World's Largest Lobster on the waterfront in Shediac, New Brunswick. Photo: JAKclapclap47, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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The demographics here are about as Acadian as the country gets. Roughly 71% of residents have some French knowledge (81st / 343), one of the most French ridings outside Quebec. It’s also an older riding compared to the country around it (33% of the population is over the age of 65, 65th) and still earns a living from the water in a way most of Canada no longer does. Cap-Pelé smokes and packs fish, the boats out of Shediac and along the shore bring in the local catch, and the fishery that feeds the coast sells most of that catch abroad. Which, on this coast, means across the border into the United States.

A lobster fishing boat leaving for the night in Shediac Bay. Photo: Célia Brás, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Beauséjour seat has belonged to Dominic LeBlanc since 2000, and his family’s legacy runs even deeper than that. His father, Roméo LeBlanc, was an Acadian journalist turned MP and fisheries minister. In 1995, he went on to become the first Acadian to hold the office of Governor General. Dominic LeBlanc has spent a quarter-century representing the same coast as his father, and in doing so has become one of the most powerful ministers in Ottawa. In Mark Carney’s government, LeBlanc is President of the King’s Privy Council and the minister responsible for Canada–U.S. trade: which is to say, he is leading Canada’s side of the tariff and trade negotiations with Washington.

The fight to secure American and Canadian trade relations abruptly halted when trade talks between the two countries collapsed on August 21, 2026. Trump put 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods; Carney’s government in Ottawa answered with counter-tariffs on about $27.6 billion in American goods, which came into effect on September 8. The future of our relationship with the U.S. still remains uncertain, but the minister responsible for leading our interests certainly hails from a part of our country who know first hand the impact of American demand on Canadian livelihoods.

In 2025, LeBlanc took 60.6% of the vote, a 27-point win over Conservative candidate Nathalie Vautour. A comfortable win, but not quite the fortress it once was given that four years earlier the Liberal margin here was 36 points. The nine-point loss keeps this riding in lockstep with many others across the country: the NDP vote here fell from 11% to 2%. Additionally, the People’s Party share went from 8% to under 1%, and most of that voting share didn’t move to support LeBlanc. It consolidated on the right, and the Conservative share of the vote nearly doubled, from 19% to 33%. While the seat isn’t in any real danger of going blue, it’s also not the runaway red race it used to be.

Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.

Our model still puts Beauséjour comfortably SAFE for the Liberal Party: 61% projected vote share and a win probability north of 99% if the next election was held today. As Canadian support continues to grow for the Carney government’s handling of the Trump administration, it’s no surprise that the minister for Canada-U.S. trade relations remains popular with his constituents. Yet, it should be noted that there are two more years of the Trump administration left. When Trump is involved, volatility follows.

The postcard for Beauséjour is warm water and the world’s largest lobster. The economy is held up by those who work on the water. While Beauséjour has spent a quarter-century sending Dominic LeBlanc back to Ottawa, it’s now his turn to be sent to Washington, D.C. to defend not only the New Brunswick fishing industry, but all Canadian economic and trade interests.

Stay curious,

Caitlin, from The Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Matt

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Located at the heart of the Grand River, and with access to railway connections across southern Ontario, its industrial significance took off early thanks to its location. Brantford grew heavily in manufacturing, especially in agricultural machinery, where companies such as Cockshutt Plow, Massey-Harris, and Waterous Engine Works helped fuel the rise of the local economy. Even in current times, when much of Southwestern and Midwestern Ontario has seen significant industrial decline over the last fifty years, manufacturing remains prominent here in Brantford Brant South-Six Nations, with just over one-sixth of the workforce employed in manufacturing (17.6%, 15th of 343), even as the public sector remains on top with 22.9% of employment in the constituency.

The Joseph Brant Monument in Victoria Park, downtown Brantford. Photo: Reacher Miao, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

On the surface, Brantford-Brant South-Six Nations (shortened as Brantford-Brant, its predecessor) appears to be a simple, rural-urban riding where the Conservatives hold a fairly firm grip with the other parties trailing behind. While it is true the Conservatives have held this constituency since the 2008 Canadian Federal Election, the picture isn’t so straightforward when you look into it further. The era-by-era changes reflect in a more gradual, even slightly delayed manner on what’s a mid-juncture between Hamilton and the Niagara region in the Golden Horseshoe, and southwestern Ontario.

