slate, it is almost certainly being over-estimated in polls, as voters are usually not aware of the candidate slate in their local riding and, where voters are aware, a provincewide poll will not be able to capture that nuance. If the Greens are lacking a candidate in about 22% of ridings, they will likely only get about 78% of the vote that the polls are awarding them, liberating about 2-2.5 percentage points. Polls suggest that nearly all of that vote will go to the NDP, as it is the overwhelming second choice of Green voters. The model takes that into account, and so accordingly boosts the NDP in ridings where there is no Green candidate. That gives the NDP a higher vote projection than a simple average of the polls would give the party.

With the New Democrats trailing, the debate might be the last moment Eby has to turn things around ahead of the October 24 vote. He’ll have to convince voters that his early election call was necessary and that the Conservative Party, despite its change in leadership, is still the division-ridden, unstable and unpopular party that voters were rejecting in growing numbers before Findlay’s resignation. If Eby can manage to do that, he might be able to turn this race back into a toss-up.

For Doerkson, the debate is more about what he shouldn’t do: give voters who weren’t sold on Findlay’s version of the Conservatives a reason to go back to the NDP. He is still a largely blank slate, so as long as he looks normal and unthreatening, while representing the change that polls suggest voters want, he should be able to hold the Conservatives’ current support levels.

The stakes are lower for Lowan, but she will be the wildcard on the debate stage. She’s a young woman leading a party that can only hope for a handful of seats debating two older men who are vying to be premier. The power dynamics have to be handled deftly by both Eby and Doerkson to avoid condescension or aggression. Like Doerkson, Lowan is also a blank slate. She has an opportunity to make her mark and give the Greens the chance to win more than the two seats the party held at dissolution. In an ideal scenario for the Greens, she might even be able to achieve the balance of power in a minority legislature, as occurred after the 2017 election.

But the pressure will be highest on David Eby. He’s the incumbent premier who called an early election that he is on track to lose. And he’s got a few problems he needs to tackle to ensure he doesn’t enter the books as having scored one of the worst own-goals in Canadian political history.

NDP’s Metro Vancouver problem

One polling trend that should be most concerning to the New Democrats is the emerging close race in Metro Vancouver, where about half of the province’s seats are located.

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The Writ Drop is your weekly round-up of everything you might have missed in political and election news, federal, provincial and municipal polling.

Good morning everyone! I hope you have a fun and relaxing Thanksgiving weekend spent with family and friends.

Here’s what you might have missed from me over the last week:

THE WRIT

• After my final analysis of the Quebec election campaign, I took a look at the results, as well as how the polls and my projection model did. Read the Quebec election post-mortem here.

• The British Columbia Election Tracker was updated a few times during the week with new polls from Pollara, Mainstreet Research, the Angus Reid Institute and Liaison Strategies. Now that the Quebec election is in the rearview mirror, I hope to have more analysis of the B.C. election in the coming weeks. For now, the B.C. Conservatives win the most seats in 74% of the model’s simulations.

• The Alberta Referendum Poll Tracker was updated with new numbers from Léger. Support for remaining in Canada was at 70% in the poll, which is also where it now stands in the aggregate.

• The Federal Vote and Seat Projections were also updated with new polling from Liaison Strategies and Nanos Research. The Liberals are now projected to win 236 seats to just 69 for the Conservatives.

THE NUMBERS & LES CHIFFRES

• The Numbers: Quebec wipeout, BC nail-biter - This week on The Numbers, we break down the results of the Quebec election and what it means for politics in the province going forward. We also lay out the state of the race in British Columbia, where Lorne Doerkson’s Conservatives are making David Eby’s New Democrats sweat. Plus, we chat about the latest federal polls, where things stand in Toronto’s mayoral race and highlight some new numbers out of Atlantic Canada. Could the Greens elect their first government next year in Prince Edward Island? WATCH OR LISTEN HERE

• Les chiffres : PQ minoritaire, la CAQ éclate - Pour ce nouvel épisode du balado Les chiffres, Éric et Philippe décortiquent les résultats de l’élection québécoise, qui s’est conclue par une victoire du Parti québécois — mais avec seulement 28 % des voix et un gouvernement minoritaire. Le PLQ formera l’opposition officielle, tandis que le PCQ fera enfin son entrée à l’Assemblée nationale par la grande porte. Où le PQ a-t-il échappé la majorité? Les libéraux devraient-ils être satisfaits de leur performance? Et qui, des conservateurs ou de Québec solidaire, exercera la balance du pouvoir pour aider le PQ ? ÉCOUTEZ ICI

ELSEWHERE

• I did some Quebec election results analysis on Tuesday, here for CPAC (en français) and here for CBC Radio Noon Quebec.

Now let’s take a look at some of the latest developments and new polls that I didn’t get a chance to get to this past week.

Read more

This week on The Numbers, we break down the results of the Quebec election and what it means for politics in the province going forward. We also lay out the state of the race in British Columbia, where Lorne Doerkson’s Conservatives are making David Eby’s New Democrats sweat. Plus, we chat about the latest federal polls, where things stand in Toronto’s mayoral race and highlight some new numbers out of Atlantic Canada. Could the Greens elect their first government next year in Prince Edward Island?

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The extended and bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Overcast

• Pocket Casts

• Podcast Addict

• RSS Feed

And this despite the complete and utter collapse of the Coalition Avenir Québec, a party that only a few years ago seemed nearly unbeatable. Instead, the PQ’s path to a majority were blocked by the three other major parties on the ballot — as well as the PQ’s own self-imposed, referendum-induced ceiling.

The PQ won 59 seats, five short of the 64 needed for a majority government in the 127-seat National Assembly, with 28% of the vote. This election marks the first time in the history of Canadian federal and provincial elections that no party was able to capture at least 30% of the vote. The PQ’s tally is the most seats it has won since the 1998 election, though its share of the vote is still lower than any of the party’s results between the 1973 and 2012 elections. A win’s a win, of course, but by historical standards this one does not rank with the Parti Québécois’s past triumphs in 1976, 1981, 1994, 1998 or, arguably, 2012.

