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Since Saturday, one idea has been everywhere: add the NDP and Green votes together and they beat the Conservative winner in about a dozen districts. That’s true, but it assumes those Green voters would otherwise have voted NDP. Even if all of them had, the Conservatives would still have secured 51 seats, a majority.

The bigger number

CBC’s Justin McElroy compared this year’s vote with 2024, leaving out mail-in ballots in both years. In this year’s provincial election, the NDP received about 228,000 fewer votes than in 2024, a drop of more than 25%, losing votes in 86 out of 93 districts. Preliminary turnout fell to 48%. If that holds once mail-in and absentee ballots are counted, CBC notes it would be the first time since at least 1949 that turnout has dropped below half. The BC Conservatives received about 22,000 fewer votes, while the Greens received about 30,000 more than in 2024.

Most of this year’s Green vote isn’t new. On the same count, the Greens got about 166,000 votes in 2024, and the NDP still won a majority government. What is new is the extra 30,000 Green votes (about 18% more). So the question has been asked (a lot):

If they had, the NDP could have won up to four additional seats: Vancouver-Fraserview, Burnaby North, Burnaby Centre and Saanich South. In the two Burnaby seats, the Greens didn’t even run a candidate in 2024.

Now run the same exercise with the NDP’s own 2024 voters. If the NDP had won back just half of the 2024 voters it lost, it would have flipped 11 districts, one more than if three in four of all Green voters had switched to the NDP. If the NDP had kept all of its 2024 voters in 2026, it would have won 19 more seats, leaving the Conservatives at 44, three short of a majority.

Where did the NDP voters go?

Results by district can’t tell us how any one voter cast their ballot, but the overall pattern is hard to miss:

• In Metro Vancouver, the Conservative vote barely moved, up about 1,000. The NDP’s fell by nearly 143,000. Some NDP voters went Green; the Green vote there rose about 27,000. The total vote in Metro fell by about 106,000, so more NDP voters appear to have stayed home than switched to voting for another party.

• Outside Metro Vancouver, both big parties lost votes: the NDP lost about 85,000 and the Conservatives lost about 22,000.

The swing was much larger in Metro Vancouver, where the NDP lost almost a third of its vote, compared to about a sixth on Vancouver Island. This is also where the Northern Vibe model, which moves every district with the provincial polls, missed the most. In every other region, it was within one seat of the result.

These are preliminary results. Mail-in and absentee ballots are counted November 6 to 10. Our final projection for every district is still available at northernvibe.ca/bc.

Stay curious,

Matt and Caitlin, from The Northern Vibe Project

Contact us at contact@northernvibe.ca

The Northern Vibe Project is not affiliated with Elections BC and isn’t a source of official results. Results here are Elections BC’s preliminary count as of 10:34 a.m. on October 26, when the initial count was complete, compared with Elections BC’s certified 2024 results without mail and telephone ballots. For official results, head to elections.bc.ca.

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As the campaign period progresses, a trajectory is starting to appear through the turbulence: provincial polling and modelling are moving further towards Lorne Doerkson’s BC Conservatives, winning a majority in 84% of simulations, compared to the NDP’s 11%.

Our polling aggregate has the Conservatives ahead at roughly 43%, with the NDP further behind at 39% and the Greens at 10%. What makes BC especially interesting is the multitude of competitive districts. Those districts are the ones we’ve been writing about each morning (@northernvibe.ca). Follow us on Threads for daily updates on the state of the race.

This week’s districts

Four of this week’s seven districts were decided by fewer than 500 votes in 2024. Today, the model favours a Conservative win in all four.

• Surrey City Centre: 232 votes was the margin for the NDP’s Amna Shah in 2024, in the district with the lowest turnout in BC. Now Shah is in a rematch against Conservative Zeeshan Wahla. Our model rates the seat a SWING, with the Conservatives at a 71% chance of winning.

• Penticton-Summerland: 317 votes was the margin for Conservative Amelia Boultbee, who crossed to the NDP in July and is not running again. The NDP’s Tina Lee is back on the ballot, this time against Tracy St Claire, who took nearly 10% as an independent in 2024 and now runs for the Conservatives. Our model rates it SAFE for the Conservatives.

• Vancouver-Langara: 419 votes kept it NDP in 2024. Sunita Dhir defends it against Conservative Jaime Stein, and our model rates the seat a LEAN for the Conservatives, with a win probability just under 80%.