Its provincial and federal pictures slightly differ, in part because Brantford has local actors that have no doubt defied the trends otherwise shown in the province. Provincially, the Ontario Liberals’ pre-2018 dominance was led by long reigns of three figures, in both Harry and Robert Nixon’s reign from 1919 to 1991, as well as that of Dave Levac from 1999 to 2018. As Ontario Liberals all three figures have held significant capacities, with the elder Nixon’s brief tenure as Ontario Premier, the younger Nixon’s party leadership in the 1970s and later tenure as Deputy Premier under David Peterson, and Levac’s tenure as the House Speaker from 2011 to 2018 under the McGuinty and Wynne governments.

If anything, Brantford-Brant’s current blue wave, which is best demonstrated by the Progressive Conservatives’ 24% and 27% vote margin over the ONDP and the OLP in last year’s general election, is a relatively new one. But its stability should be able to suggest two major things: both the Progressive Conservatives’ appeal towards rural ridings and private labour, and the opposition parties’ struggle to capture the votes on their traditional bases.

In the past fifty years, each of the federal Conservatives, Liberals and the New Democrats enjoyed a long tenure in the constituency, though their respective timelines differed, with difficult points of return for each party. The New Democrats have held a high baseline in the riding in the twenties, even though they have failed to come close to the heyday of Derek Blackburn, a highly popular MP who served from 1971 to 1992. Their high baseline tended to be consistent in both provincial and federal ridings, suggesting decent overlap that reflects Golden Horseshoe ridings in non-wave elections that would devastate the federal party.

Otherwise, it has stood as a straight contest between the Conservatives and the Liberals, all the more so because the riding has become such a durable barometer of both parties' fortunes in rural Ontario. The Liberals were at their strongest here during the Chrétien–Martin era: rural Ontario was Liberal ground until 2004, and both prime ministers leaned heavily on those seats to hold their majorities against a divided opposition.

However, the narrative has changed considerably since the PC-Alliance merger in 2003. As the country continued to become more polarised, and the Liberals faced both public fatigue and infighting, it was Jane Stewart, Robert Nixon’s daughter and a prominent Chrétien-era minister at National Revenue, Indian Affairs, and Human Resources portfolios, and Lloyd St. Amand’s local profile that would go on to play an even more important part in retaining the constituency. Brantford-Brant initially outlasted the gradual change in the landscape and stayed red until 2008, including a 0.9% finish in 2006 when St. Amand became one of only four rural MPs from southern Ontario, alongside Paul Steckle (Huron-Bruce), Peter Milliken (Kingston and the Islands) and John David Maloney (Welland), to return in the Liberals’ defeat.

But the levee broke in 2008, when Phil McColeman defeated St. Amand and the Liberals held only Kingston of the four rural ridings named above. Brantford–Brant has stayed blue ever since, with a fairly static margin of roughly 10 to 12 points that has outlasted even the Liberal wave elections of 2015 and 2025. In 2025, Larry Brock took 52.4% of the vote for an 11.3-point win over Liberal Joy O'Donnell. Both finishes are worth noting: Brock's share was the highest for a winning candidate since Jane Stewart's 56.4%, while O'Donnell's 41.1% was the best a Liberal has managed since 2000. Another Stewart win.

Now, what makes Brantford-Brant stand out as a riding is not just that it shares tendencies between Hamilton, Niagara Region and the Southwest; it shares tendencies from different parts of the region. It shares similarities to Niagara and much of Hamilton with a high New Democrat baseline, while the rural parts of the riding are closer to the Southwest, which had grown considerably in the 2023 Redistribution to incorporate parts of Oxford.

But the collapse of the NDP vote saw an even split, unlike in the Southwest and Hamilton, reflecting the tendencies shown in surrounding regions Niagara South, Niagara Falls and Haldimand-Norfolk. The reasons could be debated, but it may come down to a considerable mix of incumbent fatigue, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s populist appeal among working-class demographics, and uncertainties regarding the US-Canada trade war that has particularly hit the manufacturing-heavy regions west of Toronto. All those factors have no doubt created a situation in April 2025 where the margins have tightened across the region in both directions, but not enough to meaningfully change the outcomes in the rural and small city constituencies such as Brantford-Brant South.

