There are going to be thousands of candidates running across this country, from the major parties and from the small registered parties.  How do you learn about them?

Who is running?

In my riding:  All candidates who intend to run in the 42nd General Election must be registered with Elections Canada.  Elections Canada publishes a list of all candidates who have filed all the necessary paperwork to represent constituents in their ridings.  To find out who is running in your riding, click here.

Across Canada: If you want to know who is has the party nomination for candidates in ridings across Canada, click here

How do I find out more about the candidates?

Finding out about candidates can be as detailed as you want to make it.   Of course you could just google the candidates’ name and see what comes up.  Here are some other resources to get you started in digging deeper.  We will keep posting more sources on rabble as we find them. 

Current or past Member of Parliament:

Candidates who are not yet in government:

  • Candidate biographies on party pages:  Visit the candidate bios published by the parties for the candidates they have nominated.  Then dig into the leads you find there. 
  • Has the candidate worked with government or with public entities subject to Freedom of Information requests.  If so, you can submit a request and see what it turns up.
  • Is the candidate a business owner.  Find out more about the business on Sedar.com (public corporations) or from the various provincial business registries.

Party platforms on issues:

  • Parties will be coming up with their platforms and posting them on their party election pages, keep searching them. 

A lot of sources focus on the official parties and the Green Party candidates in the riding.  To learn more about third party candidates takes a bit more work.  Start here with a list of all the registered parties and by visiting their websites. 

Of course there are a ton of other things you can do to get data.  Here is a list of where to start with candidate research with data available in the United States  In Canada, there are more privacy protections in place than in the United States, so some of these sources may be less useful.