Rules of Play
A board game ships with a rulebook. These are the record's: what it counts, what it says, and what it will not do. They bind every page and every event, and they are the same for every party.
The players are the parties, not people
The players are the five parties that won seats in 2025: the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the Bloc Québécois, the New Democratic Party and the Green Party. A party's leader is a piece on the board; a member is the piece standing on a seat. The record counts seats and support; it does not score a person.
Nothing on the site ranks a person. The distinctions on a riding page ("2nd-highest turnout in Canada · 2nd of 343") rank the riding against the other ridings, and each prints its rank and the number it was ranked among. No superlative is written about a named living person; no attendance figure, ranking or scorecard is kept for a member. The one count a riding page prints for its member, speeches made, is the member's own and is compared with no one's.
The same rules for every party
The record endorses no party and no candidate. Every party's seats, votes and support come from the same tables by the same method; every riding's distinctions are computed by the same sort; every member's likeness is drawn with the same prompt and the same treatment (Illustrations). Parties are shown by the site's own monograms and by their colours, tuned for contrast on this paper; never by their logos.
An event says what changed, never why
Between elections, the record moves by events. Each is one dated change that moves something on the board, kept by hand in date order, with a title, one plain sentence and its source. An event enters the ledger by its category:
- a seat changing hands, or falling vacant;
- a by-election called for a seat, and each step of it: called, candidates, the vote, the result;
- a leader's departure announced, or a leader replaced, and each step of a leadership race;
- a party's standing changing;
- the House opened, adjourned, prorogued or dissolved, or a Speaker elected;
- an entry in the record: a recorded division, royal assent, a budget, a Speech from the Throne;
- a step of a measure the board keeps over time.
No event or page gives a cause: nothing on the site says that one event brought about another, or that support moved on account of anything. Where support is shown around an event's date, it is measured and printed with the number of polls behind it; it is not explained.
No forecasts
The board keeps score; it does not predict. There is no win probability, no projection, no needle and no model of who is winning. The only dates ahead of today on the board are the House's and the law's: the published sitting calendar, a by-election's polling day once Elections Canada has set it, and the fixed election date, , set by the Canada Elections Act, s. 56.1(2).
Polls appear only as tokens, never as a headline
Support on the board is 100 tokens, one for each point: each party's plain mean of the national polls whose last day of fieldwork fell in the 30 days before the board's date, as Wikipedia's polling tables list them (Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0). No weighting, no house effects, no projection. The board prints the number of polls behind each mean and the window they came from; the file it reads lists every poll with its pollster, its dates and its sample size. A region's tokens are dealt only from polls of the last 90 days, and the deed says their dates. On election night the tokens are the vote itself. The file the board reads was built on and holds 245 national polls from to .
No poll is ever the page's headline, its description or its answer sentence. The standing of the House is the seats.
No Hansard text
A riding page prints how many speeches its member has made in the 45th Parliament and the subject they spoke on most often. The words themselves are not reproduced anywhere on the site, and the public data files carry none. How each member voted in a recorded division is not on the site.
Voting logistics belong to Elections Canada
The site says nothing about where, when or how to vote, who may vote, or what to bring. For all of that, use Elections Canada and its Voter Information Service.
The standing rules the board applies
- The House has 343 seats. A party with more than half of them, 172 or more, has a majority (Our Procedure: The Canadian Parliamentary System). With the most seats but fewer than 172, it governs in a minority.
- The party with the second-largest number of seats is the Official Opposition (Our Procedure: The Canadian Parliamentary System).
- A party with 12 or more members is a recognized party (Our Procedure: The Canadian Parliamentary System; Parliament of Canada Act, s. 62).
- The Speaker is counted among their party's seats, and votes only when the voices are equal (Constitution Act, 1867, s. 49).
- A vacant seat is nobody's. It is counted as empty until a member takes it.
- The seats after an election are the official count, as validated and, where one was held, judicially recounted, not election night's preliminary count. The House is as its members' list stood on the date printed on the page.
Every figure dated and sourced
Every page prints the date its member list was read, and every figure the source it came from and the number it was measured against. A page without an as-of date is a fault. Sources & Methods lists each dataset, its terms, when it was fetched and how it was transformed, and says what each measure cannot tell you.
How the words are written
The events, the rules and the text of these pages are written by hand, in short declarative sentences, and checked against their sources before they are published. No prose on the site is written at scale by a model. The riding pages' sentences are built from the figures by fixed templates, so that each says the same thing in the same words for every riding.
Errors
An error is corrected on the page and entered on Corrections, with the date, what was wrong and what changed. Anyone may report one at corrections@politicalrecord.ca.