Now, just over a year and a proposed name change later, the constituency will be undergoing a by-election. Last Thursday, Conservative incumbent Larry Brock announced his resignation effective September 18, 2026, to return to working at the Brantford Crown Attorney’s Office. The news of his departure, which comes following his June resignation from Shadow Minister for Justice and Attorney General after five years, opens up what might be the most important by-election test for the Poilievre-era Conservatives.

Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.

Up to this point, the Conservatives haven't faced a by-election where their hold on a seat looked seriously at risk. Many expect Chicoutimi–Le Fjord to flip to the Bloc or the Liberals. Our in-house model has it at 34% LPC / 30% BQ / 23% CPC, largely because of the departure of incumbent and now-Senator Richard Martel. Martel himself won the seat in a 2018 by-election with 52% of the vote, and his personal popularity runs deep, going back to his 15-year run as head coach of the Chicoutimi Saguenéens (QMJHL). That personal appeal, combined with Poilievre's unpopularity in Quebec, gives the party a ready-made excuse should it lose.

The issue also lies in other by-elections over how certain a party is likely to win. For the Conservatives, Yorkton-Melville is as unreliable as Battle River-Crowfoot last year to gauge the Conservatives’ stability. A Reform-Conservative hold since 1993, following prominent New Democrat Lorne Nystrom’s tenure from 1968 to 1993, the seat is one where Nelson Pohl is still projected to comfortably succeed at CPC 68% / LPC 18% / NDP 8%. Elsewhere, the Conservatives are unlikely to compete in five of the six other by-elections, where the Liberals or the Bloc would enter as heavy favourites, with a strong likelihood that North Vancouver-Capilano will be the closest to an upset.

All of these factors make Brantford-Brant even more important, especially as it may provide a snapshot of the region in rapidly changing times. The national polling figures have indeed suggested a declining yet still varied picture of the Conservatives’ state under an increasingly unpopular leader. But there’s still certain murkiness in the water. While the Liberals have survived Terrebonne, the Bloc eyes Chicoutimi, and the New Democrats are vying to hold Rosemont, the Conservatives have lacked an important indicator: a competitive riding they would have to fight tooth and nail over.

Right now, Brantford–Brant looks like the closest of the lot. The Northern Vibe model reads it as a TOSSUP, with this week’s polling shift showing LPC 45% / CPC 41% / NDP 8%. This gives us an interesting possibility as it is a mixed rural–urban riding that has spent the last ten years close but never quite flipping, and that makes it the Liberals' best opening: a genuine showdown with the Conservatives forced onto defence. It should still be a two-way race: the NDP vote fell here in 2025 in step with the rest of rural Ontario, and the New Democrats, outside of a possible spoiler, are unlikely to be a major factor in the by-election on their own.

A new chapter of history could be written later in the year, possibly into the new year.

Stay Seeking,

Henry, from the Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Matt

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Toronto-St. Paul’s is one of the most affluent, white-collar constituencies in Canada, with both the highest median income ($105,400) and second-highest percentage of financial and professional industries (31.6%). There is a certain degree of financial stability that has been a longstanding constant here, one where the newer professional class on Yonge and Eg meet lifelong residents in Forest Hill and St. Clair.

Forest Hill, taken from Home. Photo: H.Y. Jeong, 2026.

But it’s also a riding where the affordability question remains stark as the city continues to grow. Not only are three-fifths of the population renters here (58.9%), almost two-fifths also qualify as shelter-stressed (35.8%), indicating over 30% of the income spent on housing. With both metrics putting the riding within the 90th percentile, affordability continues to be a challenge, as the desirability of Midtown, both in its proximity and separation from Downtown, continues to extend from Downtown Toronto and across the province.

At the same time, Toronto-St. Paul’s remains a dynamic constituency with a diverse voting base, featuring considerable Latin American, Afro-Canadian and Filipino bases on the western and southwestern tip of the riding facing Davenport and Eglinton-Lawrence. But it is perhaps best known for the fifth-highest percentage of Jewish population in Canada (15.1%), with historic congregations and schools located in the heart of the community. As with neighbouring Eglinton-Lawrence and Don Valley West, events in recent years, whether it’s geopolitics or hate crimes motivated by antisemitism, have no doubt seen constant challenges in public safety and voter intentions.

