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The Political Record

Sources & Methods

Text as of · Members as of

Every figure on the site comes from one of the datasets below. For each: where it comes from, the terms it is used under, the day it was fetched and how far it runs, and every change made to it on the way to the page. Then what each measure cannot tell you.

The data is fetched and cleaned by the record's own pipeline, and the site is built from a dated snapshot of what it writes. A page's figures are therefore as current as the snapshot, and each page prints its date. The House's list of members, which gives every riding its sitting member and the board its seats, was read on .

The House of Commons

The members of the House

Source
House of Commons of Canada, the list of current members and each member's roles, ourcommons.ca/members.
Terms
The Speaker's Permission: non-commercial reproduction, not presented as an official version (Important notices).
Fetched
. The House updates the list continuously; the site's copy is this snapshot, and every page prints its date. A check run each Monday (npm run check:house) fetches the House's list of constituencies and reports every riding whose name, member, party or vacancy differs from the site's, so a change does not sit unnoticed; the 17 renames of September 2026 were what it was written for.
Used for
Each riding's sitting member, party, up to four roles and committees, the year first elected to the House and terms served; the seats on the board; who holds each riding in the find layer.
Transformations
A riding with no member on the list is vacant. The list's own "from" date does not move when a member changes party, so a member sitting for a party other than the one they were elected for, and the date they crossed, come from the ledger's events, which cite the House's Journals; a test fails the build when the list and the events disagree. Role names are tidied ("Veterans Affairs committee", not "Member: Veterans Affairs").

Hansard

Source
House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 45th Parliament, 1st Session, the House's XML for each sitting.
Terms
The Speaker's Permission, as above. No speech text is reproduced on the site.
Fetched
. The copy runs from the first sitting, , to sitting 149 on , and stops there: a member's speech count on a riding page is the count to that day.
Used for
How many speeches the member has made in this Parliament, and the subject they spoke on most.
Transformations
Hansard names a speaker by a different identifier from the members' list, so speeches are matched to members by name (accents stripped, honorific dropped, lowercased), which matches about 86% of the Parliament's speakers who printed a riding. A member the bridge misses shows no count. English Hansard only.

The House's calendar, Journals and procedure

Source
The House's published sitting calendar for 2025 and 2026 and the Journals of the 45th Parliament, 1st Session, for the sittings; Our Procedure, House of Commons Procedure and Practice (4th ed., 2025), the Constitution Act, 1867 and the Parliament of Canada Act for the rules the Rules of Play prints, each printed beside its source.
Read
The sittings on ; the rules checked on . Kept by hand; the next sitting is added when the House publishes its calendar.
Used for
The turns of the board (a sitting is a turn), the Speaker and the date the House elected him, the seat counts that matter (343, 172, 12) and what they mean.
Transformations
A sitting runs from its first sitting day to its last before an adjournment; a day the House is deemed to have sat is not a sitting day.

Elections Canada

Official voting results, 45th general election (2025)

Source
Elections Canada, Official Voting Results, 45th General Election: the results by electoral district and candidate, and the poll-by-poll results.
Terms
Elections Canada's Terms and Conditions (its permission to reproduce): reproduction for non-commercial purposes, with the source named. The raw tables are not redistributed here.
Fetched
. Published once per general election and revised after judicial recounts and validation; the site's copy is the official count as published, not election night's preliminary one.
Used for
Each riding's winner and runner-up, votes, the margin in votes and in points, turnout, electors, valid votes and rejected ballots, the number of candidates; the seats the board starts from; the election-day versus advance comparison; the vote share the board deals on election night.
Transformations
A share is votes over valid votes; the margin in points is the winner's share less the runner-up's. The figures reconcile to the certified national total of 19,641,663 votes. For the election-day comparison, "election day" is the votes at ordinary and mobile polls, and "advance and special" everything else (advance polls and ballots under the Special Voting Rules). The distinctions on a riding page sort these figures across all 343 ridings and print each rank with its denominator.