• Richmond-Steveston: 484 votes, and now an open seat. The NDP’s Kelly Greene is not running again, leaving Bruce Kong to face Conservative Gordon Zhang. Our model rates it a SWING, with the Conservatives at 73%.

The other three districts went NDP by more than 1,000 votes in 2024. All three are now toss-ups.

• Ladysmith-Oceanside: 2,047 votes for the NDP’s Stephanie Higginson, while an independent took 16%. Higginson now faces Conservative Kris McNichol, and the model has them a tenth of a point apart.

• Burnaby South-Metrotown: 1,187 votes for the NDP’s Paul Choi. Choi faces Conservative David Xie, and the NDP’s projected lead is under a point.

• Surrey-Newton: 1,266 votes for the NDP’s Jessie Sunner, who now faces Conservative Harj Dhaliwal. The model has Sunner ahead by just over a point.

As this campaign has progressed, through door knocking, outreach events and the leaders’ debate, the polls have begun to tell a story, the conclusion of which is still unwritten. In just under a week, British Columbians will either keep David Eby’s NDP in government, extending a run that began in 2017, or elect Lorne Doerkson’s Conservatives, giving BC its first Conservative government in more than 90 years.

The BC Conservative lead in our polling average has grown from about three points to almost five over the past few weeks, but in a province where so many seats were won by a few hundred votes, the five days to go is plenty of time for that to change.

This is why The Northern Vibe Project models every district with its own page and share card at northernvibe.ca/bc, updated as new polls come in.

Stay curious,

Matt and Caitlin, from The Northern Vibe Project

Contact us at contact@northernvibe.ca

The Northern Vibe Project is not affiliated with Elections BC and isn’t a source of official voting information. For where and how to vote, and what ID to bring, head to elections.bc.ca.

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This is a lean, not a lock, in a race which has ebbed and flowed over the past few weeks. The outcome of this election is far from settled. The Conservatives win a majority in about three out of every four simulations (73%), and the NDP get the majority in roughly one in five (19%) simulations. Campaigns matter, and all the parties are working hard to sway public opinion.

Our polling aggregate has the Conservatives ahead at 42% with the NDP just behind at 39% and the Greens at 10%. Three points doesn’t sound like much; however, in a province where a long list of seats came down to a few hundred votes in 2024, three points is more than enough to influence the outcome. Those are the seats we’ve been writing about each morning (@northernvibe.ca). Follow us on Threads for daily updates on the state of the race.

The close races so far

Four seats were decided by fewer than a hundred votes in 2024. Today, all four of those now lean Conservative.

• Surrey-Guildford: 22 votes was the margin of victory for the NDP's Garry Begg in 2024, and it took a judicial recount to confirm it. This time he faces Conservative Garry Thind, and our model rates the seat a LEAN for the Conservatives, with a win probability just north of 80%.

• Kelowna Centre: 40 votes, and now a rematch. Conservative Kristina Loewen and the NDP’s Loyal Wooldridge are both back on the ballot.

• Courtenay-Comox: 93 votes was the margin for the Conservatives. Brennan Day defends it against the NDP’s Will Cole-Hamilton.

• Maple Ridge East: a flip by just 97 votes. Lawrence Mok defends it for the Conservatives against the NDP’s Hudson Campbell.

When the centre-left vote splits

On Vancouver Island, Juan de Fuca-Malahat and Cowichan Valley are a reminder that BC isn’t a two-party province. Cowichan Valley was actually held by the Greens until 2024.

Now the Northern Vibe model has the Conservatives narrowly ahead in both of those seats:

• Cowichan Valley: roughly 39% Conservative, 37% NDP and 22% Green.

• Juan de Fuca-Malahat: 38% Conservative, 33% NDP, and 24% Green.

When the centre-left vote splits, a party with north of 30% of the vote can win the district. Where Green voters land in these two seats will tell most of the story on election night.

Candidates who changed the race

In Vernon-Lumby, Kevin Acton ran as an independent in 2024 and took 15% of the vote, while the NDP’s Harwinder Sandhu held on by 476 votes. This time Acton is running for the Conservatives, with the NV model projecting a narrow lead.

Coquitlam-Burke Mountain was decided by just 368 votes, a rare straight two-way race in 2024. This year, the Greens and CentreBC are on the ballot too, and the model tips it narrowly to the Conservatives as the NDP’s Jodie Wickens defends it against Ryan Peterson.

The NDP-held exception

Not every close seat leans Conservative. Vancouver-Yaletown is the tightest race on our list where the model still favours the NDP. Terry Yung held it by about 1,200 votes in 2024, and today the projected gap between him and Conservative Margareta Dovgal is less than a single point.