The pledge to hold a referendum in the party’s first mandate (after Donald Trump leaves the White House) undoubtedly played a role in limiting the PQ’s potential. It was stuck at or below 30% for the entire campaign, putting it at the same level of support as support for Quebec independence. By corralling most of the sovereignist vote behind the PQ banner, the party was able to win in a divided electorate. But it probably also prevented it from winning bigger.

The Liberals won 40 seats and will form the official opposition after capturing 24.2% of the vote. While a marked improvement over 2022, when the Liberals won only 21 seats and took 14.4% of the vote, the party’s vote share nevertheless ranks as the second-worst in the party’s history. But in an election with five viable parties, everyone is graded on a curve.

The Conservatives made a splash with 20.7% of the vote and 19 seats. Those 19 MNAs are the first to be elected under a Conservative banner in a Quebec provincial election since 1935. Québec Solidaire, meanwhile, secured nine seats and 12.4% of the vote, down from the 2018 and 2022 elections but higher than where it was previously — an indication that QS is here to stay.

That brings us to the Coalition Avenir Québec, which took 13.4% of the vote but failed to win a single seat. It’s a catastrophic result that was predicted, but is nevertheless gobsmacking to see in reality. The last party to go from majority government to being shutout was the New Brunswick Progressive Conservatives in 1987. But even in that election the PCs still managed nearly 29% of the vote. It’s hard to see how the party survives this.

Or why it should. With the current make-up of the National Assembly, the question has to be asked: if the CAQ didn’t exist, would anyone invent it? The party was launched as a third way between sovereignty and federalism with a right-of-centre policy offering that stood it apart from the social democratic PQ and the centrist Liberals. It replaced the Action Démocratique du Québec, which had previously filled this roll. Now, it seems likely the Conservatives will take up the torch — leader Éric Duhaime has pitched himself as searching for more autonomy for Quebec without independence, and he is clearly to the right of the political spectrum. It’s not obvious what electorate remains to the CAQ going forward, as federalists have the Liberals as a viable option, small-c conservatives have the big-c Conservatives now, and the nationalists who were soft on sovereignty and tired of the PQ have, for all intents and purposes, gone back to the PQ.

Throughout the campaign, I discussed how there were many races being contested between the PQ and the CAQ, and that the survival of the CAQ would be one of the factors that could block the path forward for the PQ. That was true when the CAQ was at 20% in the polls. It was even true when they were at 17%, maybe even 15%. But the drop to 13% on election day simply removed the CAQ from the equation entirely. In only five ridings — FIVE! — did the CAQ finish within 10 percentage points of the winner. In only two ridings did the CAQ come within four points (Trois-Rivières, where leader Christine Fréchette was on the ballot, and Jonquière). They simply weren’t competitive anywhere else.

But the other parties took up the task of blocking the Parti Québécois’s majority, helped along by the PQ’s softening support in the closing days of the campaign. The Liberals and Québec Solidaire blocked the PQ in Montreal, the Liberals blocked them in the Montérégie region and the Conservatives in central Quebec. And all three parties blocked the PQ in Quebec City, where the party failed to win a single seat — and even lost one of its few holdings at dissolution.

A lot of races were settled by narrow margins. Only 3,036 votes in six ridings separated the PQ from finishing with 65 seats. The Liberals eked out narrow wins against the PQ in four of those (Vachon, Montarville and La Prairie in the Montérégie and Jean-Talon in Quebec City) and the Conservatives in the two others (Champlain in the Mauricie and Louis-Hébert in Quebec City).

Without the Liberals and Conservatives winning those seats, the PQ would have secured a narrow majority.

But that is not to say that the PQ was robbed of a majority at the margins. They also got to 59 seats thanks to their own close shaves. If 3,036 votes stood between the PQ’s result and 65 seats, only 3,244 votes ensured they won 59 seats instead of 54. The party won by fewer than 1,000 votes over the Conservatives in Drummond—Bois-Francs, over the Liberals in Papineau and Saint-François and over the CAQ in Trois-Rivières and Jonquière. The night could’ve gone very well for the PQ. But it could have also been quite disappointing.

The Parti Québécois experienced significant gains across the province, but they needed to make up more ground than they did. The party was up 16.5 points in the suburbs of Montreal and in the regions, but the Liberals were also up 11 points in the Montreal suburbs and in the regions, cutting into the PQ’s margins. The Conservatives were up 16.6 points in the Quebec City region, dwarfing the PQ’s 9.5-point gain in and around the provincial capital.

The CAQ’s wipeout is attributable to its rather uniform loss throughout Quebec, down 29 points in the Montreal suburbs, 31 points in and around Quebec City and 32 points in the regions. But the PQ needed to take more of those points to secure its majority — the Conservatives were the bigger beneficiaries around Quebec City and the Liberals took their fair share throughout the province as well.

The shifts for Québec Solidaire are worth noting. The party was up nearly three points on the island of Montreal, finishing second with 25%. But it was down everywhere else. Though the party actually only lost seats in Montreal, holding its own in Quebec City and Sherbrooke, the party’s change in vote share actually made its support base more disproportionately concentrated in Montreal than it was before.

Also notable is the Conservatives’ lack of progress on the island of Montreal, up only 0.2 points. The polls suggested that Duhaime’s party was poised to make inroads among anglophones, but that does not seem to have materialized. In the six majority-anglophone ridings on the island, the Conservatives averaged just 13% support to the Liberals’ 64%. Polls had the Conservatives around 20% among non-francophones, but these numbers do not reflect that kind of support.

How the polls did in Quebec

It was actually a rare (marginal) flub for the polls, which on the whole did very well in the Quebec election. There were joint winners of the pollster sweepstakes, with Léger (in its polling for Le Journal de Montréal/Québec and TVA Nouvelles) and Pallas Data taking the title with a total 4.8-point error, equating to less than one point per party.

Forum Research had a similarly good result, but it should be mentioned that Forum has not polled in Quebec for years and only dropped its poll late on Sunday night. The poll also had a seat projection that awarded 19 seats to the CAQ despite the party being at 13%. There are no points for style on that, and the fact that Forum did not poll the campaign and instead put out a late-night report that had no broader purpose than for Forum to have a result to point to post-election — virtually no one in the public would’ve seen the poll, since it went unreported because of its late publication — makes me loathe to give Forum any laurels. I firmly believe in the public benefit of polling in that it helps inform voters in their decision-making and understanding of a campaign, and this poll did not do that on Sunday night, and Forum certainly never attempted to do that over the last six weeks.