The 2021 result transposed onto today's boundaries

Source
Elections Canada, Transposition of Votes from the 44th General Election to the 2023 Representation Orders.
Terms
Open Government Licence – Canada (OGL-Canada 2.0), as Elections Canada's open data record licenses it.
Fetched
. Static.
Used for
Which party would have won each of today's ridings on the 2021 vote; whether 2025 was a hold or a gain; the swing by party; the 58 seats the board rings on election night as won by a different party than in 2021.
Transformations
Each party's transposed share is read as Elections Canada publishes it, which is a share of all ballots cast, rounded to one decimal and summed where a party had more than one line. It is not rescaled: a riding's 2021 shares sum to a little under 100 (between 97.0 and 99.8), the rest being rejected ballots. The 2025 share is of valid votes, so the swing (2025 less 2021) compares two bases that differ by the rejected ballots; the difference moves a party's swing by a fraction of a point. The transposition is a model of how 2021's votes fall on 2023's lines, not an election held on them.

Earlier results on the old boundaries

Source
Elections Canada, Official Voting Results for the 42nd (2015), 43rd (2019) and 44th (2021) general elections, by electoral district; OGL-Canada 2.0 where Elections Canada's open data record licenses them.
Fetched
. Static.
Used for
The line of previous elections under a riding's 2025 scoreboard.
Transformations
Those elections were fought on the 2013 boundaries, so each is the result of the former riding most of today's riding's 2025 electors lived in (see the lineage below), named as such; it is that riding's result, not this one's.

General elections since 2004

Source
Elections Canada, Official Voting Results for each general election from the 38th (2004) to the 45th (2025): Table 7, the distribution of seats by political affiliation, and Table 9, the percentage of valid votes, each election's tables linked beside its row.
Read
. Kept by hand; one row is added at every general election.
Used for
The score sheet: each election's seats and share of the vote by party.
Transformations
Seats are as the official results report them, after validation and any judicial recount: the House as the election returned it, before any by-election or change of party. Members elected without a party are one line. Shares are to one decimal as the table prints them.

By-elections, leaders and the Gazette

Source
Elections Canada's news releases for each by-election called and its result; the Canada Gazette, Part I, for the return of the member elected; Elections Canada's registry of political parties, as archived on , for the leaders on election day, and each party's own notice for a leader's departure or a leadership race.
Read
. Kept by hand, each date and name with its source beside it; a contest is added when one is called.
Used for
The ledger's events: a seat falling vacant, a by-election called, its candidates, its vote and its result; a leader leaving or replaced.
Transformations
A by-election is "called" on the day Elections Canada announces it, since the Gazette prints no notice of the writ. The day a member took a seat at a by-election is that event's date; the riding page dates the member from it.

An election annulled

Source
The court's judgment and Elections Canada's result for the by-election that followed. One entry so far: Terrebonne, whose 2025 election the Supreme Court of Canada annulled; the seat was refilled at the by-election of .
Checked
. Kept by hand; checked after any contested-election ruling.
Transformations
The riding page keeps the 2025 result as Elections Canada certified it and says, before any figure drawn from it, that a court annulled it and who won the re-run. The re-run's own figures are not in the data.

Boundaries and the census

Electoral district boundaries

Source
Elections Canada's Federal Electoral Districts for the 2013 and 2023 Representation Orders, via Natural Resources Canada's mirror and catalogued on open.canada.ca; the polling division boundaries of the 45th general election (2025), from Elections Canada's Electoral Geography Boundary Files, with each division's electors from the poll-by-poll results; the shoreline from Statistics Canada's 2021 Census cartographic boundary file for the provinces and territories.
Terms
Open Government Licence – Canada. The shoreline is adapted from Statistics Canada; this does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada.
Fetched
. The boundaries change only at a representation order, roughly every ten years.
Used for
The board, each riding's engraved plate and map, its area, its neighbours, and what it was drawn from.
Transformations
Lineage is by geometry, by people and by land. The electors: each 2025 polling division is placed in the 2013 riding a point inside it falls in, and each former riding's share is the part of today's riding's 2025 ordinary-list electors who lived in it; the former riding most of them lived in comes first. The land: the 2023 and 2013 files are intersected, and each former riding's share is the part of today's riding's area that lay in it, with how much of the former riding that part was; area is not population. Elections Canada counts 48 of 343 ridings as entirely unchanged; the site's own measure calls 54 unchanged, a riding at least 99.5% of whose area and of whose electors came from one former riding, taking at least 99.5% of its area, so a move too small for that threshold to see is a change to Elections Canada and none to the page. Neighbours are the ridings that share a border; a touch at a single point is not a border. Area is the boundary file's, in square kilometres.