All of these factors above have made Toronto-St. Paul’s, even with its particularly high-income, white-collar profile, one worth following in terms of the local and national sentiments.

Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.

In recent decades, Toronto-St. Paul’s has been reliably red for most of the last thirty years. With a strong concentration of high-income, white-collar population with progressive values, it reflects not only the Red Tory tendencies of the riding, but also the barometer of the Liberal party’s strength nationally. Municipally, it is home to high-profile Liberal-leaning councillor Josh Matlow, whose local popularity is the envy of town. Provincially, New Democrats had two close wins in 2018 and 2022, during the Ontario Liberals’ trip to the wilderness, before it flipped back with a considerable margin in 2025 (+9.1%).

Federally, a similar line of expectation has followed, though unlike a steady change in representatives at the provincial level, most nowadays would associate Toronto-St. Paul’s with Dr. Carolyn Bennett. Bennett, a longtime physician, would go on to represent the riding from 1997 to 2024, her local strengths perhaps best demonstrated by a comfortable margin of victory (8.2%), even as the Liberals suffered a historic defeat in 2011, the same year I arrived in Canada. Her experience and services were valued significantly, as would the constituency’s strategic importance, as Bennett would go on to serve extensively in the Paul Martin and Justin Trudeau cabinets in the Public Health, Crown-Indigenous Relations, and Mental Health portfolios.

Needless to say, a departure of such a high-profile figure, whose longevity overlapped with that of Dr. Hedy Fry, Lawrence MacAulay and John McKay, has no doubt raised some caution. There was a brief blip in 2024 following a highly televised by-election, where the Liberals suffered a national embarrassment. Both the riding-level discontent over public safety and the national-level furore over affordability concerns played heavily on the said by-election, the first of three consecutive by-election losses in a six-month period that would mark the beginning of the end for the second Trudeau era (one of the major events noted in the Northern Vibe Accountability tracker).

Two years later, however, most of the variability seemed to have settled. When the time came again for 2025, Leslie Church, a former Toronto lawyer who had served as chief of staff under then-Liberal Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, took 62% of the vote, nearly double-scoring the Conservative incumbent at the time. Unlike other constituencies we’ve covered so far, this story didn’t include a significant drop in New Democrat votes. In pervious by-elections in the riding the share of New Democrat voters dropped from 11.0% to just 3.5%, which amplified their steady decline in popularity in the past decade.

Rather, the change in national sentiment under the Carney era shows a relatively similar trends to those in suburban constituencies. Just over a year and many moons removed from the federal by-election, the Northern Vibe model remains as SAFE as it’s ever been with a projected LPC 63% / CPC 26% / NDP 6% / GPC 3%.

Little has changed in terms of Liberal numbers, though where the New Democrats gained, the Conservatives stumbled, reflecting numbers closer to their 2006, 2008, 2015 and 2021 results. It’s a telling sign, that the riding remains strongly Liberal, especially since this particular riding absorbs the tendencies exhibited from both Toronto proper and its neighbouring suburbs, which were joined in the 1998 Amalgamation of Metropolitan Toronto. It also reflects a similar story that we have already seen in both University-Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest by-elections.

Two years after a national humiliation for the outgoing government, the notion of a Liberal Fortress in Toronto has quietly returned under the new management, perhaps with the best demonstrable example in the riding of St. Paul’s.

Stay Seeking,

Henry, from the Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Caitlin

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Residential neighbourhoods filled with long time families who moved in before the Vancouver real estate boom are side-by-side with new wealth and student sublets. The sought after neighbourhoods of West Point Grey, Dunbar-Southlands, Kerrisdale, Arbutus Ridge, and the west end of Kitsilano are all represented here. Gentrification and densification have exploded the population of this riding over the past 20 years, but multi-million dollar homes still dominate large parts of this riding. The demographics of Canada can all be witnessed here: multi-generational Canadians, newcomers, and a strong Indigenous presence all fit within its 42 square kilometres.

The Great Hall of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, on Musqueam territory. Photo: Xicotencatl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Continue west through winding forest paths and you will eventually stumble your way onto the UBC campus, on a point far above the Salish Sea. It is a place where the old and the new sit side by side: the Museum of Anthropology with its house posts, the UBC Botanical Garden with its quiet forest glades (where Matt and I were married) and 60,000 students streaming into UBC daily to achieve their academic dreams. All of this sitting on the unceeded territory of the Musqeaum people, whose reservation sits between Dunbar and UBC.

