Canada’s electoral encyclopedia
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The ultimate reference on elections in Canada

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

Vote!You have reached what is without any doubt the largest and most complete reference 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,” a journalist, 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...)
 

What you can find in PoliCan

Although PoliCan is still a work in progress as of 2026, it already contains a wealth of information such as:

✓ The electoral record of anyone who ever ran in a federal, provincial or territorial election since 1865.

✓ The list of anyone currently in office at the federal, provincial or territorial level, by name or by riding.

✓ The composition of each current legislature, by size of government and opposition or by represented parties.

✓ A detailed profile on anyone who has been elected at the federal, provincial or territorial level since 1865, like this one.

✓ The full lists of everyone who has been elected to Parliament or each provincial or territorial legislature since 1865.

✓ Detailed or compact summaries, or all the details, of all the general elections held at the federal, provincial or territorial level since 1865.

✓ The detailed results of a general election or by-election held in any federal, provincial or territorial riding since 1865, like this one.

And much, much more! You simply need to explore.

PoliCan started in different forms decades ago in an attempts to answer 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, how many have received precisely zero vote? (Quite a few, but it’s mainly because of a single bad idea.)
→ How many people have been elected at the federal and provincial or territorial level since Confederation?
→ Is there a single place where I can get the lists of all current MLAs and MPs? (There is now!)
→ Whose idea was it that has led us to having a political party with the oximoron of a name “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? (Because of vote efficiency, or lack thereof.)

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


© 2005, 2026 :: PoliCan.ca (Maurice Y. Michaud)
Pub.: 23 Dec 2021 00:01 ET
Rev.: 20 Feb 2026 13:23 ET (but data presented dynamically)

© 2005-2026 :: PoliCan.ca
Given that electoral results are by their very nature public information, such data presented in PoliCan are considered to be in the public domain. However, unless indicated otherwise, all other elements — the concept of consolidating these data into a single format, the detailed research on each election, legislature and candidate, the organization and searchability of the data, the programming allowing the entry and maintenance of the data, as well as the analyses, explanatory articles and opinions found in this website — are the intellectual property of Maurice Y. Michaud.