Research Co. also had a decent performance, though was a little too high on the Parti Québécois. Liaison Strategies also performed well enough, though was too high on the CAQ. Mainstreet Research significantly over-estimated the CAQ and under-estimated QS and was the worst performer of the pollsters who published data in the last week of the campaign.

On the whole, however, pollsters did a good job, hinting at a weakening in PQ support in the final days and a rising tide for the Conservatives and Liberals as the CAQ collapsed. The regional numbers were also good, showing the rise of the Conservatives in Quebec City and the regions and the growing strength of the Liberals in Greater Montreal.

Kudos to the pollsters, particularly Léger and Pallas Data, who were in the field throughout the campaign, who put out good quality work that helped illuminate media coverage and inform voters about the real state of the race from start to finish.

How the model did

This election was the first test of The Writ’s revamped vote and seat projection model, and overall I am pleased with the results. Some lessons have also been learned, which I intend to apply to the ongoing B.C. election campaign, as well as to the federal model (and future provincial models).

The vote projection was a little too high for the PQ and CAQ and too low for QS and the Liberals, though every party was projected to within two percentage points.

The PQ was favoured in 65 seats, six more than the party actually won. But the result of 59 seats was well-within the low and high ranges and was quite close to the Avg. Projection, which I think proved its value by signalling that the PQ was more likely to under-perform than over-perform. The PQ was given a 58% chance of winning a minority and a 36% change of a majority. Considering how the count unfolded, that was a very reasonable projection.

The Liberals, Conservatives and QS were off by only a few seats, with the result falling within the confidence intervals.

The CAQ was favoured in zero seats, which was on the money. But it had 9.8 seats in the average projection, clearly too high considering the party was not within spitting distance of more than five seats. The high range of 39 was also ludicrously too high.

This is one of the lessons I’m taking from the results — that the level of uncertainty in the model is too great at the margins. I believe I know the reason, as the model’s ranges for a party’s performance in a seat is based on past errors, but not on the party’s projected support in any given seat. This means that a party’s +/- range in a riding was the same whether it was at 40% or 20%, which gave the CAQ a chance in too many ridings where the leading party was projected to have a relatively low level of support. It’s reasonable to assume the CAQ could’ve beat its projections by 10 points in a riding where it had 45% support, but unreasonable to expect a 10-point over-performance in a riding where it was down to 15%.

Correcting for this would’ve lowered the CAQ’s average seat projection and increased it for the other parties, which would’ve likely brought the average projection closer to the mark. It would not have changed the number of seats each party was favoured to win, however.

And on that score the model did respectably well. The wrong winner was projected in only 13 seats, meaning the model had the right winner in 114 of 127 ridings, or in 89.8%. If we include the tosses as “correct” calls, then the model only had seven true misses, for a 94.5% accuracy rating. Close enough to the 19 times out of 20 for me!

The chart below shows the calls made and whether they were right. In the misses, the projected margin is shown for the party that was wrongly called as the winner. As you can see below, in five of the 13 misses the projected margin was three points or less, while in nine it was seven points or less.

The seven true misses are interesting cases. Three of them are in Quebec City, where the PQ unexpectedly lost one of their own seats (Jean-Talon) and failed to flip Louis-Hébert and Taschereau. The latter might have been more predictable due to the presence of a QS incumbent, but the Liberals’ upset win in Jean-Talon came as surprise (it was the model’s biggest miss). The PQ’s inability to win these three seats can be attributed to its broader under-performance in Quebec City.

The Liberals were projected as the favourites in Abitibi-Est due to the presence of floor-crosser Pierre Dufour. But, clearly, he was not as much of a boon to the Liberals as the model expected (which, considering he was a caquiste before, might have been predictable). Ungava being projected Liberal is another special case considering the large Indigenous population in the riding that generally turns out in lower numbers, but usually votes Liberal when it does turnout.

The PQ under-performed on the island of Montreal (by about five points compared to the polls), which seems to be behind the model’s miss in Rosemont. Montarville going Liberal instead of PQ is another clean miss, like Jean-Talon, and perhaps a suggestion that the Liberals have re-connected with parts of a francophone base that abandoned it in 2022.

Another lesson I’m taking from the performance is that perhaps I should simplify my classification of projection calls. Six different categories is clearly too much, though they broadly performed as expected:

The model correctly predicted as many Lean, Likely and Safe ridings as it was designed to predict, but was less confident on Toss and Close calls than it needed to be. Going forward, I might try to consolidate these into three or four categories to simplify things a little.

So, a little work to be done to adjust and refine. But, overall, I’m pleased with the performance of the model and I hope it helped you understand the dynamics of this election campaign. There will be more models and, unlike in the case of Quebec and B.C., I hope to have the next ones up and running long before the next writs are dropped in Alberta, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island.

And, as a bonus, the Quebec model will start anew once the adjustments are made and the 2026 results are incorporated. Odds are the model will be put to another test in Quebec sooner rather than later. Thanks for following The Writ over the last six weeks. There’s plenty more to come!

In the early days of the campaign, it looked like the PQ might have a real fight on its hands as Premier Christine Fréchette used the threats from the Trump administration as a springboard to get her Coalition Avenir Québec back into contention. But the CAQ’s uptick in support didn’t last, and instead the CAQ fell back to the levels of support that forced François Legault to resign earlier this year. But, instead of the PQ taking advantage of the collapse in CAQ support, the Liberals under Charles Milliard and the Conservatives under Éric Duhaime were the main beneficiaries. It didn’t impact the PQ’s lead, but it did narrow its path to a majority.

The final update to The Writ’s Quebec Election Tracker reflects the razor’s edge that this election is ending on. The Parti Québécois is projected as the favourite in 65 ridings across Quebec, one more than is needed for a majority government. The Liberals are favoured in 37 ridings, while the Conservatives are favoured in 17 — a significant increase from the zero seats the party won in 2022. Québec Solidaire, under co-leader Ruba Ghazal, is projected as the favourite in eight seats. The CAQ is favoured in none.

