‘Remarkable how fast polls changed’: U of R political scientist breaks down federal election results

U of Regina Political Scientist Jim Farney on the 2025 Federal Election results

Over 19.5 million voters cast their ballot in Canada’s 45th federal election, representing more than 68 per cent of eligible voters. A Liberal Party minority win was made clear Monday evening and remains so, although some polls are still being tallied.

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University of Regina political scientist Jim Farney joined CTV Morning Live Saskatchewan on Tuesday to analyze the election, attributing part of the Liberal Party’s success to Justin Trudeau’s resignation and U.S. President Donald Trump’s involvement in Canadian politics.

“It is really remarkable how fast the polls changed,” Farney said. “There’s all sorts of kind of little landslides that got set off as a result,”

In Saskatchewan, the Conservatives held all 14 seats going into election night. Liberal Party candidate Buckley Belanger managed to claim a seat in the Desnethé – Missinippi – Churchill River riding, marking the only change to the province’s long-held blue dominance.

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While federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre remains popular in much of Saskatchewan and the prairies, he ended up losing his own seat in the Ottawa riding of Carleton.

“If you look at kind of the core demographics of Poilievre’s own riding, if it hadn’t been for his record, we would have been talking about it as a swing riding. It’s a little bit like Regina-Qu’Appelle here, a mix of rural and urban in Ottawa, and that’s not easy campaigning grounds for a conservative,” he said.

Farney said something that really hurt the Conservatives was the progressive vote shifting towards the Liberals and away from the New Democrats.

“That probably cost them something [in] the order of 15, maybe 20 races, depending how fine grained you want to get,” he said. “It’s that collapse of the NDP and [Jagmeet] Singh’s own loss that I think is the probably lasting story of the night that the NDP has lost official party status as a result of yesterday’s voting.”

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Farney also doesn’t think Canadians will be heading back to the polls anytime soon, noting Prime Minister Mark Carney’s platform is a big spending one, so he has ways to negotiate with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois to get things passed.

“We are at a time of national crisis, so no party is going to want to be the one that interrupts us with another election quickly, but my guess would be in the next 18 months or so, we’ll be back in election mode,” he added.

Farney said what drove Carney over the top was a “rally around the flag effect.”

“I think there is a bit of mystery in why the Liberals are so good at being kind of Canada’s natural party,” he said. “I think if we had made a similar move before Trump was President, we would be taking about Prime Minister Poilievre this morning.”

• CTV News declares Liberal minority, here are the results from across Saskatchewan

“It was very much a feature of timing.”

Looking forward, Farney said the prime minister has a big job ahead and will undoubtedly face some challenges.

“The first will be this meeting with Trump, but making the premiers and the federation work together, dialing down some of the tension, making sure everyone understands they have a seat at the table is, I think, Carney’s big challenge,” he said.

“It’s both the prairie west and Quebec has kind of simmering issues with the federation, simmering kind of hotter than they’ve been for a while, that is going to be probably his second challenge.”