What is a judicial recount and could it leave Liberals with a majority government?
An Elections Canada judicial recount flipped a riding back to the Liberals over the weekend, but the results of three more recounts yet to be completed won’t give Prime Minister Mark Carney and his party the 172 seats needed for a majority government.
In fact, the Liberals could lose two seats to the Conservative Party of Canada and drop to 168 members of parliament if the count doesn’t go their way.
However, there’s also a chance they could end up one shy at 171.
Here’s what you need to know:
What is a judicial recount, and why are they called?
Per the Canada Elections Act , a judicial recount is a formal re-examination and recounting of all accepted ballots in the presence of a superior court judge from the province or territory in question, usually from within the riding itself.
The process also involves a second look at rejected ballots — those cast by registered voters but were improperly marked — and any which candidates or officials dispute to determine if they should have been accepted. Invalid ballots — those that were found in the wrong box or weren’t issued by Elections Canada, for example — are not included.
In addition to the judge and the returning officer, attendees include a recount team consisting of a handler, a recorder, and one scrutineer from each candidate (if desired); all candidates, their legal representation and up to two other representatives; and legal counsel for the Chief Electoral Officer.
The result, once certified by the judge, becomes final.
The returning officer for a federal electoral district is required to request a judicial recount when the margin of victory is less than one one-thousandth of all votes cast (0.001 per cent of the vote).
Such was the case in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne, which Liberal candidate Tatiane Auguste won by a single vote after a judicial recount was completed on Saturday.
Preliminary results on election night awarded the 24-year-old with the victory, but she ended up falling 44 votes short of Bloc Québécois candidate Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagne once results were validated, thereby necessitating the recount that began Thursday morning.
The riding had 840 rejected ballots, and of the 74 votes added to the total after the recount, 56 went to Auguste to secure the win and get the Liberals to their current standing of 170 seats.
A candidate or an elector may also request a judicial recount within four days of the results being validated via a signed affidavit explaining the errors or irregularities that warrant a recount.
Liberal incumbent Irek Kusmierczyk has done just that in the Ontario riding of Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore, where he is seven votes shy of triggering an automatic recount.
How close are the three remaining judicial recounts?
Even narrower margins than Terrebonne separate the current Liberal winners from their Conservative opponents in two of the three remaining recounts.
The process began Monday morning for Newfoundland’s Terra Nova—The Peninsulars, which newcomer and former CBC journalist Anthony Germain is clinging to by a mere 12 votes ahead of Tory hopeful Jonathan Rowe.
Before the Terrebonne recount, theirs was the closest race in all 343 ridings this election and had 597 rejected ballots.
A recount for Ontario’s Milton East—Halton Hills South starts Tuesday in Milton.
Preliminary election night results awarded the riding to the Conservative’s Parm Gill by almost 300 votes, but became a win by 29 ballots for Liberal Kristina Tesser Derksen after results were validated. Rejected ballots numbered 412.
Liberals were just 611 votes from a majority government. Here’s how
The last recount won’t begin until Tuesday, May 20 — six days before Parliament is set to re-open — and was granted after Kusmierczyk successfully argued that some of the 537 rejected ballots in Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore should have been considered because the voter’s intention was clear.
According to the Windsor Star , one example cited by lawyer Jeff Hewitt was a ballot marked with an X for Kusmierczyk , but also had the words ‘Irek did a good job’ in the margins.
Preliminary figures had the CPC’s Kathy Borrelli finishing 233 ballots ahead, but Kusmierczyk said Elections Canada later found four errors in howWin polling stations reported their final tallies, which reduced the margin to 77, leaving him seven shy of hitting the 0.1 per cent need to trigger the recount.
“We knew from the very beginning that we had questions, and we knew… there were ballots that had been rejected wrongly, and those numbers were adding up,” he told reporters outside the courthouse last week.
He said he was “feeling confident” about his chances.
Please see my statement. pic.twitter.com/47b2FIA8At
— Irek Kusmierczyk (@Irek_K) May 5, 2025
How likely are one or more of these seats to flip on a recount?
Based on past elections in recent history, it’s statistically unlikely, but not at all impossible, that a result could be overturned once a recount is complete.
Before Terrebonne, the most recent occurred in 2011 when Conservative incumbent Bernard Genereux lost Montmagny—L’Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup to the NDP’s Francois Lapointe by nine votes on judicial recount, one of three that year.
Six recounts were needed after the 2008 election, and the only one that bore a different result was in Quebec’s Brossard—La Prairie, where incumbent and initially reported victor Marcel Lussier wound up losing his seat to the Liberals’ Alexandra Mendès.
Should recounts result in Germain and Tesser Derksen retaining victories and Kusmierczyk reclaiming his seat in recounts, the Liberals will land on 171 seats in the house, a scenario in which a single floor-crossing MP could drastically alter the balance of power. Crossing the floor is the parliamentary process whereby an MP abandons the party under whose banner they were elected to sit in the House in favour of another party.
It doesn’t happen often, but there are a few notable ones in the past quarter century. In 2021, the Green Party’s Jenica Atwin bolted for the Liberals after a public disagreement with party leader Annamie Paul about the Israel-Hamas war. In the days following the 2006 election, returning Vancouver Kingsway MP David Emerson left the Liberals to take a cabinet post in Stephen Harper’s minority government.
A floor crossing has never created a majority government, but it has helped bolster a minority. When Belinda Stronach jumped ship from the Tories to become a minister in then-prime minister Paul Martin’s cabinet in 2006, it saved the Liberals from losing a confidence vote on the budget and fallout from the Quebec sponsorship scandal.
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