Quadra is one of the most credentialed ridings in the country where more than two in three working-age adults here hold a university degree (67%, 4th of 343), and the reason is not hard to find. The university is the largest entity in the riding, and the neighbourhoods east of the campus are where its faculty, its graduates, and many of Vancouver’s professional class have settled. It is also a globally connected place. Close to four in ten residents were born outside Canada, and nearly three in ten are of Chinese heritage, a community generations deep on Vancouver’s west side. Almost half of households rent rather than own (46%), many of them students and young professionals cycling through the towers near campus and along the Broadway corridor. This mixture is not just something the census records; in 2025 the riding sent it to Ottawa.

Grant is of Musqueam and Chinese descent, a lineage that reads like a map of the riding itself. He came to Parliament by way of the Musqueam council, a stretch advising British Columbia premier Christy Clark, and years as the band’s intergovernmental affairs officer. Currently, Grant sits as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change. A riding built on Musqueam territory, and home to a large and long-established Chinese-Canadian community, chose a man who belongs to both.

Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.

The electoral math almost comes second here, which is itself the point. Quadra is Liberal ground and has been for many years, and in 2025 it only hardened. Grant took 63% of the vote, more than 30 points clear of the Conservative candidate, Ken Charko. The story was the one that ran through much of the country: the New Democrat vote collapsed here, from nearly 20% to barely 4%, and moved to a Liberal Party under Mark Carney that read, to the riding at least, as the safe choice. Based on these numbers the model reads Vancouver Quadra as SAFE, a near-certain Liberal hold. An educated, immigrant-heavy, urban riding is about as dependable a Liberal coalition as any within Canada.

The UBC campus can feel like a place apart and away from the rest of City of Vancouver. The riding around the campus tells a story that is distinctly more Canadian: the oldest claim to the land and the newest arrivals to the country, voting together, and, for the first time, represented by someone who carries both.

Stay curious,

Caitlin, from The Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Matt

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Downtown Kitchener at dusk on King Street. Photo: K Danko, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped from the original.

This is a city of renters: nearly half of households don’t own the roof over them (48%, 50th of 343, against two-thirds ownership nationally). They can afford to be here because the rent, on average a little over $1,500 for a two bedroom (what residents are paying, not market price), still undercuts Toronto’s. A tech economy is growing up around the university campuses of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier, and Conestoga College, and it shows in who lives here — more than one in nine workers here are in natural and applied science fields (12%, 47th). Kitchener has a booming software economy, which pulls in the young and the credentialed; two in five working-age adults hold a university degree here, well above the national average. What all of this adds up to is a downtown of degree-holding renters in their thirties, people who own little, move often, and treat housing as a monthly bill rather than a financial asset.

The population leans left, but is not loyal to any one political party. The same voter who rents downtown, codes for a living, and watches the price of a one-bedroom rise can be a Green, a New Democrat, or a Liberal who wants a climate plan and a competent manager of finances in the same box. In Kitchener Centre all three left-leaning parties are represented, which is why it became one of the most interesting three-way races in the country.

On April 28, 2025, the Conservative, Kelly DeRidder, won the riding with 34.2% of the vote. Just behind her (by only 375 votes) was Mike Morrice, one of two sitting Green MPs. The Liberal, Brian Adeba, ran third at 29.3%. Three parties inside five points resulting in one of the ten closest races in the country.

It was not a city changing its mind as much as it was a city splitting into factions. In 2021 Morrice carried a large, already-divided progressive vote, which by 2025 had scattered. The Liberals nearly doubled their vote count under Mark Carney while the New Democrats fell from 9,000 votes to barely 1,200. Morrice’s own vote actually rose compared to his winning total four years earlier. However, the Conservative vote grew faster, from a quarter of the riding to a third, consolidating the right into one segment while the left spread itself across three.

The winner fits the place better than the banner suggests. DeRidder is a mechanical engineering technologist and former Conestoga College instructor who now sits on the House of Commons science and research committee. A tech-heavy riding sent a technologist to Ottawa, under the one party its demographics would not have predicted.

Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.

