There is only one poll that matters—especially at the local level.
As politicians and Canadians focus on polls to get a sense of who might win the next election, at the local level, the best gauge of the future is the past.
Below, we answer your questions about local polls, tariffs, trade, politician pay, party, and more.
Polls
Are there any polls being taken that are riding-specific? We can find lots of information about how the parties are doing nationally—but nothing about what’s developing in our own riding. For people who are planning to vote strategically, this would be very helpful information to have.
The short answer is no.
Polling is expensive. Polls are created one of three ways: a polling company will produce a regular poll that it makes public as a type of advertisement of its services; media companies (and sometimes interest groups) hire companies to poll the public as a news-gathering and information service; and political parties commission their own polls to use for strategy reasons.
Parties often finance riding-level polls, but they rarely become public. Media companies rarely commission (and polling companies rarely freely share) riding-level polls because they are expensive to produce and have a limited reach. And although political parties sometimes disclose their own internal polls, they almost always do so out of self-interest and in a way that can’t be trusted (even if the numbers themselves are legitimate.)
There is one site, 338canada.com, that produces riding-level projections. It’s important to note that the projections on the site are not based on actual polling data. Instead, they use an algorithm to translate provincial and regional polling numbers to the level of individual ridings, based on previous election results. The projections, then, are highly variable, and do not reflect the quality of candidates this election, nor other local factors.
In general, nationwide Canadian polling has been accurate during past elections. That’s largely because there is a lot of it. But at a riding level, sometimes the best one can do is to look at previous election results, and try to gauge how the present campaign is different or similar.
First past the post
Two people asked about Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system and why it hasn’t changed. Why do we still have first-past-the-post? And why doesn’t the party with the popular vote always win?
First, we have to define how we talk about an election’s “winner.” And that’s going to take some time.
The winner of a Canadian election is whichever party is able to form the next government. Real power in our democracy lies with the House of Commons and the Members of Parliament chosen to sit in it and represent their constituents.
And for a government to function, and a Prime Minister and cabinet to wield power, they need the support of a majority of Members of Parliament (regardless of which parties they belong to).
As our reader alludes to, a government does not necessarily need to be led by the party with the most total votes. Indeed, an election’s “winner” doesn’t even always receive the most seats—even if it does usually line up that way.
What matters is that a party leader can obtain the support of a majority of MPs and thus gain the “confidence” of the House of Commons. Winning the most seats usually means a party can form government—even if a party doesn’t have a majority, it can usually govern with the support of MPs from other parties. This is how Canada’s minority federal governments have functioned in recent years. But smaller parties can also collaborate to create a government that has the backing of a majority of MPs.
We explained this in depth in our Government 101 story, and you can read that section here.
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Government 101: How does Canada’s federal government work?
The unequal distribution of votes means that similar vote tallies can translate to very different numbers of seats. It also means that a party with the most votes can win fewer seats than a party with a smaller number of votes.
Canadian elections are actually more than three hundred local elections for Members of Parliament. If every victorious candidate won by the same margin, one could easily predict what percentage of the vote translated to what percentage of seats.
But that’s not what happens. Some parties have a more “efficient” distribution of voters than others. Essentially, if a party has a lot of supporters spread over a large number of ridings, its vote will generally result in more seats than if those voters were spread over a small number of ridings that you won easily. The Conservatives’ overwhelming popularity in the prairie provinces tends to result in a large number of votes that don’t do much to add to the party’s seat tally.
The reverse tends to be true among parties with a smaller share of the vote. In that case, a small party with many of its voters concentrated in a few ridings might be able to win some seats, while another with a more even distribution of voters might be left with little representation in Parliament. In 2021, for instance, the NDP received twice as many votes as the Bloc Quebecois, but because the Bloc’s voters were concentrated in a single province, it won more seats.
Why we still have first-past-the post is a question that has been put to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who previously promised a new electoral system for Canada.
Many countries use various forms of proportional representation systems that attempt to match the total share of votes a party receives with a similar proportion of seats in the country’s legislative assembly. (Australia uses preferential voting, and you can watch a beer-themed explainer of how that works here.)
But Canadian governments have not moved toward a new system for a variety of political reasons.
Most obviously, it’s rarely in the self-interest of the government of the day to introduce a new electoral system. After all, the status quo just allowed them to win control of government. A new system may make winning future elections more difficult. Thus, they stick with the current system.
There are different views on the benefits and drawbacks of a first-past-the-post system. Some like the fact that first-past-the-post leads to more consistent majority governments, and thus governments that are more stable and able to deliver policies. First-past-the-post also generally reduces the ability of fringe parties to win seats in Parliament.
Others prefer proportional representation systems that give smaller parties a greater voice, and which ensure that every vote cast in an election is factored into how many seats a party receives in Parliament. Some say the existence of more parties encourages co-operation and better reflects a population’s diversity of views.
Tariff responses
How much authority does each provincial government have to choose its own response to American tariff threats? What happens if a province is in direct opposition to the response of the federal government?
The federal government is in charge of foreign policy—and that includes negotiating trade deals. It has the ability to set tariffs on incoming goods—and impose export taxes as retaliation against other countries’ tariffs. That said, each province has both official and non-official tools at their disposal to try to respond to tariffs on their own, or respond to the federal government’s decisions.
