The Liberals rose from the ashes under Prime Minister Mark Carney in a stunning reversal of fortunes this year, but the party's failure to sweep many of the ridings it sought Monday night denied it a resounding majority mandate.
A big part of that failure happened in Ontario, where the party lost many incumbents — even as Carney called for a strong mandate to deal with the threat posed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Abacus Data CEO David Coletto said the party fell short in Ontario, losing seats in the Greater Toronto Area and York region, and failing to break through in the Prairies.
While there's widespread consensus that Trump was behind the Liberals' stunning victory, other factors put wind in the Conservatives' sails in Ontario.
"I have been arguing for most of this campaign that it wasn't one ballot question. It wasn't just Trump defining this," Coletto said.
"As the campaign went on, and even as Trump inserted himself into those last few days, particularly on election day, there were still half in this country and many in Ontario and those ridings around Toronto where the cost of living and the price of housing remain big issues, and so change was a bigger factor in those places."
Party rank-and-file spent Tuesday worrying about how stable the new government would be. Counting continued into the day and key seats with narrow margins remained in a state of flux until Elections Canada arrived at a result of 169 seats — just shy of the 172 needed for a majority.
The party was angling to add about six seats more to their total count in Ontario, but instead dropped to 69 from the 78 they won in 2021.
The party lost more than a dozen previously held ridings throughout the province while also winning new seats.
Dan Arnold, a former Liberal pollster now at Pollara Strategic Insights, said that while the Liberals made the gains they needed in Quebec and B.C., holding their ground in Ontariowould have given them a comfortable majority.
"The Liberals ran up the score in downtown Toronto this time. NDP voters there flocked their way en masse," he said. "They obviously had a phenomenal night in Ottawa, winning Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's riding, and they actually picked up a few more seats in Eastern Ontario too — Peterborough, Bay of Quinte."
But the Liberals lost six ridings in the 905 area and in the Golden Horseshoe that former prime minister Justin Trudeau had won over three elections, Arnold said.
Former cabinet minister Ya'ara Saks lost York Centre to Conservative candidate and former Tory MPP Roman Baber — a seat held by the Liberals since 2015.
Prominent GTA incumbent MPs like Francesco Sorbara in Vaughan—Woodbridge, Majid Jowhari in Richmond Hill South and Liberal Bryan May in Cambridge all fell to Conservative challengers.
In Peel region, former cabinet minister Kamal Khera lost Brampton—West to Conservative Amarjeet Gill — a seat that the Liberals had won by just over 25 percentage points in 2021.
Arnold said results like that one may signal the Liberalsstruggled with multicultural electorates this time.
"If you look at ridings nationally, where there's large South Asian populations, the Liberal vote went down a lot compared to the last election, and the same thing would be true with ridings with large Chinese populations, including Markham and Richmond Centre in B.C.," he said.
The Liberals also had their eye on doubling their Alberta seat count in Edmonton and Calgary. They fielded current mayor and former Liberal cabinet minister Amarjeet Sohi in Edmonton Southeast, and Carney campaigned for him.
But while some polling projections suggested the party could walk away with as many as seven or eight seats in the province, they only managed to elect two Alberta MPs: Corey Hogan in Calgary Confederation and Eleanor Olszewski in Edmonton Centre. And they lost incumbent George Chahal in Calgary McKnight.
In B.C., Carney travelled multiple times to Vancouver Island, where Liberal Will Greaves managed to unseat NDP incumbent Laurel Collins in Victoria, while former Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr took Kelowna.
Coletto said those are two B.C. seats that boast large populations of seniors, showing how the demographic story of boomers rallying around Carney's Liberals played out regionally. Meanwhile, the Conservatives' efforts to court private sector and unionized workers "paid dividends," he said.
"You saw them pick up seats in northern Ontario, Southwestern Ontario and in the interior of British Columbia," he said. "That was going to be part of their road to victory but that obviously fell short because they couldn't convert in Toronto and the Lower Mainland."
While the NDP fell everywhere, many downtown progressives flipped to the Liberals. The Conservatives "appear to have picked up some of those NDP voters" in more blue-collar ridings, "and that could be a bit of what happened in Southwest Ontario," Arnold said.
Aggregate polling suggested the Liberals entered the campaign marching toward a majority — momentum that waned by the end of the campaign.
Lawrence LeDuc, professor emeritus of political science at University of Toronto, said the short campaign may be what ultimately kept the Liberals in power as the polls tightened significantly toward the end of the campaign — from about a spread of about five or six points between the two main parties to two points over the course of a week.
"In polling terms, that's quite a move and it suggests that the momentum the Liberals had at the beginning of the campaign was probably beginning to dissipate," he said. "They were probably pretty smart to opt for the shortest possible campaign because they might not have been able to sustain that momentum for another week."
The prime minister opted not to hold a press conference the day after the vote but told reporters in French Tuesday morning in Ottawa that he's feeling upbeat, with "lots to do, of course."
Carney warned in his election-night speech that the coming days and weeks will not be easy as Canada returns to the challenge of convincing Trump to back away from his punishing tariff agenda.
Picture Courtesy: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
