Voter turnout in Canada’s federal election was the highest it’s been since 2015, Elections Canada says.
The Liberals regained the popular vote on Monday following two consecutive elections that saw them form minority governments but trail the Conservatives in the popular vote.
According to preliminary results from Elections Canada, as of Tuesday at 12 p.m. eastern, Mark Carney’s Liberals received 43.5 per cent of the popular vote with 8,367,521 ballots cast.
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives received 7,950,394 votes amounting to 41.4 per cent.
That comes as the Liberals are projected to win 168 seats, while the Conservatives are projected to win 144.
Monday’s election also had the most people heading to the polls since 2015, with 19,216,917 people casting their vote, a total of 67.37 per cent of registered electors.
The last time Canada saw a higher percentage of electors voting was in 2015, when 68.3 per cent of the total number of registered voters cast a ballot.
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The last time the winning party achieved 40 per cent or more of the popular vote was in 2000 when former prime minister Jean Chretien was elected to his third majority.
But in a Parliament with multiple parties, that percentage is not always easy to get.
Even rarer is for two parties to surpass the 40 per cent mark like the Liberals and Conservatives did Monday. The last time that happened was in 1930 when then-Conservative leader R. B. Bennett and then-Liberal leader William Lyon Mackenzie King received 47 and 44 per cent, respectively.
In Quebec, Yves-Francois Blanchet’s Bloc Quebecois received 6.7 per cent, or 1,223,506, in the national results, giving the party 23 seats, a drop from the 32 they received four years ago.
Jagmeet Singh’s NDP suffered the biggest loss of the night, however, receiving only 1,205, 131 votes, or 6.3 per cent. His New Democrats lost official party status in the House of Commons, which requires at least 12 seats, dropping from 24 MPs to a projected seven.
Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault’s Green Party also saw a loss, with only May keeping her seat and the party receiving just 1.2 per cent of the vote.
Pedneault did not hold a seat when the election began, but lost to the Liberals’ Rachel Bendayan. The other Green seat, held by Mike Morrice in Ontario, has not been declared yet, but the party is currently trailing the Conservatives.
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