The Liberal Party picked up the most seats out of all the parties with 157. The Conservative Party won 121 seats to return to the House of Commons as the Official Opposition. The Bloc Quebecois came third with 32 seats, the New Democratic Party (NDP) elected 24 MPs, and the Green Party now have 3 MPs. Finally, 1 independent candidate, not representing any party, won a seat.

What’s this I’m hearing about minority government?

As the leader of the party that won the most seats (the Liberals), Justin Trudeau stays on as Prime Minister. Since they didn’t reach the magical number of 170 (i.e. the majority of the seats), he’ll need some help to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. That’s a fancy way of saying enough MPs like him as Prime Minister and his party as the government. If the Liberals had won a majority of the seats, they could easily vote together to stay in power like they had for the past four years.

But that didn’t happen so the Liberals form a minority government. They’ll need the support of opposition parties to pass budgets and bills.

A total of 17,890,264 people voted this year, which is the highest number of voters ever in a Canadian election! However, the percentage of people who voted was down a bit from 2015. Turnout this year came in at around 66%.

Lots of people took advantage of early voting this year. About 4.7 million people voted during advance voting over Thanksgiving Weekend, which was 29% more than in 2015. This was thanks in large part to more voting stations and longer voting hours during that time!

We don’t know yet! And it might be a while before Elections Canada crunches all the numbers to give us an idea of that. We do know a lot of people took advantage of expanded voting on campus. 111,300 people voted at campus polling stations from Oct. 5-9, which is a nice jump from 2015 when it was just being piloted.

Minority governments typically don’t stick around very long so we could be having another election in a couple of years. That all depends on how the Liberals do working with the opposition to pass their bills.