Based on the model numbers Kitchener Centre is a TOSSUP, the most competitive tier, effectively a coin-flip between the Liberals (32 % projected vote share), Greens (31%), and Conservatives (29%). A young, mobile, degree-heavy electorate with no settled partisan home means opportunity for all parties. While the towers keep changing the city skyline and the renters keep arriving, the three-way race won’t be settled just by the city aging into a single party. It turns instead on which of the three more left-leaning parties the majority decides to trust next, and whether the New Democrats under Avi Lewis, near zero here now, come back to crowd the lane again.

A city that leans one way, a system that rewards whoever splits least, and a seat 375 votes wide. Until it stops splitting and begins consolidating, this riding is going to stay a tossup.

Stay curious,

Matt, from the Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Caitlin

Rue Sainte-Catherine, Montreal's Gay Village, near Beaudry metro station. Photo: Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is Laurier–Sainte-Marie: just over 100k people are packed into just over 20 square kilometres. This is one of the densest ridings in the Canada, and, as of this summer, an open seat for the first time in seven years. But, this riding is less about who holds it now and more about which way the country is leaning.

Steven Guilbeault, the riding’s Liberal MP since 2019, Canada’s former environment minister, and Mark Carney’s Quebec Lieutenant, announced in May that he’s resigning his seat in a quiet act of protest against his own government's energy policy.

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For context, Guilbeault left cabinet in November 2025 after Prime Minister Mark Carney signed an energy memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith that included a commitment to advance a new bitumen pipeline while suspending federal clean electricity regulations. He stayed in the Liberal caucus for months, internally pushing for a deal with Alberta that still could still be softened from the inside. In May, he told the House of Commons it was time to “pursue my life’s work” outside government.

That makes Laurier–Sainte-Marie the riding to watch this summer — not because the result is in doubt, but because of what triggered the vacancy.

The numbers underneath the story

The electoral history here reads like a case study in decline-and-realignment. Gilles Duceppe held it for the Bloc Québécois for 15 years into 2008 with a declining margin of victory in each subsequent election. In 2011, the orange wave broke the BQ’s grip on the seat, and most of Quebec: NDP’s Hélène Laverdière won the seat with 46.6% in the face of a BQ colapse to 34.9%. The NDP held it through 2015, then in 2019 the Liberals recruited Guilbeault, a Greenpeace and Équiterre veteran turned star candidate, who won the riding outright at 41.8% and again in 2025 with 52.1%.

Four different parties, four different mandates, and one pattern: this riding has voted with the national tide in every wave election of the past 30 years. It isn't a fortress like Edmonton Strathcona, it’s a bellwether, catching the wave every time.

So why is he leaving a seat he just won by 14 points, on a wave that was still building?

Because the story was never really about the riding itself. In 2025, Laurier–Sainte-Marie didn’t reject Guilbeault, and it didn’t reject the Liberals. Voters here just handed both their strongest mandate yet. The rupture is entirely intra-party: an environment minister who helped negotiate the Kunming-Montreal biodiversity framework and Canada’s first emissions reduction plan under Justin Trudeau, watching another prime minister unwind those files to strike a deal with Alberta.

Guilbeault said the quiet part out loud on his way out:

warning that concessions to Alberta could just as easily encourage separatist sentiment in Quebec.

Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.

Our model still puts this riding comfortably in Liberal hands: 56% projected vote share, a win probability north of 99% while the NDP (18%) and Bloc (15%) trail well behind. One caveat worth noting is that our model still treats Guilbeault as the incumbent, since he hasn’t formally resigned yet. That likely inflates the Liberal number, whoever the party actually nominates won’t carry his personal vote. We’ll re-run this once a candidate is confirmed, but the underlying gap looks wide enough that the seat isn’t in real danger of flipping.

What to watch for in the byelection

Whoever the Liberals nominate inherits a riding that just gave Guilbeault his best-ever number, in a province where the BQ has been bleeding support in Montreal’s urban core for over a decade. The NDP, reduced to seven seats nationally and mid-leadership-transition under new leader Avi Lewis, will be fighting to prove that 2025’s collapse here wasn’t permanent. Don’t expect the Conservatives to be a factor in this election. This riding remains one of the least CPC-friendly ridings in the country.

