Final days

The last days of the campaign saw multiple Liberal blunders pile together. Turner continued to refer to "make work projects" and made other gaffes that caused voters to see him as a relic from the past. Turner even rehired much of Trudeau's staff during the final weeks in an attempt to turn the tide, but this did nothing to reverse sliding poll numbers. Even Trudeau himself did not campaign for Turner, instead only making appearances to support Liberal candidates.

Besides the Tories, the NDP also benefited from the slip in Liberal support. Under Broadbent, the party had seen greater support in opinion polling than ever before, and had actually replaced the Liberals as the second party in much of western Canada.

Notes

• Number of parties: 11
  • First appearance: Confederation of Regions Party of Canada, Green Party of Canada, Party for the Commonwealth of Canada
  • Final appearance: none
  • First-and-only appearance: Parti nationaliste du Québec

Further information: Parti nationaliste du Québec candidates in the 1984 Canadian federal election

10 closest ridings

1. Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON: Len Hopkins (Lib) def. Don Whillans (PC) by 38 votes
2. Ottawa Centre, ON: Mike Cassidy (NDP) def. Dan Chilcott (PC) by 54 votes
3. Nunatsiaq, NT: Thomas Suluk (PC) def. Robert Kuptana (Lib) by 247 votes
4. Prince Albert, SK: Stan Hovdebo (NDP) def. Gordon Dobrowolsky (PC) by 297 votes
5. Burin—St. George's, NF: Joe Price (PC) def. Roger Simmons (Lib) by 299 votes
6. The Battlefords—Meadow Lake, SK: John Gormley (PC) def. Doug Anguish (NDP) by 336 votes
7. Willowdale, ON: John Oostrom (PC) def. Jim Peterson (Lib) by 362 votes
8. Saskatoon East, SK: Don Ravis (PC) def. Colin Clay (NDP) by 417 votes
9. Humber—Port au Port—St. Barbe, NF: Brian Tobin (Lib) def. Mike Monaghan (PC) by 493 votes
10. Mackenzie, SK: Jack Scowen (PC) def. Mel McCorriston (NDP) by 555 votes

Liberals

Turner's inability to overcome the alleged resentment against Trudeau, combined with his own mistakes, resulted in a debacle for the Liberals. They lost over a third of their popular vote from 1980, falling from 44 percent to 28 percent. Their seat count fell from 135 at dissolution to 40, a loss of 95 seats—the second worst defeat of a sitting government in Canadian history at the time (after the 1935 election), and among the worst defeats ever suffered by a governing party in a Westminster system. It was the worst performance in their long history at the time; the 40 seats would be their smallest seat count until they won only 34 seats in 2011, when they also fell to third place in the seat count for the first time at the national level. Eleven members of Turner's cabinet were defeated.

Despite their hopes of winning more support in the West, the Liberals won only two seats west of Ontario. One of those belonged to Turner, who defeated Tory incumbent Bill Clarke in Vancouver Quadra by a fairly solid 3,200-vote margin. The other belonged to Axworthy, who was re-elected in Winnipeg—Fort Garry by 2,300 votes.

Particularly shocking was the decimation of the Liberals in Quebec. They won only 17 seats, all but four in and around Montreal. The province had been the bedrock of Liberal support for almost a century; the 1958 Tory landslide was the only time since the 1896 election that the Liberals had not won the most seats in Quebec. They would not win the most seats in the province again until the 2015 election (albeit they won the province's popular vote in 2000). In Ontario, the Liberals won only 14 seats, nearly all of them in Metro Toronto.

Progressive Conservatives

Early in the election, Mulroney focused on adding Quebec nationalists to the traditional Tory coalition of western populist conservatives and fiscal conservatives from Ontario and the Atlantic provinces.

This strategy, as well as denouncing alleged corruption in the Liberal government, resulted in a major windfall for the Tories. They won 211 seats, three more than their previous record of 208 in 1958-the only other time a Canadian party won 200 seats at an election. They won both a majority of seats and at least a plurality of the popular vote in every province and territory, the only time in Canadian history a party has achieved this (the nearest previous occasion being in 1949, when only Alberta kept the Liberals from a clean sweep). They also won just over half the popular vote, the last time to date that a Canadian party has won a majority of the popular vote.