As with many elections, the overall provincial numbers matter less than the small local stories. This is why The Northern Vibe Project models every district with its own page and share card at northernvibe.ca/bc, updated as new polls come in.

Stay curious,

Matt and Caitlin, from The Northern Vibe Project

Contact us at contact@northernvibe.ca

The Northern Vibe Project is not affiliated with Elections BC and isn’t a source of official voting information. For where and how to vote, and what ID to bring, head to elections.bc.ca.

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

The Northern Vibe Project has created its first provincial election projection map, and now models each of British Columbia’s 93 provincial districts. Today, the model gives a slight edge to the BC NDP: projecting 46 seats out of 93, against the 47 needed to form a majority government. Eby’s government says that the timing of this early election is based on the new realities of an ongoing tense relationship with the United States, while his critics argue this election call is an effort to take advantage of a fractured opposition. Two days before this election was announced, the leader of the BC Conservative party, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, resigned, a change which was precipitated by months of growing tensions within the BC Conservatives.

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Whatever the motive, the timing has created enough suspicion and energy that Eby may have just given the BC Conservatives the one thing they needed to consolidate: a common enemy.

District share card for Vancouver-Langara

In BC: Want to Share Your District’s Projection?

Every district in BC has its own page and every projection now carries a share option with a custom card which can be shared: the district, the projected winner, the margin, and the map.

District share card for Surrey City Centre

Today, the district pages show who held the seat. As candidates are confirmed we will add them, district by district, through to BC voting day: October 24, 2026. If your BC district has a candidate we have missed, let us know!

British Columbia is the first of many provinces to get coverage of its own through The Northern Vibe Project. Subscribe + Follow for updates!

Twenty-six days. Come watch the projections move in real time and let us know what you think about this upcoming election and what it means for your community.

Stay curious,

Matt and Caitlin, from The Northern Vibe Project

Alexandra Park, in Toronto's downtown core: walk-ups, semis, and mid-rise rentals in the foreground, the condo wall behind. Photo: Canmenwalker, 2025, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In Toronto Centre, fewer than one in three households own the place they live. The neighbourhood is condos, walk-ups, and basement apartments; people renting, often for years, often paying more than half their income to do it. Unsurprisingly, this riding ranks 5th among Canadian ridings for share of households spending more than 30% of their income on housing (shelter stress), a whopping 39%. In the April 2025 federal election, Toronto Centre voted Liberal with 64% of the vote.

In Vaughan–Woodbridge, just past the northern edge of Toronto, almost nine in ten households own their homes. The streets are lined with detached homes with finished basements and double driveways. The percent of shelter-stressed households drops to 23%, ranking 102 out of 343 in the country. Vaughan–Woodbridge voted Conservative with 60% in the last election.

A Liberal landslide in one. A Conservative landslide in the other. Same province, same month, two ridings only twenty kilometres apart. That's not a coincidence. Once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere.

We sorted all 343 ridings by their homeownership rate, the share of households who own (rather than rent) the place they live, and grouped them into three buckets.

1. Renter-heavy ridings: fewer than 45% of households own. These are dense urban cores: downtown Toronto, downtown Vancouver, parts of Montreal. There are 14 of them. The Liberals won 11 of these. Their average margin over the Conservatives was 26 points which, in Canadian politics, is a blowout win.

2. Mixed ridings: between 45% and 70% home ownership. These are the inner suburbs, university towns, mid-sized cities. 86 ridings. The Liberals are still ahead on average, but only by 10 points; the difference between a safe seat and a battleground.

3. Owner-heavy ridings: more than 70% ownership. These are the outer suburbs, exurbs, and most of rural parts of Canada. 162 ridings, nearly half the country. Here the Conservatives lead by 11 points on average and won 108 of them last April.

Move from the most renter-heavy ridings to the most owner-heavy and the Liberal–Conservative margin shifts 37 points. To put that in perspective: a 5-point national swing typically reshuffles enough seats to flip government, and decides who becomes Prime Minister. The density of homeownership in your riding moves the needle more than seven times further. This suggests that homeownership, or at least the ability of the majority of the population in a given riding to have the means of buying the place they live in, is correlated with the political leanings of each riding.

Each dot is one federal riding, coloured by which party won it in the 2025 election. The x-axis is the share of households that own their home (Statistics Canada 2021 Census). The y-axis is the Liberal vote share minus the Conservative vote share. The dashed line is the best-fit trend. The annotation shows the raw correlation and the correlation that survives after controlling for income, age, urban/rural classification, and immigrant share. Non-Quebec ridings only.