The 2021 Census

Source
Statistics Canada, Census Profile, 2021 Census of Population, by federal electoral district of the 2023 Representation Order (catalogue 98-401-X2021029, released ).
Terms
Statistics Canada Open Licence. Reproduced and distributed on an "as is" basis with the permission of Statistics Canada.
Fetched
. Static until the 2026 Census is published.
Used for
A riding's population and density, and six indicators: median household income, median age, the share with a bachelor's degree or higher (25 to 64), immigrants, owner households, and French as mother tongue; each ranked among all 343 ridings and compared with the median riding.
Transformations
Density is the census population over the boundary file's area. Each indicator's rank is a sort of the 343 values; the comparison is with the median riding, not with Canada as a whole. Elections Canada's results tables print a population of their own for each district, which differs from the census profile's count in most ridings; the site prints the census profile's, since its indicators are ranked on the same table, and does not reconcile the two.

Support and conditions

National and regional polls

Source
Opinion polling for the 46th Canadian federal election — Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0: Wikipedia's tables of opinion polling for the 46th Canadian federal election, read through the MediaWiki API, with each poll's pollster, fieldwork dates, sample size, method and the pollster's own release linked.
Terms
CC BY-SA 4.0; the page history lists the authors.
Fetched
The tables on ; the file the board reads built on . It holds 245 national polls with a last day of fieldwork from to . New polls reach Wikipedia within about a day of release; the site's copy is this snapshot.
Used for
The support tokens on the board, one per point; a region's tokens on its deed.
Transformations
Each party's figure is the plain mean of the polls whose last day of fieldwork fell in the 30 days before the board's date (14 polls for the latest, September 24, 2026 to October 24, 2026), of decided voters as the pollster reports them. No weighting, no house effects, no projection. The regions are the six the pollsters publish (British Columbia, Alberta, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic Canada), and a region's tokens are dealt only from polls of the last 90 days. On election night the tokens are the vote itself: each party's share of valid votes from Elections Canada's official results.

Prices, unemployment and the policy rate

Source
Statistics Canada, table 18-10-0004-01, vector v41690973, via the Web Data Service; Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey, table 14-10-0287-01, vector v2062815; Bank of Canada, Valet, series V39079.
Terms
Statistics Canada Open Licence for the two Statistics Canada series; the Bank of Canada's terms of use for the policy rate, read through its Valet API.
Fetched
. Each figure is dated by its release, and the state of play shows the latest released by the day the site was built, with the one before it.
Used for
The state of play under the board, its Conditions: consumer prices over a year, the unemployment rate and the Bank of Canada's target rate.

The board, the maps and the lookups

The board's geometry

The board is the 2023 boundaries, cut to the shoreline, reprojected to a Lambert conformal conic on Statistics Canada Lambert's standard parallels (49° and 77°) with its central meridian turned from 91.87°W to 103°W, so the prairies' border lies level and the country fills the board's frame, simplified at 2.5 km with every island kept, the ridings dissolved into their provinces, and scaled into a 1000-unit-wide drawing; built . When the board goes to a province it draws a finer cut in the same projection: the ridings under 300 km² at about 60 m, those under 5,000 km² at about 150 m, the rest as the board has them. A conic projection shows Canada as a wall map does; Mercator would let the north swallow the country. The map on a riding page draws the same 2023 boundaries as vector tiles from the site's own storage (built ) over OpenFreeMap's Positron basemap, recoloured to the page's paper.

Live lookups

A postcode typed into find is sent to Open North's Represent API, which answers with the federal electoral district of the 2023 order that the postcode's centroid falls in: one riding per postcode, which can be wrong where a postcode straddles a boundary. "Near me" uses the device's location in the browser and finds the riding whose centroid is nearest, which is approximate near a boundary; nothing is sent.

Official portraits

A member's official photograph is the House of Commons' (© House of Commons of Canada), linked from each riding page's structured data and used as the page's shared-link image. The pieces and portraits drawn from it are described on Illustrations.

Held by the pipeline, not published

The pipeline also holds datasets the site does not print: Wikidata's members of the House (CC0), openparliament.ca's politicians and memberships, how each member voted in recorded divisions, Hansard's text, LEGISinfo's bills, and the government's published contracts, grants and contributions, petitions and members' expenditures. None of it is on a page or in a public file.

What each measure cannot tell you