The Tories had a major breakthrough in Quebec, a province where they had been virtually unelectable for almost a century. However, Mulroney's promise of a new deal for Quebec caused the province to swing dramatically to support him. After winning only one seat out of 75 in 1980, the Tories won 58 seats in 1984, eight more than they had won in 1958, their previous high water mark in the province. In many cases, ridings where few living residents had ever been represented by a Tory elected them by margins similar to those the Liberals had scored for years.

New Democrats

The NDP had a net loss of one seat, which was far better than expected considering the size of the PC tidal wave. Historically, third parties do not do well in landslides, especially in a first-past-the-post system that awards power solely based on seat count. Despite losing less than a percentage point in terms of total vote share, the NDP still finished with less than two-thirds of the Liberals' popular vote. However, the NDP vote proved itself to be much more efficient since it was not as evenly distributed across the country. While they were a distant third everywhere east of Ontario, the NDP won only one seat fewer than the Liberals in Ontario despite finishing a distant third there as well. In Western Canada, the NDP lost seats to the Tories but was by far the second-largest party behind the Tories. Some NDP incumbents essentially held on to their own share of the vote, and simply had to survive a swing from Liberal to PC which in many cases proved insufficient to unseat the sitting NDP MP.

More importantly, their 30 seats were only ten behind the Liberals. Although the NDP had long since established itself as the third major party in Canada, this was closer than any party had gotten to the Grits or Tories since 1921, when the Progressive Party briefly surpassed the Tories. This led to speculation that Canada was headed for a UK-style Labour–Conservative division, with the NDP knocking the Liberals down to third-party status. It would be as close as the NDP would get to becoming the Official Opposition until 2011, when the party gained the second-most seats in the House of Commons and the majority of seats in Quebec.

Other parties

The Social Credit Party, which for a long time had been the country's fourth-largest (and occasionally even third-largest) party, suffered a massive drop-off in support from the previous election, in which they had already lost a major share of the vote and all their remaining MPs. Having performed poorly in various by-elections in the years that followed, the party suffered a blow to its image in June 1983, when the party executive voted to re-admit a faction led by Holocaust denier James Keegstra. Party leader Martin Hattersley resigned in protest and was replaced by Ken Sweigard, who publicly endorsed Keegstra's role in the party (if not his personal views) and allowed him to run as the Social Credit candidate in Red Deer. This, along with Sweigard instituting a new party-wide policy of not engaging with the press, caused the drop in support that had begun at the previous election to accelerate dramatically.^[5]

In Quebec, most of the support which had helped keep the party viable in its final years turned to the Progressive Conservatives. The party essentially disappeared there—even among ridings the party had won as recently as 1979, it could field only one candidate (who finished in last place). What remained of Social Credit essentially reverted to being a western-based party, which was only able to run 52 candidates in 51 ridings (with two Socreds standing in a British Columbia seat), none of whom came even close to being elected. It was its second-smallest slate since first running candidates east of Manitoba four decades earlier, and barely enough to allow Social Credit to retain its party registration. The party lost 92 percent of its vote from 1980 and dropped from fourth place to ninth in the popular vote. For all intents and purposes, this was the end of Social Credit as a viable national party. It would make a desultory final appearance in 1988 before collapsing altogether in 1993.

The satirical Rhinoceros Party, despite a slight drop in their popular vote tally from the previous election, recorded its highest-ever finish at a general election, finishing as the fourth-largest party. Of the minor parties, only the Parti nationaliste du Québec and the Confederation of Regions Party of Canada managed to record more votes per candidate than the Rhinos, and even then only by small margins.

The Parti nationaliste du Québec, a successor to the previous Quebec-nationalist Union populaire party, ran for the first (and, ultimately, only) time in this election. Despite getting nearly six times the votes that their predecessors did in 1980, and finishing fifth in the popular vote, like the Socreds they proved unable to compete with the Progressive Conservatives, and failed to win any seats. The party would eventually collapse in 1987, though several of its members, along with dissident Tories and Liberals, would go on to found the more successful Bloc Québécois.

The Confederation of Regions Party of Canada, formed mostly by disaffected former Socreds, were another party who debuted in this election. While they placed sixth in the popular vote and attracted a little over quadruple the vote of their forerunners, they still failed to seriously challenge for any seats. Much like the Socreds, they too disappeared from the national scene after 1988, though they continued on a regional level for several years afterwards.