The bigger question is whether this becomes a template for soft rebellion within the LPC. According to multiple reports, Guilbeault is far from the only Liberal frustrated with Carney’s rightward drift on environment and energy policy, and Laurier–Sainte-Marie will be the first real test of whether that frustration will cost the party anything at the ballot box.

Laurier–Sainte-Marie has never sat out a wave election. The only question left is which direction the wave comes from this time.

Stay curious,

Matt, from the Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Caitlin

Stop outside a local coffee shop on Whyte Avenue and you’ll see crosswalks painted in rainbows, bike lanes, used bookstores, and maybe even a local farmers' market. Within a few city blocks you can find both a university campus of forty thousand and the health-sciences complex adjacent it, containing a teaching hospital, children's hospital, and a cancer institute.

Old Strathcona, looking east from 104th Street, Edmonton. Photo: Arctic.gnome, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

However, In 2025, Alberta sent the vast majority of its 37 members of parliament to Ottawa under the blue Conservative banner. Edmonton Strathcona has sent one of the lonely exceptions, in one form or another, for the better part of two decades.

The demographics of this riding are the engine that drives the progressive narrative. Edmonton Strathcona is one of the youngest ridings in the country (29% under 35, 14th of 343) and one of the most educated, with nearly one in five residents holding a postgraduate degree (top 11% nationally) and almost half a bachelor’s or higher. The economy runs on the university campus and in public services: 35% of workers are public sector, the 39th-highest share in Canada. Nearly half the households rent, and nearly half have moved in the past five years, reflecting a more credentialed, transient electorate. Incomes are comfortable rather than wealthy (median $60,000), but this was never a story about money. It’s a story about the people who call this riding home.

The orange exception has a long lineage. Strathcona spent the Reform–Alliance years Conservative under Rahim Jaffer, who took it in 1997 and held it for more than 10 years. Then, in 2008 Linda Duncan won it for the New Democrats. For much of the decade that followed it was, more often than not, the only seat in Alberta the Federal Conservatives could not win. Duncan held it both through the 2011 Conservative majority under Stephen Harper and the 2015 Trudeau-Liberal wave. When she retired from federal politics in 2019, Heather McPherson, someone who spent their time in international development circles and running the Alberta Council for Global Co-operation, a coalition of aid and development NGOs, has kept it firmly orange ever since.

Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.

During McPherson’s tenure, the seat wasn’t just seen as safe, but a fortress. In 2021 McPherson took 58% of the vote, a 31-point margin, followed in 2025 by a thinned victory falling to 47%, a margin of 14 points. It wasn’t a Conservative surge, the CPC had a small positive nudge in the riding, but the Carney-Liberal wave nearly doubled the LPC vote share here from 9% to 18% and pulled soft New Democrats toward a Liberal government.

This shrinking vote share exposes some cracks in the local NDP’s ability to hold the young, progressive core around campus and Old Strathcona as the more conservative-suburban ground to the south and east continue to be true blue. The seat didn't change character in 2025. The Liberal red wave just made its seams visible.

The Northern Vibe model still calls the seat comfortably in favour of the NDP. No realistic simulation turns this into anything resembling a contest. In fact, by the ballots already counted in 2025, this is now the safest New Democrat seat in the country.

Edmonton Strathcona is somewhat of a microcosm for Canada - while still holding onto power, significant ground was ceded to the Carney Liberals nationally. The New Democrats weren’t just beaten; their representation in parliament was halved and then halved again down to seven seats (below the twelve needed for official party status). This reflected the worst result for the party since 1993. After the dust settled, McPherson was one of the few left standing, and she ran to lead what remained of her party. However, in March 2026, in the NDP convention in Winnipeg, she lost decisively, 56% to 29%, on the first ballot to Avi Lewis: a movement-left candidate, and grandson of an NDP founding leader.

This story shares the lesson of Swift Current, read backwards. There, the province that invented social democracy produced the country’s most entrepreneurial, most Conservative seat written across fields of canola. Here, the Conservative heartland produced the country’s safest New Democrat seat written across a campus, university hospital, and a few square kilometres of renters who have spent two decades voting differently from the tides of CPC blue swirling around them.

Two prairie ridings, each the exception that defines its province.

Stay curious,

Matt, from the Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Caitlin

Canola near Shaunavon, in the riding’s southwest. Photo: Alan Levine (CC0).

