Trudeau faced public blowback for holding an election in the middle of a global pandemic due to his expectation that doing so could translate his supposed rallying popularity into a landslide victory.

The 2019 Canadian federal election resulted in the Liberals, led by incumbent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, losing both their parliamentary majority and the popular vote but nevertheless winning the most seats and remaining in office as a minority government.

Although the Greens increased their seats in the House of Commons, they ultimately failed to achieve the required number of MPs (twelve) for official party status.

[23][24] On November 6, 2019, the members of the Conservative caucus decided not to adopt a measure which would have given them the ability to remove Andrew Scheer as leader; his leadership would still have been reviewed at the party's next convention, which was scheduled for April 2020.

[90] Trudeau thus received criticism for not acting fast enough in the face of the 2021 Taliban offensive to evacuate Canadians from Afghanistan, as well as Afghans who supported Canada's military and diplomatic efforts during the War.

[95] Meanwhile, Trudeau attacked the new Conservative leader Erin O'Toole on the topics of compulsory vaccination for federal officials, abortion and the privatization of health care.

[99][100] The group Canadian Campaign for Afghan Peace launched an open letter on August 17 calling on political parties to take position of the new situation in Afghanistan.

He argues that the Liberals did not deviate from their government's existing foreign policy, while the Conservatives produced a lengthy list of reforms that one commentator described as "scattered and unfocused".

[105] There was thus a broad consensus among all represented parties for policies to mitigate climate change, although they differed in the emissions targets, the level of the carbon tax, and the transition path to a clean economy.

The Liberal party sought to defend its pandemic response, while trying to tie Erin O'Toole to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney.

The Bloc Québecois criticized the amount of money invested in Federal aid for workers, especially the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).

[109] The NDP, on the other hand, criticized the government's "aggressive" crackdown on possibly fraudulent CERB claims, while calling for clawing back wage subsidy payments to companies who fired their workers while received this benefit.

Before the election, Mainstreet Research gave the party more than 8 per cent of the vote,[117] and Abacus Data noted particularly high scores among Canadians under the age of 60.

[135][136] The English-language debate gained notoriety when the moderator posed a question to Blanchet that characterized Quebec's law on secularism as "discriminatory".

[137] On August 29, Ici Radio-Canada Télé hosted a special broadcast consisting of a series of solo interviews with each leader in turn, with questions posed by Patrice Roy, Céline Galipeau and Anne-Marie Dussault.

[5] In a federal election, a judicial recount is automatically ordered in a riding where the margin of victory is less than 0.1 per cent (one one-thousandth) of the votes cast.

Only Châteauguay—Lacolle saw its initial result overturned: the recount had Liberal incumbent MP Brenda Shanahan proclaimed the ultimate winner over Bloc candidate Patrick O'Hara, by a margin of only 12 votes.

Some political scientists and commentators debated whether the PPC's better performance, compared to the 2019 federal election, contributed to the Conservatives under Erin O'Toole losing to the Liberals.

Mainstreet Research CEO Quito Maggi and University of Toronto political science professor Nelson Wiseman posited that the PPC may have cost the Conservatives at least ten ridings.

[171] Important vote swings to the Liberals were also noted in ridings with significant Chinese-Canadian populations, with especially large ones arising in Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill and Richmond Centre.

[172] This was predicted early on in the campaign in polling by Mainstreet Research, which observed that they "were not supporting Conservative candidates in the same way they did in the last couple of elections.

"[172] While some commentators believed that this may have arisen because of the manner the Tories were handling China-Canada issues,[172] others wondered whether the abnormally large changes were due to disinformation activity occurring in the local Chinese-language media.

[182] During the campaign, Trudeau said he remains open to getting rid of Canada's FPTP if re-elected, provided there is consensus on the issue; he also expressed his preference for ranked voting over proportional representation.

"[187] George Chahal, elected in Calgary Skyview, was the subject of several complaints concerning the removal of campaign flyers of another candidate, substituting them with his own.

In a 2022 interview on the UnCommons podcast with Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, O'Toole opined that media outfits linked to the Chinese Communist Party could have cost the Conservatives up to "eight or nine seats.

"[190] O'Toole's beliefs were supported by Conservative MP and foreign affairs critic Michael Chong who stated that while the party was initially hesitant to blame China for influencing the vote due to inconclusive evidence at the time, he now believed "The communist leadership in Beijing did interfere in the last federal election by spreading disinformation through proxies on Chinese-language social media platforms that contributed to the defeat of a number of Conservative MPs" citing a report by McGill University.

Similar views were shared by O'Toole's director of parliamentary affairs Mitch Heimpel who claimed Canadian national security officers had contacted the Conservatives around election day to express concerns about potential foreign interference.

Heimpel also cited the example of former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu who had been targeted by a misinformation campaign by the Chinese social media platform WeChat.

Research into alleged electoral interference by McGill University indicated that there was no specific riding specific data to draw a full conclusion on the impact of potential interference and noted "Canadian-Chinese issues were not central to the campaign nor were they top of mind for voters" but concurred researchers had found Chinese state media had worked "with an apparent aim to convince Canadians of Chinese origin to vote against the Conservative Party.

[197] The survey's core questions were adapted from prior iterations of the CES to maintain consistency and focus on key topics, including voting intentions, demographics, issue positions, partisanship, and political engagement.