Parliamentary ridings

An electoral district in Canada, colloquially and more commonly known as a riding, is a geographical constituency upon which Canada's representative democracy is based. It is officially known in Canadian French as a circonscription, but frequently called a comté (county).

Each federal electoral district returns one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of Canada; each provincial or territorial electoral district returns one representative—called, depending on the province or territory, Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), Member of the National Assembly (MNA), Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) or Member of the House of Assembly (MHA)—to the provincial or territorial legislature.

While electoral districts at both the federal and provincial levels are now exclusively single-member districts, multiple-member districts have been used in the past. The federal riding of Ottawa elected two members from 1872 to 1933. The federal riding of Halifax elected two members from the 1800s to 1966. Alberta had three provincial districts that at various times returned two, five, six or seven members: see Calgary, Edmonton and Medicine Hat. British Columbia provincially had a mix of multiple-member districts and single-member districts at the provincial level until the 1991 election, and Prince Edward Island had dual-member districts at the provincial level until the 1996 election. With the exception of the Alberta districts, where single transferable voting was used, voters in multiple-districts cast as many votes as there were seats in the district.

Since 2000, there have been 11 federal electoral districts in Canada, each one encompassing at least one province or territory.