But with the PQ projected to take 29.6% of the vote, and with five parties slated to take at least 10%, there are many races across Quebec that are very tough to predict. For that reason, there is a very wide confidence interval for the number of seats the PQ and the CAQ could win. The average projection, which takes into account the past tendencies of parties to out- or under-perform the polls, as well as the number of closely-contested races, gives the Parti Québécois 58.1 seats. This means that the PQ is pegged as the favourite in a lot of close contests, and that the odds are they are likely to lose more of them than they will win. That pushes them down below the majority threshold.

The Liberals and Conservatives win 36.2 and 16.0 seats, on average, in the model’s 10,000 simulations. This reflects that these parties are expected to finish roughly in line with the polls, and that they are not disproportionately leading or trailing in toss-up contests.

The CAQ, on the other hand, wins an average of 9.8 seats in the model’s simulations. This is a stark difference from the zero seats the party is favoured in, but this shows how the CAQ does not have any obvious seats where it could pull off a win. There are many where the CAQ is projected to be trailing (usually the PQ) by a few percentage points. If the CAQ beats its polls by a little bit, if local candidates and organization make the difference and/or if sheer chance comes into play, the CAQ could come out ahead in several of those seats and stave off a wipeout. Indeed, the most common result in the seat projection’s simulations is a total of three seats for the CAQ.

But which three could they be? Perhaps Trois-Rivières, where Fréchette is on the ballot, or Granby, where the CAQ (and the ADQ before it) has long held the seat. Or perhaps it could be one of the (potentially many) seats where the winner could have less than 30% support, where any party could end up on the top of a three- or four-way race.

However, with the CAQ’s momentum heading in the wrong direction in the final stages of the campaign, there is also a high likelihood that the party will simply not have enough support in any riding to come out on top and instead will have a dozen strong second-place finishes.

The fate of the CAQ will have a big impact on the PQ’s chances of winning a majority government. Every seat the CAQ is able to eke out is one more that could push the PQ below the majority threshold. It’s no coincidence that the PQ is favoured in enough seats to win a majority AND the CAQ is favoured in zero, while the average projection keeps the CAQ alive with a handful of seats and puts the PQ down into minority territory.

The Parti Québécois wins the most seats in 94% of simulations, with the remaining 6% of simulations entailing a big miss in the polls (with the PQ’s significant lead among francophone voters, a polling miss is the only thing that could realistically keep the PQ from winning). But the PQ wins a minority in 58% of simulations, with only 36% ending in a majority. The path to a majority for the PQ is there, but it requires a lot of things to go right — for the party to win nearly all of the toss-up contests, keep the CAQ at low-single digits or zero seats, hold off the Conservatives in central Quebec and in Quebec City and keep the Liberals from making gains in the suburbs around Montreal. No pressure.

Let’s take a look at how the night could go for each of the five major parties, and what their best and worst case scenarios could look like. We’ll start with the PQ.

It’s not quite majority or bust for the PQ, but with St-Pierre Plamondon asking voters for a majority in the final days anything below the 64-seat mark will be a disappointment for the party.

The PQ does have the ability to get there. The model favours the party in 65 seats and has an upper ceiling of 68 seats. That’s not a lot of wiggle room, but there is enough margin for error for the PQ to get a few seats above the majority threshold.

They get there by dominating in the “regions” of Quebec, the swathe of francophone-majority ridings that are located outside of the Montreal and Quebec City metropolitan regions. The PQ is projected to have 33% support in this region, giving them a nearly 10-point lead over the Conservatives. This is their base of around 35 seats, and to that the PQ can add another 20 or so in the suburbs around Montreal, primarily in the Laurentides and Lanaudière regions to the north of the city. The PQ is leading in the suburbs with a projected 33% support, a lead of eight points over the Liberals.

But these two regions put the PQ in a minority position with around 55-60 seats. To get to 64 or more, the PQ needs to win seats in Quebec City and on the island of Montreal. These are different contests than in the regions and suburbs, with the PQ wrestling with the Conservatives in the more outlying parts of Quebec City and with Québec Solidaire in the downtown centres of both. Winning those seats, plus perhaps a few bonus ones in the regions and suburbs, would put them in majority territory.

Failing to breakthrough in the urban centres, losing to the Liberals on the south shore of Montreal and the Eastern Townships and to the Conservatives in the Centre-du-Québec and Mauricie regions would put the PQ short of a majority. It could be an agonizing finish for the PQ — one-third of all simulations end with the PQ between 58 and 63 seats. The party is about as likely to come up just short of a majority as it is to get to the promised land.

The Quebec Liberals have never finished an election in any position other than first or second. First seems out of the cards in this campaign. Second seems virtually assured.

There are a few factors playing against the Liberals. The main one is that the party has just 15% support among francophones, more than 20 points behind the PQ and too low to seriously challenge for government. Accordingly, the Liberal ceiling is 41 seats. But the 54% support the party has among non-francophones ensures a high floor of 29 seats. It is difficult to imagine any other party finishing with between 29 and 41 seats, so that leaves Milliard as the favourite to be the leader of the official opposition (if he can win Orford in the Eastern Townships, which is not a given).

Another factor is the geographic limitation of the Liberals’ support. The party is projected at 42% on the island of Montreal and at 24% in the surrounding suburbs, but is slated to take just 15% of the vote in and around Quebec City and 16% in the regions (primarily the Outaouais and the Eastern Townships). The party is simply not competitive in enough other places of Quebec to be able to put much pressure on the PQ.

But, the Liberals could help block a PQ majority if they pull off some wins in ridings where the PQ is the projected favourite, such as Vachon and La Prairie in the Montérégie and Maurice-Richard in Montreal.

One note about the Liberals’ projected vote share of 23.2%. The five final polls of the campaign had the party between 23% and 25%. The Liberals are on the low-end of that scale because a lot of the party’s support comes in anglophone-majority ridings on the West Island, which have shown lower turnout in the last few elections than other ridings in Quebec. The advance poll turnout suggested that this pattern will hold in this election, meaning the Liberals’ total provincewide vote might prove lower than expected, simply because many of their supporters might stay home in ridings they are guaranteed to win.

