2025 Election: What to Expect in the Final Week

The debates are over, advance voting has closed after a record turnout, and we’re into the final week before election day on April 28.

Polling shows the gap between the Liberal and Conservative parties has narrowed slightly since the debate, with about 5% now separating the two parties.

Will the Liberal lead hold? Will we have a majority government or a minority? And how many seats will smaller parties like the NDP and Bloc Québécois secure?

In this post I’ll give you my projection of the likely and possible outcomes, based on publicly available data.

What’s the likely outcome?

One week before the 2021 eleciton, I wrote about why parties appear to gain or lose support on voting day. Elections aren’t just about issues, platforms, and voter preference. If they were, the elections results ought to line up very closely with the last day of polling.

In reality, there are at least two other factors at play in the final week:

• The money/organization effect. During an election campaign, parties work to identify their supporters using sophisticated databases, then follow up to remind them to vote. Larger, better-funded parties do this more effectively, and this appears to give them a bump of as much as 2% compared to the last day’s polls, while weaker parties can lose as much as 1%.
• The “strategic voting” effect, which can transfer as much as 0.2% from a smaller party to one of the leading parties. This effect is strongest when it’s a close election and the public sees critical differences between the two leading parties, and weakest when the election is a blowout or the two leading parties are seen as interchangeable.

Together, these two factors can shift a party’s result by as much as -1.2% to +2.5% compared to the polls on the last day of the campaign. In a close election, this can mean the difference between a majority government or a minority government, or even a change in which party wins the most seats.

So, with that in mind, what should we expect for the 2025 election? Here’s my projection:

	LPC	CPC	NDP	BQ	GPC	PPC
Polling aggregate, April 21	43.2%	38.0%	8.3%	5.9%	2.1%	1.7%
Money/organization effect	+1.3%	+1.9%	-0.9%	-0.3%	-0.8%	-1.3%
Strategic voting effect	+0.3%	+0.1%	-0.1%	-0.1%	-0.1%	-0.1%
Projected result	44.8%	40.0%	7.3%	5.5%	1.2%	0.3%
Approx. seats (172 = majority)	191	124	8	19	1	0

In other words, continue to expect a Liberal majority government. While the Conservative party will gain some ground in the final week, it won’t be enough to change the overall result. Meanwhile, smaller parties will all fare very badly compared to previous elections.

What other outcomes are possible?

Some folks may be curious about the range of possible outcomes–are there circumstances that might lead to a Liberal minority, or even a Conservative minority?

I would love to give an in-depth breakdown of all the other possible scenarios. The problem is, there don’t appear to be any.

In the last twenty years, since the current five-party configuration was established, a first-place party has never dropped more than 2.0% in the final week. Meanwhile, a second-place party has never gained more than 2.8%. If we assume the Liberals drop 2.0% and the Conservatives gain 2.8% in the final week, we get the following result:

	Liberal	Conservative
Vote percentage	41.2%	40.8%
Seats (172 for majority)	173	138

In other words, anything less than a Liberal majority would be the biggest upset in the last twenty years. That’s not impossible, but given the current mood of the electorate, I see it as extremely unlikely.

What about the smaller parties? Might any of them recover from their serious losses of the past month? That would also be very surprising. Over the last twenty years, no party polling under 10% has gained more than 0.5% in the final week. So the fates of the NDP, Bloc, Greens, and People’s Party would also appear to be sealed.

What will the consequences be?

I think it’s best to save a detailed analysis for after election day, when we have the full results. However, there are a couple of points I’d like to raise now.

First, winning a majority government after being as low as 20% in the polls is obviously a massive comeback for the Liberals. People will say it’s because of the U.S. tariffs, or because of Mark Carney winning the leadership, but is that really what happened? Not quite. The Liberal comeback began immediately after Trudeau’s resignation on January 6, with support rising rapidly. The trend continued through the 25% tariffs on February 1, continued through Carney’s leadership win on March 9, and finally plateaued around April 5. So, while I have no doubt that Carney’s win and the tariffs both had an effect on Liberal support, the starting point was in fact Trudeau’s resignation.

Secondly, this election will be devastating for smaller parties:

• The Bloc Québécois will be reduced to about one third of the seats in Québec, losing their credibility as the primary representatives of Québec’s interests.
• The NDP will almost certainly lose official party status, with only a slim chance of being elected in 12 or more ridings, making this their worst seat count in thirty years.
• The Greens will see their worst vote share in twenty-five years. But even worse, they’ll probably miss the 2% threshold for expense reimbursements, costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time when their donations have already been dropping.
• The PPC will fail to capture any seats again, with potentially their weakest popular support since their first election in 2019.

Because of disadvantages created by our electoral system, small parties are always in a precarious situation and can experience large swings in their seat count. But usually, when one is waning, another is waxing. Not so this election.

We may be witnessing the collapse of the five-party configuration that has existed since the 2004 election. [I’ve now discussed this in more detail in my new post, Is Canada Moving to a Two-Party System? —SB.] For the next four years, Parliament will effectively operate as a two-party system outside of Québec. How the small parties respond to their setbacks, and whether any new parties appear, will determine the options available to voters in the 2029 election. By that time, both Canada and the world will likely be very different than they are today.