Drive the grid roads out of Swift Current and the land does most of the talking. Canola and wheat to the horizon with cattle on the short-grass south toward the Montana line. This is a big riding, running from Grasslands National Park on the border north past Kindersley, a few hours of highway end to end. Almost all of it is working land.

Nearly one in three workers here (29%) are self-employed, the highest share of any of the 343 ridings in Canada. These are ranchers and grain farmers, owner-operator truckers, oilfield-service contractors, and main-street businesses in towns like Cabri, Leader, Shaunavon, and Maple Creek. Four out of five households own their home and unemployment sits at 5.4%, among the lowest in Canada. The median income is unremarkable, about $50,400, so this is not a story of wealth but one about self-reliance.

And here is the part that doesn’t fit the story the voting numbers tell.

Saskatchewan is the cradle of Canadian social democracy. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the NDP’s direct ancestor, first formed government here in 1944 under Tommy Douglas, the first social-democratic government in North America, and the movement he led gave our country medicare. The great farmer co-operatives and the Wheat Pool were Saskatchewan institutions. The Matador Co-operative Farm, 17 veterans who pooled 10,000 acres of provincial land near Kyle in 1946, sat inside what is now this riding. This co-operative experiment took root in country that looks like the photo above.

While the fields stayed, the politics eventually inverted.

Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.

Through the Reform years and everything after, southwest Saskatchewan became some of the most reliably Conservative ground in Canada. In 2021 the Conservatives took 72% of the vote here, rising to 82% in 2025, resulting in a margin of nearly 71 points, among the widest in Canada. And the NDP, the CCF’s own descendant, finished third, under 6%, in the province that invented it.

On these numbers the model reads the seat as SAFE: a near-certain Conservative hold, with a win probability of essentially 100%. Effectively no run in the Northern Vibe simulation turns this riding into a contest. The fundamentals all pull the same way: an older population (a third over 65), fewer university degrees than the national average, and an economy of owner-operators in agriculture, energy, and the trades — all indicators that correlate with a population who tend to vote Conservative.

Historically, Saskatchewan taught Canada how to share risk through socialized programs like medicare. Now, its southwest corner has spent the last few decades deciding to carry risk alone, through private entrepreneurship.

Stay curious,

Matt, from the Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Caitlin

The 343 takes them one at a time: the riding, the MP, the model’s call, the demographic anchor that explains the politics. One profile a week, every Wednesday.

National numbers tell you who’s winning. The 343 tells you who’s representing.

1/343 — Halifax, NS

The Northern Vibe Project started here — 343 ridings modelled out of the one we walk around in. So the series begins at home.

Downtown Halifax, taken from George’s Island. Photo: Matthew Hickey, 2025

The riding is the urban core — the peninsula and its harbour edges. It runs on universities, hospitals, government, and the naval dockyard, an economy where more than a third of workers are public sector (35th of 343). That mix makes Halifax one of the youngest seats in the country (36% under 35, 7th), one of the most rented (61%, 16th), and one of the most transient (57% have moved in the past five years, 6th). The city has lately been among Canada’s fastest-growing, and the rent has followed — the riding now sits 24th nationally for shelter stress. On paper, a contested political battleground.

Halifax: a peninsula riding that was NDP ground for 18 years, now a safe Liberal seat.

Politically, it was New Democrat ground for almost two decades. Alexa McDonough held Halifax from 1997, Megan Leslie from 2008, a party leader then a deputy leader, back to back. The Liberals took it only in the 2015 wave, under Andy Fillmore. When Fillmore left federal politics to become Halifax’s mayor in 2024, the seat opened.

In 2021, the NDP nearly gained it back. The Liberals held by just 1.95 points, the NDP a breath behind at 40%. It read as a genuine LPC–NDP race.

Then 2025 flattened it. With Shannon Miedema, a 15-year city-hall official who ran Halifax’s climate plan carrying the seat, the Liberals took 63%, the NDP fell to third at 17%, and a two-point race became a nearly 44-point one. The NDP floor simply gave way.

On these numbers the model now reads Halifax as SAFE — LPC near-certain to hold, a projected LPC 67% / NDP 17% / CPC 12%. The seat the NDP held for 18 years, and nearly took back four years ago, no longer behaves like a contest.

The map starts at home.

Stay curious,

Matt, from The Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Caitlin