How did the federal election change Canada’s representation in Parliament?

A party breakdown of Canada's 45 Parliament based on number of elected MPs. Note: The graphic does not purport to be an accurate representation of how the seating arrangement will be laid out in the House of Commons. (CTV News / Jasna Baric)

Days after an estimated 19.6 million Canadians cast their ballots, the results of this year’s federal election are coming in, bringing with them a new political landscape.

Here are some of the takeaways from Canada’s 45th trip to the polls:

Big takes from small

This year’s election saw gains for Canada’s two largest federal parties and losses for everyone else.

The Liberal Party of Canada, which won the most ridings of any party at 169, picked up 11 seats from the Bloc Quebecois, 10 from the Conservatives and seven from the NDP, while the Conservatives, in second place with 143 seats, took 16 from the Liberals, 10 from the NDP and one each from the Bloc and Green Party of Canada.

Collectively, Canada’s smaller parties lost nearly half of their total seats this cycle, to 31 from the 60 ridings they held at dissolution. It’s a development that Fair Vote Canada, a non-profit electoral reform group, calls a shift toward American-style two-party politics.

“In the face of unprecedented threats from Donald Trump and the harsh choices presented by our first-past-the-post system, many voters abandoned the NDP and Greens, lending their votes to the Liberals out of fear that Pierre Poilievre would win 100 per cent of the power with 40 per cent of the vote,” reads a Tuesday release.

“Canada’s Parliament and our politics will suffer from the lack of diverse voices in Parliament for years to come.”

But while a Liberal win and collapse for New Democrats might suggest that left-of-centre Canadians voted strategically to ward off a Conservative government, Conservatives actually peeled off more NDP seats than the Liberals did, complicating that narrative.

Memorably touting “boots, not suits” on the stump, Poilievre’s campaign targeted blue-collar workers, traditionally a constituency for the pro-labour NDP and a group put at risk amid the global trade war, particularly in Ontario’s auto sector.

“What happened in (southwest) Ontario is not progressive vote splitting‚" wrote economist and political commentator Mike Moffatt in a Wednesday post to X. “There’s a lot of blue-orange ‘anyone but Liberal’ switchers.”

“It would be a heck of a coincidence that the phenomenon was isolated to blue collar ridings like Fanshawe,” Moffatt added in a post Thursday.

For the NDP, which lost official party status after falling below the 12-seat minimum threshold, that kind of loss can colour their understanding of what comes next.

“We have to figure out with a diminished size and influence how we can best use what we have to make an impact,” said NDP campaign spokesperson Anne McGrath, noting that a postmortem on the election outcome -- as well as a plan for who will replace outgoing leader Jagmeet Singh -- are forthcoming.

Regional shifts

This week’s electoral shakeup also shifted where in the country each party draws their support.

Liberals made gains in Quebec and Western Canada, while trading seats with the Conservatives in Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

Bloc Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet attributed his party’s challenges in French Canada to U.S. President Donald Trump‘s threats of annexation. Speaking to reporters in French, he said the subject surfaced again and again throughout the campaign, “each time (the Liberals) feared to lose ground.”

Conservatives, meanwhile, were the only party to end the night with more support in riding-rich Ontario than they had before, capturing 13 seats from the Liberals in areas including the 905 and southwest, three from the NDP and one from the Greens. They also made notable gains in British Columbia, flipping one Liberal and five NDP seats.

New Democrats made no gains this election, losing more than two-thirds of their total seat count with steep drops in Ontario and Western Canada. At time of this writing, they hold onto just seven ridings, spread across B.C., Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec, as well as the riding for Nunavut.

As a one-province party, the Bloc’s support hasn’t shifted so much as shrunk, down to 23 seats from 34 at dissolution with a loss of 11 to the Liberals and one to the Conservatives. The party did pick up a seat from the Liberals, in Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Listuguj, on election night. And then three days after the election, it was determined that the Bloc won another seat, Terrebonne, after an Elections Canada validation process found they had in fact beaten the Liberals by 44 votes in the closely-fought riding.

Meanwhile, the Greens lost their only Ontario riding, leaving party leader Elizabeth May’s seat in B.C. their last holdout.

May has said she’s open to “lots of things” as this new Parliament takes shape, including the race for Speaker of The House and hypothetically a spot in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet, though she has noted she wouldn’t do so if it meant dropping her party affiliation.

New faces in the House

While control of Parliament remains in the hands of the same party, this election saw change on the seat-to-seat level, from the top on down.

House of Commons records show that Canada’s 45th Parliament will include 226 re-elected MPs and 117 new members; the lowest proportion of incumbents since 2015, despite the total number of ridings growing to 343 from 338 following the last census.

Of the five party leaders in the House of Commons at dissolution, only Blanchet and May are set to return to Parliament in the coming weeks.

Former Liberal leader Justin Trudeau did not run after stepping down as prime minister earlier this year, and both Poilievre and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh were ousted from their seats in Carleton and Burnaby Central, respectively. Jonathan Pedneault, the Green party’s other co-leader for this election, lost his race to pick up the Montreal seat of Outremont, and has since resigned from his role in the party.

Meanwhile, Poilievre is set to run in an upcoming byelection for the rural Alberta riding of Battle River—Crowfoot, after Conservative MP-elect Damien Kurek announced he would give up the seat, earlier this week.

According to the Library of Parliament records, the incoming House of Commons will have 104 women among its members, one more than were elected in 2021, but with slightly lower representation, as there are now 343 seats in the House, up from 338.

Since the late 1990s, the proportion of women in Parliament has risen to 30 per cent from 20 per cent.

With files from CTV News’ Judy Trinh and Spencer Van Dyk, and The Canadian Press