Will the CAQ survive the night? That’s one of the big questions that’ll be answered when the results start coming in.

Early in the campaign, the CAQ was the projected winner in 24 ridings, with a ceiling that put them in contention for a minority government (their odds of winning topped out at 30% on Sept. 1). But the three debates and the fading-away of Trump as a top campaign issue took their toll on CAQ support. The party lost roughly half of its support in the Montreal suburbs and the Quebec City region over the course of the campaign, and with that its chances of a respectable finish.

Fréchette, who was at one point tied with St-Pierre Plamondon on the preferred premier question, ended the campaign 13 points behind the PQ leader and in fourth place, ahead of only QS’s Ghazal.

But there is still some potential for the CAQ to win a few seats. The party is projected to have 17% support in the Montreal suburbs and 19% in the regions of Quebec. This means that some ridings in these regions will have the CAQ in the low-to-mid-20s in support. That’s enough to win some three- and four-way races if the non-CAQ vote is perfectly divided. The model thinks the party’s best chances are in Papineau and Chapleau in the Outaouais, Granby in the Eastern Townships and Champlain, Maskinongé and Trois-Rivières in the Mauricie. All six of these seats are ridings where it is not clear who the winner would be if it wasn’t the CAQ, as they aren’t natural fits for the PQ, Liberals or Conservatives, depending on the seat. But that doesn’t mean they fit with the CAQ, either.

The other thing that could boost the CAQ is turnout — not necessarily because of organization or enthusiasm (there might not be much of either at this point), but because of age.

The final polls of the campaign suggest the CAQ has rock-bottom support among younger voters. But it polls more highly among older voters with more than 20% among those over the age of 55.

In the 2018 and 2022 elections, turnout among those over the age of 55 was around 73%. Turnout among those under 35 was around 54%. That has an impact on election results, especially when parties have their supported disproportionately concentrated among one group or the other.

The PQ and Liberals don’t have that issue. They have roughly uniform support among all age groups (though the Liberals might get a small bump from older voters). The Conservatives and Québec Solidaire, however, could be penalized because of their higher support among young voters. By my estimates, the Conservatives might have a penalty of about 0.4 percentage points due to turnout, while QS could under-perform by about 0.7 points.

The CAQ’s turnout bonus might not be as big as it could have been earlier in the campaign, when the party was leading among older voters. But I estimate that the CAQ could get a boost worth nearly one percentage point. That’s not enormous, but based on current riding projections it alone could be enough to swing as many as four seats from the PQ to the CAQ.

That is, if their older voters bother to vote. The final poll from Léger showed that only 4% of Quebecers, including 8% of older Quebecers, think the CAQ will actually win. There’s not a lot of motivation to go out to vote for a lost cause.

The Conservatives are probably going to have a good night regardless of the outcome. The party was shutout of the National Assembly in the last election despite getting nearly 13% of the vote. Now projected to take 20.4% of the vote (the Conservatives get a bonus in part due to the higher-turnout Quebec City region where it has high support), the Conservatives will almost certainly win the 12 seats needed for official party status, and return to the legislature with their first MNA elected under the Conservative banner since the 1930s.

If one party has momentum going into election day, it’s the Conservative Party. In their polls conducted around Sept. 19, the Conservatives had 16% according to Pallas Data and 17% according to Léger. In their final polls, the party was at 20%.

The Conservatives are projected to have 36% support in the Quebec City region, putting them more than eight points ahead of the PQ. The Conservatives are also second in the regions with 23%, up about five points from where they were at the outset of the campaign.

If their vote doesn’t turnout (see above), the party could find itself limited to its core regions in the Quebec City suburbs and in the Beauce. If the party’s momentum carries it forward, however, the party could expand into regions the federal Conservatives haven’t even been able to win — ridings like Champlain and Nicolet—Bécancour.

If we’re searching for reasons the PQ failed to win a majority tonight, the Conservatives might be a key player in that. The party’s increased support in the regions is difficult to model, as it is ‘new’ support that could pop up in unexpected places. Or, it could increase uniformly in much of Quebec, giving the Conservatives lots of strong second-place finishes, but few extra seats.

Ghazal and Québec Solidaire had a somewhat better campaign than expected, with Ghazal performing well in the debates and the party putting forward some proposals that captured the media’s attention for a few days. But QS remains on the defensive.

The party is polling well on the island of Montreal, where it is projected to take 17.5% of the vote. But it could be in tough to defend three of its seats there: Maurice-Richard and Rosemont, where the PQ could flip them, and Verdun, where the Liberals could make a gain. QS is also defending Sherbrooke and its two Quebec City ridings of Jean-Lesage and Taschereau. That’s five QS seats that could go to the PQ. As with the Conservatives, QS could prove to be one of the reasons the PQ fails to win a majority — or, conversely, QS’s inability to hold these seats might be what gives the PQ its majority.

A challenge will be turnout. Québec Solidaire averaged around 21% support among voters under the age of 35, enough to put them tied for third with the Liberals. But they have 4% among voters over the age of 55. The 0.7-point impact I estimated for QS’s turnout means more for a party at 10.1%.

But, it could’ve been worse. This time one year ago, Québec Solidaire risked being reduced to three or four seats. Now, QS has good reason to hope for the balance of power in the National Assembly. That’s not nothing.

Surprises in store

It will be a fascinating night to watch the returns roll in. Even if the polls are very accurate, the seat outcomes could hinge on just a few hundred votes in dozens of ridings. The Parti Québécois is hoping for a majority, and if it gets one the country could be heading toward another referendum on independence before the end of St-Pierre Plamondon’s first term. Even a minority doesn’t rule out a referendum, especially if Québec Solidaire has enough seats to make up the difference.

The fate of the Coalition Avenir Québec, a party started by François Legault as a means to give Quebecers a third way beyond the old sovereignty-federalism debate, could also be decided tonight. If the CAQ drops to zero seats, it could disappear, replaced by the Conservatives as the main party on the right of Quebec’s political spectrum.

