Welcome to PoliCan!

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

You have reached what is without any doubt the largest and most complete database on all federal and provincial or territorial general elections, by-elections and referendums ever held in Canada. Whether you are an historian, a political or social scientist, a teacher, a student, a politician, a statistical "quant jock," or a citizen who like me admits to being a fan of Canadian or Quebec politics, this website is sure to engage you in hours of exploration — or will quickly give you the answer to that nagging question that brought you here in the first place, like: "When, where and for which party did Uncle Charlie run and didn't only get defeated but was completely humiliated ?" (True story, by the way...)

This project started in different forms decades ago when, like many other Canadians, I would ask myself all sorts of questions about our electoral system, like:

• How can a party form a "majority" government when it only obtained about 37 percent of the popular vote?
• Are deaths in office more or less frequent today?
• Do we have more by-elections today or were they more frequent in the past?
• Is winning an election by acclamation a common occurrence today and has it ever been?
• Besides unopposed races, has anyone ever run for office and received precisely zero vote? (The answer is a qualified Yes.)
• How many people have been elected at the federal and provincial or territorial level since Confederation?
• What maneuverings have led us to have a political party with the oximoron of a name like "Progressive Conservative"?
• Why does Party A consistently win so few seats while Party B always gets so many more with roughly the same number of votes or sometimes even far fewer?
• This Maurice guy certainly asks himself a lot of questions, doesn't he?

It is especially that second-to-last question that has led to the current version of this project that you see here today. It sparked in me a keen interest (to not say an obsession) in proportional electoral systems. Quickly understanding that any such system was not as simple as taking the percentage of votes and translating that same percentage into seats, I resolved to select a few recent elections and come up with a more sophisticated simulator that would take the actual riding-by-riding results to consider alternate outcomes had these elections been held using one of the successful proportional systems elsewhere in the world (that is, a system that is NOT like the one in Italy or Israel — the systems that are always cited as examples by opponents of proportional representation).

However, now that you have arrived here, go on! Go find what you came here to find. It shouldn't take you too long.

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