Canada's electoral history from 1867 to today
Base → People → Introduction and statistics

There's a lot of people in PoliCan!
(And many details, too!)

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

2019 federal compositeJust 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, there are 68,822 persons to be found in this section.

I have spent and I continue to spend countless hours revising the data over and over 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. Then, for every candidate for whom I could find more information (mostly those who have won, but others as well), I have created a 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 that takes into account their age at each pivotal moment of their career. All candidates have at least a unique numerical identifier to make it easier and faster for you and me to pull their electoral data. As a result, PoliCan is very likely the only website where you can obtain, in under 10 seconds and one mouse click, the complete list of the members of Parliament since 1867.

These tables summarize how many unique names 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.

Unique names
F: Federal    P: Provincial/Territorial    T: Total
Juri. Total Men (M) Women (F) Non binary (X)
F P T F P T F P T F P T
9 AB 2,182 5,512 7,694 1,765 4,542 6,307 417 969 1,386 0 1 1
8 BC 2,892 5,354 8,246 2,294 4,464 6,758 597 888 1,485 1 2 3
11 MB 1,422 3,726 5,148 1,208 3,209 4,417 214 516 730 0 1 1
3 NB 906 3,169 4,075 780 2,685 3,465 126 484 610 0 0 0
7 NL 402 1,584 1,986 325 1,315 1,640 77 268 345 0 1 1
2 NS 1,074 2,999 4,073 956 2,540 3,496 118 457 575 0 2 2
14 NT 80 592 672 62 473 535 18 119 137 0 0 0
13 NU 27 298 325 18 234 252 9 64 73 0 0 0
15 NW 47 175 222 47 175 222 0 0 0 0 0 0
6 ON 9,137 9,971 19,108 7,635 8,426 16,061 1,501 1,543 3,044 1 2 3
4 PE 296 1,445 1,741 255 1,235 1,490 41 209 250 0 1 1
5 QC 7,796 10,376 18,172 6,495 8,395 14,890 1,300 1,981 3,281 1 0 1
10 SK 1,256 3,312 4,568 1,091 2,887 3,978 165 425 590 0 0 0
12 YT 72 477 549 60 351 411 12 125 137 0 1 1
Total 27,589 48,990 76,579 22,991 40,931 63,922 4,595 8,048 12,643 3 11 14
Diff. = -7,757 68,822 Diff. = -6,640 57,282 Diff. = -1,116 11,527 Diff. = -1 13
The name of 250 candidates (0.36%) is incomplete. Given the nature of archiving and record keeping in the 19th century up to the mid-20th century in some jurisdictions, it is unlikely that those names will ever be found.
  Electoral runs
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10+ Total
M 85 35,362 9,924 4,556 2,762 1,794 1,106 676 385 271 361 57,282
F 5 8,155 1,911 752 363 145 80 52 17 11 36 11,527
X 0 10 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 13
T 90
0.13%		 43,527
63.25%		 11,837
17.2%		 5,309
7.71%		 3,125
4.54%		 1,939
2.82%		 1,186
1.72%		 728
1.06%		 402
0.58%		 282
0.41%		 397
0.58%		 68,822
In other words, an important plurality of unique names appear only once in PoliCan.

In most cases, 0 electoral run represents a person who chose not to run after having been elected prior their jurisdiction's entry into Confederation. However, a few represent unelected ministers who sat in the Senate or their jurisdiction's legislative council, senators related to an elected individual, or pre-Confederation persons of interest for whom a full profile has been created.

And as I mentioned, in addition to "Unique names," there are the people for whom there is a full 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."

What sets PoliCan apart from other websites of its kind is the fact that each profile usually has at least one link to an external website which leads to more details on the profiled individual. It is by following some of the 35,986 links recorded so far to 32,880 online documents that you are likely to get engrossed as I did into reading about some of these individuals. So the second table shows the number of profiles by the number of links they have (links to bilingual websites are counted only once), while the last table shows how many of these individuals have or had at least one familial link with another profiled individual.

Profiles in PoliCan (22.55%)*
⊕ Alive    ⊖ Dead    T Total
Category
↓		 Total Men (M) Women (F) Non binary (X)
⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T
Elected 4,593 9,792 14,385 3,443 9,585 13,028 1,145 207 1,352 5 0 5
Unelected 293 716 1,009 205 658 863 85 58 143 3 0 3
Perennial 63 64 127 50 60 110 13 4 17 0 0 0
Total 4,949 10,572 15,521 3,698 10,303 14,001 1,243 269 1,512 8 0 8
* Percentage of unique names with a full profile

The profile of someone elected prior to Confederation but NOT afterwards has been filed in the "Elected" category, while the profile of someone elected only at the municipal or county level has been filed in "Known but unelected candidate" as those lower levels of government are outside the scope of PoliCan. Senators who served in cabinet have also been filed in "Known but unelected candidate" if they have never been elected federally or provincially.

While the relatively small number of profiles for women is glaring, it is interesting to note that most of the women who have a profile are still alive. Even though women have had the right to vote for a bit more than a century in most jurisdictions, they only started to be elected in more significant numbers to legislative assemblies in the 1980s, and parity with men is still very far from being achieved.
Number of profiles with X external links
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10+ Total
M 8 2,541 5,876 4,529 772 218 50 5 2 0 0 14,001
F 4 289 479 674 52 5 7 0 1 1 0 1,512
X 0 4 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8
T 12 2,834 6,355 5,207 824 223 57 5 3 1 0 15,521
Links 2,834 12,710 15,621 3,296 1,115 342 35 24 9 0 35,986
The most common number of external links per profile is 2, 3, and 1 respectively. A profile without a link is likely very new and will eventually have at least one soon.
Profiles with family relations (15.36%)**
⊕ Alive    ⊖ Dead    T Total
Category
↓		 Total Men (M) Women (F) Non binary (X)
⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T
Elected 429 1,722 2,151 305 1,682 1,987 124 40 164 0 0 0
Unelected 55 158 213 32 144 176 23 14 37 0 0 0
Perennial 8 12 20 6 11 17 2 1 3 0 0 0
Total 492 1,892 2,384 343 1,837 2,180 149 55 204 0 0 0
** Percentage of full profiles with at least one family relation

So far, 3,406 connections have been found and noted (parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, spouses, domestic partners, etc.). A connection between two persons results in a pair of connection records in PoliCan — for example: (1) would indicate that Robert was the father of Maurice and (2) would indicate that Maurice was the son of Robert.

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.


© 2019, 2023 :: PoliCan.ca (Maurice Y. Michaud)
Pub.:  5 Jun 2022 18:20
Rev.: 15 Oct 2023 11:14 (but data presented dynamically)

© 2019-2023 :: PoliCan.ca
Given that electoral results are by their very nature public information, such data that can be found 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 and explanatory articles found in this website — are the intellectual property of Maurice Y. Michaud.