Cartograms for the 2015 Canadian Federal Election

During the 2015 Federal election in Canada, Stephen McMurtry put together a fantastic visualisation of the projected outcomes developed by Eric Grenier’s ThreeHundredEight.com.

I loved the map and the responsiveness but it, along with many other maps, underlined my frustration with how geographic maps such as these could put a lot visual emphasis on geographically-large but sparsely-populated ridings.

Inspired by the Economist’s cartograms for the UK 2015 election, I worked to build a cartogram on a hexagonal grid.

Along the way I discovered that Luke Andrews had done a cartogram for the 2011 election. Luke used squares and managed to show bodies of water.

Mine uses hexagons. I experimented with putting in the Great Lakes and so on, but these were so massively distorted that they didn’t help much.

You can see archived versions with the last set of predictions and with the preliminary results.

I spread the territories along the top of my map (instead of having them bunched together) and the key lesson I learned from putting together my map was just how many ridings there are in Canada’s major cities: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. Adding provincial/territorial boundaries helped make the map a little more readable.

After the close of the election, Gerald Butts, who worked on the Liberal campaign and is now Principal Secretary to PM Justin Trudeau, shared a photo of a physical cartogram of ridings which I presume had been used in the campaign HQ. I think they used post-it notes, but the photo is now gone.

For 2019 - I may work to set up an animation of a transition between the geographic map and the cartogram (as seen in the Economist map).

To be clear, the work of the web-design and creation and interaction for the cartogram is Stephen McMurtry’s; I took his code and reworked it to use a different “map” of Canada.