Graphic showing surge for People's Party of Canada was aired by mistake
"Is that an 84 seat projection for PPC by CTV?" a March 24, 2025 post on X asks.
It shares an image that appears to show a February 28 election data analysis by Nanos Research, visualized by CTV News. The graphic supposedly depicts parliamentary seat projections that would put Canada's ruling Liberals at 96 seats and the opposition Conservatives at 129, with the PPC -- which currently holds no seats -- in third place with 84.
Different versions of the claim that the PPC outperformed the minority New Democratic and Bloc Quebecois parties in February 28 and January 1 projections by Nanos spread in videos and screenshots depicting the CTV clip on X, Facebook and Instagram.
The PPC is led by Maxime Bernier, a former government minister who quit the Conservative Party in 2018. AFP has reported on misinformation spread by Bernier and supporters of his party.
He enjoyed a surge in popularity from campaigning against Covid-19 restrictions during the 2021 federal election, but this did not translate into electoral wins for his party. As Canadians went to the polls that year, misrepresentations of election data graphics also sparked inaccurate claims about the PPC's performance.
A snap election was called on March 23, 2025, nine days after the swearing-in of Mark Carney as Canada's new prime minister following his victory in the Liberal leadership race. The vote is scheduled for April 28, with five new electoral ridings bringing the total number of seats in Parliament to 343.
The opposition Conservatives had been polling ahead for the past year, but public opinion surveys indicate the Liberals have been gaining support in recent weeks.
However, this shakeup has not contributed to any dramatic leaps in voting intention for the PPC, according to data from The Economist, CBC and 338Canada, which projected the federal election would see the party again fail to obtain a seat as of March 26 (archived here, here and here).
A spokesman for Bell Media, CTV's parent company, told AFP on March 26 that the graphic showing the PPC in third place did air on CTV National News and the CTV News Channel but contained an error.
"It was quickly corrected for additional broadcasts," said spokesman Rob Duffy in an email.
Keyword searches for the CTV broadcast reveal a March 24 video on the network's YouTube page (archived here) with the corrected graphic categorizing the 84 seats as "too close to call."
CTV appears to pull seat projection data from information available to Nanos subscribers (archived here). AFP requested access to seat projection data but a response from the research company was not forthcoming.
Publicly available Nanos reports from the weeks of December 27, 2024 and February 28, 2025 projected the PPC would receive 2.7 or 2.1 percent of the vote, respectively (archived here and here). The Nanos poll released on March 25 projected the Conservatives would receive 36.5 percent of the vote, the Liberals 34.1 percent and the PPC 2.1 percent (archived here).
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation impacting the Canadian election here.
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