And will the Liberals make inroads in francophone Quebec, the parts of the province it has struggled in since the 2018 election? Can Charles Milliard win in Orford and present himself as a plausible alternative premier before Quebecers next head to the polls? And what role will the Conservatives play in Quebec politics going forward, especially if the result is a minority government?

Lots of questions. We’ll have to wait until tonight to have our answers. I’ll be tuning in to watch my (and our) friend Philippe J. Fournier, who will be part of Radio-Canada’s coverage. And I’ll have some analysis tomorrow on the results. Let the voting (and the counting) begin!

Updated October 4, 2026 (10:31 PM) - Most, if not all, of the final polls of this campaign have been published and they are unanimous on one thing: the Parti Québécois should win the election. But will it be a majority or minority government?

The PQ is projected to win in 94% of the model’s simulations (the other 6% are scenarios in which the polls completely miss the mark) but only wins 64 or more seats, the threshold for a majority, in 36% of simulations. In 58% of simulations, the PQ wins a minority.

The party is projected to be leading in 65 seats, but that is at the high end of its ceiling. On average, the PQ wins 58 seats. So, the majority/minority is on a knife’s edge, but a minority is the marginally more likely outcome because there aren’t a lot of scenarios in which the PQ clears the 64-seat mark very easily.

The Liberals look set to resume the official opposition role with around 37 seats, while the Conservatives are likely to make a splash and achieve official party status, either because they will win at least 12 seats or because they could hit 20% of the vote (or, quite possibly, both, as the party is projected to win around 17 seats and just over 20% of the vote).

Québec Solidaire is holding on to most of its incumbent seats but is likely to lose a few. When it comes to the Coalition Avenir Québec, it’s a distinct possibility that the party will go from its landslide, 90-seat victory in 2022 to a complete wipeout, an ignominious fate few governing parties have experienced anywhere in Canadian history. But there is enough uncertainty, and enough toss-ups, for the CAQ to have a hope of winning a few seats merely by chance. But it’s hard to identify what seats they could be, if any, because the party is projected to be leading in none.

Note to Readers: These projections are presented using Datawrapper’s interactive charts. They are best viewed on a desktop. In most cases, you can click, tap or hover over the charts to interact with them.

Full regional breakdowns and tracking charts are available for subscribers below, as are complete riding-level projections. A full methodological explanation of how the vote and seat projection model works can be found here.

The Vote Projection is based primarily on a weighted average of all publicly-available provincial and regional polls. The weighted average is then used to project the outcome in all 127 ridings across Quebec, taking into account local candidates. Those individual riding-level projections are then weighted by the number of eligible voters in each riding and past turnout to determine the provincial vote projection for each party.

The Seat Leading shows the number of seats in which each party is projected to be ahead. Parties are assigned a range of likely vote share in each riding based on past polling and modelling errors and 10,000 simulations are run to assign to each party a number of ridings in which they are in contention. The High and Low ranges take into account 95% of all likely outcomes, while the Avg. Projection shows the average number of seats each party wins in these simulations, which takes into account the tendency for parties to under- or out-perform their polls, as well as the number of toss-up contests across the province.

Wondering how to interpret the Seats Leading and the Avg. Projection? While the Seat Projection is The Writ’s “official call”, the Avg. Projection is an important guide to understanding the projections, in conjunction with the high and low ranges. Seat projections are rarely right on target, so the Avg. Projection should set expectations. In other words, if a party is leading in 25 seats but the Avg. Projection is 21.2, your expectation should be that the party will win around 25 seats, with a greater likelihood that the party under-performs that target rather than beats it.

The percentage of simulations in which each party wins a majority or a plurality of seats is shown below.

A full breakdown of the methodology behind the vote and seat projection model can be found here:

The table below includes all recent provincial voting intentions polls that are publicly available. You can click or tap on the name of the polling firm in the left-most column to go directly to that polling firm’s original poll release.

Vote and seat projections broken down by region, tracking charts, maps and detailed projections for all 127 ridings across Quebec, as well as vote projections for smaller regions within the province, are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇

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While I’ve been building and running election models for over 15 years and ran the CBC’s Poll Tracker in the 2015, 2019, 2021 and 2025 elections (as well as for a handful of provincial elections), this model is newly-designed from the ground up. I wrote about some of my thought processes during the development of the model here:

The Writ’s federal vote and seat projection model was launched in March 2026. Prior data was loaded into the model to calculate projections stretching back to the April 2025 federal election for comparison purposes.

This projection model will always be in a state of evolution as changes will be made when required (and, if significantly changing the model, explained in full). While I’ve taken as many steps as possible to reduce the amount of my own subjective judgment that is applied to the projections, there might arise some situations in which there are few or no historical precedents to use as guidance. In those cases, some ad hoc adjustments to the projection model might be made by me.

Calculating the polling average

National, provincial and regional polls are weighted by three factors.

The first is the date of the poll, based on the mid-point of the poll’s field dates. Outside of a campaign, polls with a mid-point date within the last week are given a full weight, while during a campaign full weights are given to polls with a mid-point date within the last three days. Outside of a campaign, the date weight of a poll is reduced by 7% per day, while during a campaign it is reduced by 25% per day.

The second weight is the sample size, with larger sample sizes given more weight than smaller sample sizes, up to a limit of 1,500.1

The third weight is the track record of a polling firm, with polling firms with a better track record give more weight than polls with a worse track record.

The relative weights of these three factors is 70%, 25% and 5%, respectively, with the sample size and track record weight reduced at the same pace as the date weighting. After each poll is assigned a weight, it is then used to calculate an average in a given region. Polling averages are calculated for each region and sub-region, depending on what data is available.

Riding-level projections

For each region with a polling average, a baseline riding projection is calculated for each riding in that region. The riding projection is a 50/50 combination of a proportional and uniform swing model.

With proportional swing, a party’s result in a riding in the previous election is adjusted proportionally by how a party’s support has shifted in the region as a whole since that election.2

With uniform swing, a party’s result in a riding is adjusted uniformly by how a party’s support has shifted in the region as a whole.3

The average between the proportional and uniform swing is then calculated for each party in each riding, and then those numbers are adjusted to ensure support adds up to 100%.

