Much like many economic, social, health, crime, and environmental data sets, election results have an important geospatial component. For the 2019 federal election, Canada was divided into 338 electoral districts, each of which is represented by a member of parliament. Consequently, thematic maps – usually representing the “first-past-the-post” winning party – are a typical part of news media coverage of the 43rd election. The following examples were found in select Canadian media outlets on the morning after the election.
The Good
Canada’s vast geographic expanse makes it difficult to show the entire country in a map that preserves its internal shapes and sizes as much as possible. Kudos to the Toronto Star for publishing #elxn43 results on a map with a suitable, appealing projection.
From the source code it appears that the Star used the D3js Javascript library with an orthographic projection.
If you zoom to your local riding results, you may notice that this projection is not ideal for local areas. In the case of Toronto, the city is presented at an awkward angle due to the projection centre being located in the east-west centre of Canada, far to the west of Toronto. Since maps are primarily useful to examine general spatial patterns, not specific data points, I find that the properly presented overview map outweighs the issue with local zooming.
The Bad
All other outlets that I checked do not live up to the Star’s standard. According to the copyright statement on the map, the Globe and Mail used the Leaflet interactive mapping library with an OpenStreetMap base layer. The provincial breakdown of riding results is helpful to illustrate the increasing divisiveness of Canadian politics, yet the use of a Mercator map projection is not just unappealing but further emphasizes the size differences between small left-leaning city ridings and large right-leaning rural ridings.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) uses the US-based Mapbox “location data platform” with the same projection issue. A difference is that the Globe uses the actual riding boundaries including water bodies, while the CBC clipped the ridings at the shores – both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.
The Ugly
Maybe it’s just the way it is integrated in the National Post’s, Toronto Sun’s, and Huffington Post’s web sites that makes the Canadian Press’s #elxn43 results map “ugly”. When I loaded these newspaper pages, the map defaulted to full extent including all of Ellesmere Island in the most northern reaches of Nunavut. While we normally don’t want to cut off relevant geographic areas from a map, in this case it makes the entirety of the map all the more … ugly.
Maps can be a “centre piece” not only during election time but for many important political discussions and decisions. The following tweet by Jean Tong and the Ontario Association of Geographic and Environmental Education sums it up nicely.
As I am teaching two cartography courses this semester, I was compelled to take a critical look at published #elxn43 maps. Nevertheless, I appreciate the media’s efforts to visualize geospatial data and make them navigable for their readers. In interactive mapping, some cartographic guidelines become blurred. Maybe this critique will further stimulate improved map-making and underline the value of higher education and applied skills in the field of Geography.