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 68,798 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. Men (M) Women (F) Non binary (X) Total
F P T F P T F P T F P T
9 AB 1,765 4,542 6,307 417 969 1,386 0 1 1 2,182 5,512 7,694
8 BC 2,294 4,464 6,758 597 888 1,485 1 2 3 2,892 5,354 8,246
11 MB 1,209 3,209 4,418 214 517 731 0 1 1 1,423 3,727 5,150
3 NB 781 2,685 3,466 126 484 610 0 0 0 907 3,169 4,076
7 NL 325 1,315 1,640 77 268 345 0 1 1 402 1,584 1,986
2 NS 956 2,540 3,496 118 457 575 0 2 2 1,074 2,999 4,073
14 NT 62 454 516 18 106 124 0 0 0 80 560 640
13 NU 18 234 252 9 64 73 0 0 0 27 298 325
15 NW 47 175 222 0 0 0 0 0 0 47 175 222
6 ON 7,645 8,421 16,066 1,501 1,540 3,041 1 2 3 9,147 9,963 19,110
4 PE 255 1,235 1,490 41 209 250 0 1 1 296 1,445 1,741
5 QC 6,495 8,395 14,890 1,300 1,981 3,281 1 0 1 7,796 10,376 18,172
10 SK 1,091 2,887 3,978 165 425 590 0 0 0 1,256 3,312 4,568
12 YT 60 351 411 12 125 137 0 1 1 72 477 549
Total 23,003 40,907 63,910 4,595 8,033 12,628 3 11 14 27,601 48,951 76,552
Diff. = -6,638 57,272 Diff. = -1,115 11,513 Diff. = -1 13 Diff. = -7,754 68,798
The name of 254 candidates (0.37%) 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 35,355 9,924 4,557 2,757 1,794 1,107 675 387 272 359 57,272
F 5 8,150 1,904 751 362 145 80 52 17 11 36 11,513
X 0 10 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 13
T 90
0.13%		 43,515
63.25%		 11,830
17.2%		 5,309
7.72%		 3,119
4.53%		 1,939
2.82%		 1,187
1.73%		 727
1.06%		 404
0.59%		 283
0.41%		 395
0.57%		 68,798
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 from 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 35,551 links recorded so far to 32,471 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 (22.47%)*
⊕ Alive    ⊖ Dead    T Total
Category
↓		 Men (M) Women (F) Non binary (X) Total
⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T
Elected 3,441 9,567 13,008 1,130 206 1,336 5 0 5 4,576 9,773 14,349
Unelected 196 653 849 77 56 133 3 0 3 276 709 985
Perennial 49 60 109 13 4 17 0 0 0 62 64 126
Total 3,686 10,280 13,966 1,220 266 1,486 8 0 8 4,914 10,546 15,460
* 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 3 2,718 5,789 4,435 750 214 50 5 2 0 0 13,966
F 0 288 464 668 51 6 7 0 1 1 0 1,486
X 0 4 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8
T 3 3,010 6,253 5,107 801 220 57 5 3 1 0 15,460
Links 3,010 12,506 15,321 3,204 1,100 342 35 24 9 1 35,551
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 (15.16%)**
⊕ Alive    ⊖ Dead    T Total
Category
↓		 Men (M) Women (F) Non binary (X) Total
⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T ⊕ ⊖ T
Elected 302 1,654 1,956 121 40 161 0 0 0 423 1,694 2,117
Unelected 32 139 171 22 14 36 0 0 0 54 153 207
Perennial 6 11 17 2 1 3 0 0 0 8 12 20
Total 340 1,804 2,144 145 55 200 0 0 0 485 1,859 2,344
** Percentage of full profiles with at least one family relation

So far, 3,336 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.: 17 Jun 2023 11:49 (but data presented dynamically)

© 2019-2023 :: PoliCan.ca
Given that electoral results are by their very nature public information, the data found in this site 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.