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Seats obtained by party

Liberal   Conservative   New Democratic   Green   Progressive Conservative (defunct)   Progressive (defunct)

This is page shows results of Canadian federal elections in Midwestern Ontario, which is roughly from Woodstock to Milton, and from Lake Erie to Goderich.

Regional profile

Before the late 1950s, Midwestern Ontario had not leaned towards either the Progressive Conservatives (Tories) or the Liberals (Grits) on a regular basis as there was wide variation in each party's results from election to election. Since the late 1950s, however, it has been a primarily conservative-voting area. Even when the Liberals won every federal election except one from 1963 to 1980 inclusive, the Progressive Conservatives usually won the majority of seats in this region, and in the 1979 Progressive Conservative election plurality, the only seat the Tories did not win was won by the New Democrats (NDP). The NDP usually claimed one seat from the mid-1960s until the 1993 election, usually in the riding of Brant.

Vote splitting allowed the Liberals to win all of the seats in Midwestern Ontario from 1993 to 2000 in their province-wide sweeps, although the seat of Perth—Wellington was lost to the Progressive Conservatives in a 2003 by-election following the resignation of the outgoing Liberal MP. The Conservatives picked up four more seats in the 2004 election, another in the 2006 election, and four more in 2008, leaving Guelph as the only non-Conservative seat in the region from 2008 to 2015. In the 2015 Liberal majority government win, the Conservatives still took one more seat in the area than the Liberals as they swept the rural areas.

The Conservatives are weaker in the larger cities of Kitchener-Waterloo and Guelph, partly because they have prominent universities (University of Waterloo, University of Guelph, Wilfrid Laurier University) with large student populations. The Liberals retained three of the four ridings in those cities by significant margins in 2006 despite the Conservatives forming the government, and won four of the five seats available there in the 2015 election, the exceptions in both elections being the partially rural Kitchener-Conestoga riding, although both wins in the riding were only narrow victories for the Conservatives. Even in the 2008 election victory by the Conservatives, the ridings of Kitchener Centre and Kitchener-Waterloo were only won by the Conservatives by less than 300 votes. The riding of the more suburban city of Cambridge has generally leaned Conservative dating back decades whereas the riding of Brant-Brantford has switched from being strongly NDP to Liberal to Conservative in the last three decades.

In 2019 the Greens were able to gain over 25 percent of the vote in two urban ridings, Guelph and Kitchener Centre. However, the Liberals held both seats by over a 10% margin.

Votes by party throughout time

2015

2011

2008

2006

2004

2000

1997

Notes

1. Bory is leader of The Maple Party which was ineligible to be on the ballot; he chose to be listed as an Independent.
2. Elected as a Progressive Conservative in a 2002 by-election following the resignation of Liberal MP John Richardson.

References

1. Pearce, Daniel R. (4 September 2015). "Independent candidate leads own party". Simcoe Reformer. Canoe Sun Media Community Newspapers. Retrieved 22 September 2015.

• Canadian federal election results in Ontario