The projection for each riding in each region with a polling average is then assigned a weight according to the weight of all the polls in the polling average for that region, and a weighted average riding projection is then calculated for every riding.

At this point, adjustments are made to the projection to take into account local factors. This include:

• Byelections: When a seat has changed hands in a byelection, the vote projection in the region or province where and when the byelection was held is used as the new baseline from which to apply the proportional and uniform swing. When a seat hasn’t changed hands, the previous general election result is still used as the baseline. Regardless of whether the riding changed hands or not, the error range for the riding’s projection is widened to increase the level of uncertainty.

• Incumbency: Based on historical precedent at the federal level, the presence of an incumbent marginally boosts support for the Liberals or NDP, largely at the expense of the other party.4 The lack of an incumbent penalizes the party that lost the incumbent by between three to four points, with different parties getting a corresponding boost depending on which party has lost the incumbent. For provincial elections, second choice polling might be used to determine which parties benefit or are penalized due to the presence or otherwise of an incumbent.

• Floor-crossing: The party that has welcomed a floor-crossing legislator receives a boost that comes at the expense of the party that lost the floor-crossing legislator. The size of that boost can be adjusted according to the circumstances but is based on past precedent.

• Independents: The presence, or departure, of significant Independent MPs, provincial legislators or candidates is taken into account.

• Party leaders: A party leader running in a riding for the first time gets a significant boost in the model, based on past precedents. A party whose leader has vacated a riding is penalized to a greater extent than when it is a normal incumbent that has retired.

• Candidates with previous electoral experience: For federal projections, new candidates who have previously sat in a provincial or territorial legislature or who were leaders of a provincial or territorial party are awarded a boost which comes at the expense of other parties, depending on the party of the candidate.

• Withdrawn or no candidate: When a major party withdraws a candidate but that candidate will still be present on the ballot as a candidate for that party, a smaller share of what the candidate would have normally been expected to get is awarded to the party. That reduction is awarded to other parties depending on which party withdrew their candidate. When a major party has no candidate on the ballot, the share that would have been projected for a candidate from that party is distributed to other parties in different amounts depending on which party does not have a candidate. When a party did not run a candidate in the last election, previous results are used to estimate that party’s support.

The size of boosts or penalties assessed is determined by looking at how past actual election results compared to expected results when applying the mixed uniform/proportional swing model to those past elections.

Once these adjustments are complete, a final projection for the riding can be calculated. These are the numbers that you can find on the Riding Projections page.

Vote projection

The national, provincial and regional vote projections are calculated by summing the riding projections. In other words, the weighted polling average and the vote projection are two separate things, and only the vote projection is presented.

The projection for each province is calculated by weighting each riding projection by the average of 1) the riding’s share of the province’s total eligible voting population in the last election and 2) the riding’s share of the province’s total actual voters in the last election. With each riding assigned a turnout weight, they can then be combined to calculate the vote projection for the province as a whole.

This means that the vote projection takes into account not only turnout dynamics but also the adjustments made to each individual riding. A party losing a large number of incumbents in a province, for example, would be projected to take less of the vote than the polling average would suggest.

To calculate the national (and, in the case of Atlantic Canada, regional) vote projection, the provincial vote projections are weighted by the share of each province’s national turnout in the last election. Different provinces have consistently and predictably had higher or lower turnout than the country as a whole.5

Since the national vote projection is dependent on the provincial vote projections, single-province or region polls can influence the federal vote projection.

Sub-regional vote projections presented with the Riding Projections (such as for Toronto or Montreal) are a simple average of the individual riding projections in that region, with a few exceptions made for regions with ridings with significantly smaller populations or lower turnout.6

Seat projection

The Seat Projection or Seats Leading is simply the number of ridings in which a party is projected to be leading.

However, each party in each riding also has a lower and higher range of likely support. These ranges are based on the past performance of this model when applied to elections between 2011 and 2025 (or the last three provincial elections for provincial projections) meaning the ranges take into account both the errors in the model itself and in the polls. For that reason, the ranges aren’t a simple +/- calculation, with the likelihood of the result being higher or lower than the projection being equal. The precise projection for each riding does not take into account the past errors in the polls, but the projection ranges do take into account past polling error.

This means that parties that have historically beaten their polls (such as the federal Conservatives) have a higher high range and a lower low range than parties that have historically under-performed their polls (such as the federal New Democrats). For federal projections, these tendencies to under- or out-perform the polls is calculated for each party in each region. In some regions, for example, parties have largely matched their polls while they haven’t in others. Alberta and Saskatchewan for the Conservatives are good examples of where the polls have been off by greater amounts than in other regions.

These upper and lower ranges are then used to determine which seats are in contention for each party at each confidence level. More seats are in contention at the 95% confidence level, where the ranges are greater, than at the 75% confidence level, where the ranges are smaller.

The classification of a projection as Safe, Likely, Lean, Close, Edge and Toss reflects at which level of confidence does a seat become contested. If a seat is projected as “Safe”, it means that with the widest projected ranges for every party the leading party’s floor is higher than every other party’s ceiling at the 95% confidence level. “Likely” represents the 85% to 95% range, “Lean” the 75% to 85% range, “Close” the 65% to 75% range, “Edge” the 55% to 65% range, and “Toss” is 55% and less.

Since the upper and lower ranges differ for each party, in each region and at each confidence level, the classification of a projection is not uniformly based on the same margins. Two seats contested by the Conservatives and Liberals with the same margin between the two parties might be an “Edge” call in Ontario and a “Lean” call in Alberta because of how the ranges for the two parties differ from region to region. For example, a Liberal lead in Alberta is going to be more uncertain than a Conservative lead of the same size in the province, because the Conservative floor is higher than the Liberals’ floor.

The precise riding projections do not take into account these past polling performances, however, because polling errors are not consistent from one election to the next. Rather than risk adding to potential errors7, I have decided to let the riding projections reflect the seats each party should be able to win based on where the polls are, and let the projection classifications reflect the certainty (or uncertainty) of those projections.