Why this is real and not just disguised income

The obvious objection is that homeowners are richer than renters, older than renters, and more likely to live in places where Conservatives win. So perhaps the pattern is just income or age or city-versus-country, disguised as housing.

We checked. We controlled for the four most obvious suspects - average income, urban-versus-rural, share of seniors, and share of residents who immigrated to Canada - and the moderately strong correlation remained. Income, age, urbanism, and immigration can't explain the relationship away.

A few honest caveats are worth naming. This is data at the riding level, a pattern across neighbourhoods doesn’t tell us how any individual homeowner or renter casts their ballot. We can’t say from this analysis alone whether owning a home makes people vote Conservative or whether Conservative-leaning places just tend to be more affordable to buy into; both are likely at least partly true. And the homeownership numbers come from the 2021 census, so the picture has only shifted further since then.

What we can say: the pattern is large, it shows up across the country, and it doesn’t go away when you account for the obvious suspects. That’s enough to take it seriously.

Why it makes sense

Once you say it out loud, the divide isn’t mysterious.

If you own your home, your single biggest financial asset sits on a specific street. A lot of what matters to you politically is whatever protects that asset - property values, mortgage rates, the character of the neighbourhood, who gets to build what next door. Caution becomes rational and tied to your economic future.

If you rent, especially if you rent in a city where ownership has drifted out of reach, your political interests are nearly the mirror image. You want more abundant housing supply, stronger tenant protections, and a path to becoming a homeowner yourself someday. Caution about the status quo feels expensive, especially when you are paying for someone else’s mortgage.

Neither party in 2025 ran on an explicitly pro-owner or pro-renter platform. But the Liberals’ housing message centred on supply, curbing corporate landlord power, and direct intervention; the Conservatives’ centred on tax cuts, deregulation, and market-led solutions. Each party’s coalition lined up with its message.

Where the rule breaks

Two places, both worth understanding.

The first is Brampton. Several Brampton ridings, Brampton East, Brampton North–Caledon, Brampton South, sit above 78% homeownership and still vote Liberal. Comfortably in the first two and narrowly in the third.

The reason is likely community history more than housing economics: large Punjabi-Canadian populations bought homes in Brampton through the 1990s and 2000s and have voted Liberal in federal elections for decades. High ownership, but the political loyalty is older than the mortgage. Brampton is the cleanest reminder that the housing pattern is a tendency, not a law.

The second is Carleton, just outside Ottawa. At 89.5% ownership, Carleton is the most owner-heavy riding in the country, exactly the kind of place that should have gone Conservative by a wide margin. Instead it voted Liberal, 51% to 46%.

The Conservative candidate in Carleton was Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative party leader and contender for Prime Minister.

Like in Brampton, this explanation is also local. Carleton is full of federal public servants — more than a third of working-age residents work in the public sector: government, schools, and hospitals. Poilievre's 2025 campaign promised deep cuts to government spending, including the consultants and contractors many of those public servants work alongside. When your paycheque is the thing being cut, the question of whether you own the house becomes a smaller part of how you vote.

Four Ontario ridings where high homeownership did not deliver a Conservative win. For each, the chart shows the Liberal–Conservative margin the homeownership trend alone would predict (open circle) versus the actual margin in 2025 (filled circle). The arrow length is how far the riding broke the pattern; the labelled number is that gap in points.

What this means going forward

The share of Canadians who own their home has been falling for more than a decade. The 2021 census put it at 66.5%, down from 69% in 2011. That sounds small until you realise the decline happened in every province. It was steepest exactly where federal elections are decided: among younger Canadians and in cities. The net shift is roughly one Canadian household in forty moving from owning to renting over those ten years, and the curve has almost certainly continued downward since.

Canada’s national homeownership rate at each census from 2006 to 2021. The rate peaked at 69.0% in 2011 and has fallen 2.5 percentage points since — roughly one in forty Canadian households shifting from owning to renting in a decade.

If this pattern holds, that demographic drift has real political weight. The renter coalition is growing, and growing fastest in the places that swing elections. Whichever party can reach those voters without losing the homeowner coalition wins the 2030s.