Many provincial governments have control over various ministries, agencies, and Crown corporations that do business with the United States. The province can direct those bodies to alter their behaviour in response to American bluster. (Although those actions must still generally abide by existing trade agreements.)
Most prominently, Canada’s largest provinces all run massive hydroelectric systems that sell electricity to the US. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has threatened to restrict electricity sales to the United States, and added a temporary 25% surcharge to energy exports in March. (That surcharge threatened to exacerbate the Canada-US trade war, with Trump saying he would increase steel and aluminum tariffs to 50% in response. The surcharge ended after one day.) Last week, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said his province would not be renewing a deal in which it sells energy to a US power company.
NS Premier Tim Houston and the province have taken their own steps to counter American tariffs. That has included removing US booze from the shelves of provincial liquor stores, doubling tolls at the Cobequid Pass and seeking options to cancel any existing contracts and reject outright bids from American businesses.
So while the federal government is in charge of foreign trade, provinces do have their own tools. The feds also usually seek to work with provinces to avoid political and constitutional conflict. If the provincial and federal governments disagree on who has jurisdiction over a certain response or policy related to international trade—or anything else—the dispute will be litigated in, and decided by, Canada’s Supreme Court.
For provinces that oppose federal measures, other options are also possible.
The federal government has threatened, although not imposed, export taxes on energy, which could have a significant impact on Alberta’s oil fields. Alberta’s provincial government has vociferously campaigned against such taxes.
Although they couldn’t do anything to directly stop those taxes, Premier Danielle Smith has threatened other actions. Back in January, Smith said a national export ban on energy would cause a “national unity crisis,” implying that Alberta would be reconsidering its place within confederation. In March, Smith reiterated the statement in her list of demands to the future Prime Minister, saying Alberta would “not accept an export tax or restriction of Alberta’s oil and gas to the United States.”
Interprovincial trade barriers
Why haven’t interprovincial tariffs been removed? Why does Canada have so many barriers to interprovincial trade in the first place?
There have been a lot of news stories recently that have tried to explain this issue, because it does sound weird that there are so many barriers to trade between provinces. Let’s try to break it down here as well.
The trade barriers are not tariffs. Rather, they are informal obstacles to trade that make it more expensive or burdensome to do business across provincial lines. Frequently, the barriers are regulations that provinces have created for rational reasons. They may involve rules about the qualifications needed to do a certain job or the safety requirements required for a product to be sold.
But because these barriers can vary from province to province—and in some provinces can be more stringent—they can increase costs for businesses and consumers.
Because many barriers were created for noble reasons, they are hard to remove because doing so requires some provinces to ease rules intended to improve public safety. Even so, it’s not always clear that the rules actually accomplish that mission. Quebec, for instance, once had more-stringent rules about the type of stuffing required in car seats. Those rules increased the cost to make car seats, making it harder for manufacturers to sell their products in both Ontario and Quebec. But they didn’t turn out to actually increase safety. (They’ve since been removed.)
The trade situation with the United States has prompted Canada’s provinces and territories to try to remove internal trade barriers. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick signed deals with Ontario to allow people in certain regulated professions to easily move between provinces, and for alcohol to be sold without additional barriers.
Political pay
A few readers wanted information on how politicians are compensated. How are politicians paid and how do they access their pensions?
The pay for MPs and Senators is set by Parliament. Like with legislators, federal politicians get pay for being a member of Parliament. Politicians get additional money for extra roles. Those include leading a party, being a cabinet minister, serving as speaker, being a member or chair of a committee, or serving in the Official Opposition’s shadow cabinet.
Your average Member of the House of Commons receives $209,800 a year. They get $120 deducted each time they are absent from a sitting of the House, unless they are sick, on official business, serving in the Armed Forces, pregnant, or caring for a newborn. (They get 21 freebies before the money starts being deducted.)
The Prime Minister receives an additional $209,800 a year, plus a car allowance. The leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, on the other hand, receives an extra $99,900 a year, also with a car allowance. That is the same bonus as for Ministers and the Speaker of the House of Commons, although the Speaker gets a smaller car allowance.
You can see a full breakdown of the salaries (called sessional allowances) and those bonuses here, along with the many, many rules around expenses and insurance.
The sessional allowances are updated each year. They have been going up over the past few years, with Members of Parliament receiving $167,400 in 2015 and nearly $210,000 today. Salaries increases are pegged to the average wage hike for private-sector union workers. (The federal government’s Department of Human Resources publishes an index of those settlements at the end of the calendar year.)
Pensions were first introduced for Members of Parliament in 1952, when then-Prime Minister Louis St-Laurent expressed concerns that some people would not run for Parliament because it would make it less likely they could provide for themselves after retirement. (At that time, the average Canadian wage for workers in manufacturing was around $3,000 a year, and the MP sessional allowance was $8,000.)
Members of Parliament still need to pay into a pension plan, the same way people elsewhere do. They are entitled to a full pension after service for six years; if they retire with less than six years of service, they get back the money they paid in a single installment.
There are various rules about people who lose one election and return to the House of Commons years later; there are also rules around survivor benefits, formulae for how much Prime Ministers receive after their retirement, and other details on how pensions are distributed. Those are all laid out in the Members of Parliament Retiring Allowances Act.
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This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2025.