Calculating probabilities and the Median Projection

Using the ranges at each confidence level, the number of seats being contested between two or more parties is calculated. Then, a proportion of these contested seats are randomly assigned to each party to give each party a total of seats won. The result is one election simulation that incorporates the uncertainty in the riding projections. This process is repeated 10,000 times to simulate 10,000 individual election results.

The presented “chances of winning” the election is the equivalent of the share of times one party has the most seats and/or crosses the seat threshold for a majority government in those 10,000 simulations.

The high and low seat projection ranges reflect the 95th percentile of outcomes in those 10,000 simulations, while the Median Projection8 is the median outcome of those simulations. As the simulations rely on the projection ranges for each individual riding, which themselves are calculated by assessing the tendency for parties to out- or under-perform their polls and the model, the ranges and the Median Projection take into account the likelihood that parties will beat or under-perform their polls and the model.

• Any questions regarding the model? Leave them as a comment below or send me an email.

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The Writ Drop is your weekly round-up of everything you might have missed in political and election news, federal, provincial and municipal polling.

Good morning everyone! It’s the last weekend before Quebec’s election, so keep an eye out for new polls that will be published between now and Sunday evening. Look on Monday morning for my last update to the Quebec Election Tracker. I’ll also have a final analysis to set you up for when the counting starts!

Here’s what you might have missed from me over the last week:

THE WRIT

• The Quebec Election Tracker was updated early in the week with the polls from Synopsis Recherche, Léger and Pallas Data that really kicked off what was a rough week for the CAQ. I wrote a deeper analysis of those numbers on Monday. You can read that analysis here. With those (somewhat dated) numbers, the odds the PQ wins the most seats sits at 93%.

• The Federal Vote and Seat Projections were also updated with new numbers from Abacus Data, Liaison Strategies and Nanos Research. Two numbers in particular from that Nanos poll really captured people’s attention: 50% for the Liberals and 62% for Mark Carney on the best prime minister question.

• Finally, the B.C. Election Tracker was also updated with new polls from Léger, Liaison Strategies, Innovative Research Group and Ipsos. The model currently gives the B.C. Conservatives a 54% chance of winning the most seats. Not exactly what David Eby had in mind.

THE NUMBERS & LES CHIFFRES

• The Numbers: Carney hits new highs, Conservatives risk new lows - Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to be walking on water in the polls, as new numbers put the Liberals and their leader at highs not seen before in recent history. Meanwhile, support for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives drops to new lows as an upcoming resignation means the party will face another tough byelection in the coming months. This week on The Numbers, we discuss the federal polling landscape and the upcoming byelection in Parry Sound—Muskoka. We then take a look at where the polls are heading in the ongoing Quebec and British Columbia provincial elections, before chatting about new developments in Alberta and Manitoba. We then answer questions from our members WATCH OR LISTEN HERE

• Les chiffres : Que restera-t-il de la CAQ ? - À une semaine du vote, trois nouvelles enquêtes placent le parti de Christine Fréchette sous la barre des 20 %, au point où sa présence même à l’Assemblée nationale après l'élection pourrait être menacée. Pendant ce temps, le Parti québécois conserve son avance et se rapproche du seuil d’un gouvernement majoritaire, tandis que les conservateurs poursuivent leur progression. Que s’est-il passé avec la CAQ? Jusqu’où peut-elle tomber? Et le PQ peut-il réellement décrocher une majorité avec moins du tiers des suffrages ? Puis, nous terminons en répondant aux questions des membres du balado. ÉCOUTEZ ICI

ELSEWHERE

• Along with Abacus Data’s David Coletto, I joined Power & Politics on CBC News Network earlier this week to discuss the latest federal poll numbers. WATCH HERE

• Earlier this week, I recorded an interview with CBC Radio’s The House about the Quebec election. I’m not sure what will be used from that interview, but tune in this morning to find out!

Now let’s take a look at some of the latest developments and new polls that I didn’t get a chance to get to this past week.

Read more

This week on The Numbers, we discuss the federal polling landscape and the upcoming byelection in Parry Sound—Muskoka. We then take a look at where the polls are heading in the ongoing Quebec and British Columbia provincial elections, before chatting about new developments in Alberta and Manitoba. We then answer questions from our members, with an extended edition of the mailbag available on Patreon or via an Apple subscription.

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The extended and bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

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Today’s update to The Writ’s Quebec Election Tracker now puts the PQ in the lead in 68 ridings across the province, just above the 64-seat threshold needed for a majority government. The party’s average seat haul in the model’s 10,000 simulations is 59 seats, just below the majority threshold (and a reflection of the high degree of uncertainty remaining in the riding-by-riding battles). But the result is that the odds of a PQ majority have spiked from just 6% in last Wednesday’s update to 46% today.

The PQ is also now over 30% support in the vote projection for the first time during this campaign. The Liberals are holding second with 22% and 36 seats, but their ceiling tops out at 39 seats due to the party’s continuing inability to breakthrough among francophone voters.

The Conservatives have surged into third place in the vote projection with just over 19% and are projected to win 14 seats, enough to land them third spot in the National Assembly.

That’s because support for the CAQ has cratered. Now at just 16.9% in the vote projection, the party is projected to be leading in only a single seat. The model sees them within striking distance of dozens more, so the average seat projection sits at 11.9 seats. But the floor is really falling out for the CAQ. In 52% of simulations, the CAQ wins seven seats or fewer.

The three polls out today (from Léger for Le Journal de Montréal/Québec and TVA, Synopsis Recherche for La Presse and Pallas Data) all put the PQ at 30%, a mark that has been stubbornly elusive for the party since the outset of the campaign. All three pollsters all put the Liberals in second place (with between 22% and 26%). They also put the CAQ and Conservatives either tied for third place or within two points of one another.

The trendlines from these three pollsters are quite clear. Both Léger and Pallas were last in the field more recently (around Sept. 18-21) and, since then, have recorded a drop of four and three points, respectively, for the CAQ with the PQ (one and two points), Liberals (three and one point) and Conservatives (one point) all benefitting.

Compared with when all three pollsters were last in the field at the same time (around Sept. 10-13, so before the three debates were held) the movement has been even more dramatic.

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