Liberals slip slightly, maintain clear lead in seat projections

The latest seat projections suggest there’s a strong probability that Canada will have a minority Liberal government when the ballots are tallied on Monday, Oct. 19.

After overtaking the Conservatives in seat projections last week, the Liberals are now projected to win 138 seats to the Tories’ 115. That’s a drop of four seats for the Liberals since Thursday and an increase of three for the Conservatives.

The NDP gains two seats in the latest projection while the Bloc Quebecois slips from four seats to three. The Green Party is projected to win one seat in B.C.

“Momentum for the Liberal party in Ontario seems to have finally abated, but in the last three weeks the party has turned around a one percentage-point deficit to the Conservative party in the province to an 11-point lead,” Wilfrid Laurier University politics professor Barry Kay said.

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The drop in projected seats for the Liberals comes in Ontario, but the party is still expected to take the lion’s share of the seats allocated to the nation’s most populous province. In the last election, the Liberals took 11 Ontario seats. The Conservatives won 73. The Tories are projected to lose almost half of those seats on Monday.

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The seat projections are based on a weighted averaging of polls from firms Angus Reid, Ekos Research Associates, Forum Research, Innovative Research, Ipsos Reid and Nanos Research conducted between Oct. 8 and Oct. 16 and involving over 6,000 respondents.

The party leaders are spending the final two days before election day crossing the country, trying to win over undecided voters.

Visualization is based on Twitter data and should not be considered scientifically accurate. Data has been made available via a partnership with Twitter Canada.