Northern Vibe tracks homeownership rate, alongside income, age, and the full simulation, at the riding level. You can look up your own riding at northernvibe.ca

Stay curious,

Matt, from The Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Caitlin

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Sources: Statistics Canada 2021 Census, Federal Electoral District profile (2023 redistribution). Election results: Elections Canada certified totals, April 2025. Homeownership rate = owner-occupied households as a share of total occupied private dwellings. The “statistically subtracted” analysis is a partial correlation: the LPC–CPC margin was regressed on each control variable (average total income, urban/rural classification, share of residents aged 65+, immigrant share) and the correlation was recomputed on the residuals. Raw correlation r = –0.46; partial correlation after controls = –0.40. n = 265 non-Quebec ridings with complete data on all controls. Quebec ridings are excluded because the Bloc Québécois complicates a clean Liberal–Conservative comparison.

Alexandre Boulerice has held Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie since 2011, when Jack Layton’s orange wave swept through Montreal and turned one of Quebec’s most sovereigntist urban ridings into an NDP stronghold. He held it through four subsequent elections, most recently winning the 2025 election with 41% of the vote.

Then he left the NDP to sit as an independent. Now he’s expected to resign from Parliament in the coming months to run in the upcoming provincial election for the sovereigntist, left-leaning Québec Solidaire (QS).

What he leaves behind is one of the most genuinely unpredictable ridings on the map: a three-way race between a weakened NDP without their biggest Quebec draw, a BQ with a natural claim on a sovereigntist electorate, and a Liberal party that wants to repeat last month’s success in the Terrebonne by-election. The simulation flags it as one of the seats it can’t model cleanly given that national polling averages don’t capture what happens when a personal-vote incumbent walks out the door.

Track this riding as polling evolves; current win probabilities for Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

It’s a good encapsulation of where Canadian politics sits right now. The Liberals swept three by-elections on April 13 and now hold a majority at 174 actual seats, but the map still has live questions. Here’s where the current-polls simulation puts things today.

ISSUES CANADIANS CARE ABOUT

This Month: What’s on Canadians’ Minds

Data from the Northern Vibe issues pipeline as of May 3, 2026 (aggregate of weekly CTV/Nanos surveys)

Top issues by importance this month:

1. Economy (21.8%) — The broadest issue category dominates by a wide margin. This is the category that contains everything from tariffs and trade to jobs and wages. In the current environment, it’s almost entirely driven by the US trade file. Coverage has run net positive for the government through Carney’s economic sovereignty argument, while simultaneously surfacing anxiety about what the USMCA review means for Canadian exports. No other issue comes close to this volume.

2. US Relations (12.3%) — Running at just over half the volume of the economy issue, and tightly coupled to it. The July 1 USMCA review is the forward story every political journalist is writing toward. Coverage here has run net positive for the government; the “standing up to Washington” narrative has been durable. The issue carries inherent uncertainty, though, which keeps the picture from fully settling.

3. Cost of Living (11.2%) — The May issues picture tells a government in a relatively strong position on the issues that matter most. Economy and US relations are generating positive coverage; cost of living is the vulnerability. The gap between the government’s macro story - sovereignty, trade diversification, housing deals - and what voters feel week-to-week (groceries, rent, affordability) is the central tension.

Coming up next: The housing file raises a deeper structural question we’ve been sitting on for a while. Why does housing matter so much politically in the first place? In our first deep-dive article, we’re going into the data on homeownership rates at the riding level and what they predict about how Canadians vote. It’s one of the sharpest demographic divides in the electoral map, sharper than income, sharper than age. We’ll show you exactly where the fault line runs.

SEAT PROJECTION SNAPSHOT

The Map This Week

Majority threshold: 172 seats · LPC majority probability: 95.8%

What this means:

The Liberals are well into majority territory if the election were held today with 213 seats, with the simulation assigning majority probability at just over 95% — confident, but not a certainty. In contrast, the Conservatives sitting at 99 seats have no current path to government. The coming months will test Pierre Poilievre’s ability to push the narrative away from trade and national unity, where Carney has dominated, and back toward cost of living and accountability, where the Conservatives have historically had more room to run. The NDP holds at 9 projected seats, consistent across recent runs, a historically weak floor with no upside momentum visible in current polling. Avi Lewis has an uphill battle in front of him, one he seems more than willing to charge at. Lewis has been pushing big ideas loudly and on his own terms in a way the party hasn’t in years. While the polling reflects a party at its floor, Lewis is betting that's the place to build from.

Keep an eye out for our issues on homeownership rates at the riding level and what they can tell us about how Canadians vote.

Stay curious,

Matt, from the Northern Vibe Team

Edited by Caitlin