The map that delivers Poilievre's majority
A deep-dive into the current seat projections.
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If the federal election were held today, the Conservatives would likely win somewhere between 195 and 230 seats. But just where would these gains come from?
The short answer is: nearly everywhere.
But let’s take a deeper look at what the electoral map would probably look like if Canadians were called to the polls this week.
Back in September, we launched the Poll Tracker, the CBC’s interactive tool highlighting the results of the poll aggregation and seat projection model that I developed and used for the last three federal elections. Things haven’t shifted much over the last two or three months. On September 15, the Conservatives led by about 19 points. Now, they lead by about 18 points and would likely win just as many seats today as they would have at the end of the summer.
I’ve been making the seat-level projections available to subscribers to The Writ, but today I wanted to dive a little deeper into those projections and take a cross-country tour of how they look — and just where those Conservative gains are likely to come.
Liberal Toronto no more
Remarkably, the Liberals have won every seat in Toronto in each of the last three elections. That winning record was finally broken when the Liberals lost the byelection in Toronto–St. Paul’s in June, a defeat that was a canary in the coalmine for just how bad things could get for the Liberals in the city.
Toronto–St. Paul’s was, and is, approaching the limit of what the Conservatives could hope for in Toronto and is likely as close as the party can realistically get to the downtown core. But there are six other Toronto seats that the Conservatives are likely to take from the Liberals: Etobicoke Centre, Etobicoke–Lakeshore, York Centre, Willowdale, Eglinton–Lawrence and Don Valley North. Scarborough–Agincourt and Don Valley West are also listed as tosses (though leaning Liberal). All in all, that means the Liberals could lose as many as nine seats to the Conservatives in Toronto — or more than one in three.
(In the maps below, ridings are coloured according to which party is leading in the seat projection model. The darkest colours show “Safe” ridings, with those colours getting progressively paler according to the “Likely”, “Leaning” and “Toss” classifications.)
The New Democrats also have some opportunities in Toronto. They are favoured in Davenport and in Taiaiako’n–Parkdale–High Park and are on the wrong side of tosses in University–Rosedale and Toronto–Danforth. This means the Liberals have to fight off the NDP in the downtown core of the city while they are fighting off the Conservatives in the inner suburbs.
There are also the assumptions baked into the model, which is by no means a certainty, that the Liberals’ strength will hold in Scarborough and in parts of Etobicoke that could swing more dramatically to the Conservatives than the provincewide polling would suggest.
Conservatives look for a virtual sweep in the GTA
If the Liberals still have a chance of holding some seats in Toronto, things look bleaker for them in the Greater Toronto Area.