by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)
Just as the people who vote are at the heart of every election, the people who run for office are at the heart of PoliCan. In fact, you can find 73,105 persons in this section.
The data on these persons is constantly being revised to ensure that the same person has been entered consistently and correctly. Their gender identity is also recorded, including those who identified as non-binary despite the fact that they still represent a minuscule minority of those who stand for election. Any candidate for whom more information could be found — mostly those who have won, but others as well — have an enriched profile showing their date of birth and death (if applicable), whether or not they died while in office, their relationship with other profiled candidates and, of course, their electoral and political history. As a result, PoliCan is very likely the only website where you can obtain the complete list of the members of Parliament since 1867 with a single mouse click.
These tables summarize how many distinct candidates are recorded in PoliCan, by jurisdiction. The Total row makes an adjustment in order to give the real number of unique names, as the same person could have run at both levels or even in several jurisdictions. Additionally, we can see the number of electoral runs of each person, by gender identity.
And as mentioned, of these 73,105 “Distinct candidates,” 17,054 of them have an enriched profile on this website, who can be found according to multiple criteria (by gender identity, whether they are alive or not, etc.) or by category. "Elected candidate" is by far the most common category, followed by “Known [but unelected] candidate” and “Perennial candidate.”
Each enriched profile condenses a great deal of information. Slightly more than three-quarters of them have a photo of the profiled individual. Their dates of birth (if available) and death (if applicable) are given, allowing to show their age at the time of each electoral event in which they ran, with a summary of their results for each run and the list of their documented challengers. Whether they were a party leader or minister is also noted. While the scope of PoliCan is limited to federal and provincial or territorial elections, more than a third of the profiles mention tenures at other public office — whether elected or unelected — and about 1 profile out of 6 is linked to another one by a familial link. Furthermore, each profile contains at least one link to an external website (links to bilingual websites are counted only once), leading to more details on the individual. It is by following some of the thousands of links recorded so far that you are likely to get engrossed into reading about some of these individuals.
So if your Uncle Charlie, or your great-grandfather, or even you ran in a federal or provincial election, it should take you only a few seconds to find the details now that you have arrived on this website.
