What Is a Riding in Canada? — Electoral Districts Explained

# What Is a Riding in Canada? — Electoral Districts Explained

A riding is an electoral district — the geographic area that elects one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons. The word is sometimes confusing for newcomers, so this guide breaks it down with everything you need for the citizenship test.

A riding is one of 338 areas Canada is divided into for federal elections. Each riding sends one MP to Ottawa. Three terms mean the same thing:

• Riding (most common Canadian term)
• Electoral district (legal term)
• Constituency (UK and parliamentary term)

You can hear all three on TV during election coverage — they refer to the same thing.

On election day:

1. Each voter goes to a poll inside their own riding.
2. They pick one candidate running in that riding.
3. The candidate with the most votes wins the riding and becomes its MP — even without a majority of votes.
4. The winners from all 338 ridings sit in the House of Commons.
5. The party with the most seats forms the government.

This system is called first-past-the-post. See [How Does a Canadian Federal Election Work?](/blog/canadian-federal-election-how-it-works) for more.

Ridings are designed to have roughly equal populations — about 110,000 people on average — so each MP represents a similar number of Canadians. But the Constitution guarantees each province a minimum number of seats, so the math is not perfect:

• Urban ridings in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver are geographically small and densely populated.
• Rural and northern ridings are huge — Nunavut is one riding the size of all of Western Europe combined.

After every 10-year census, independent provincial commissions redraw riding boundaries to reflect population shifts. Public hearings let voters and political parties weigh in. This keeps the system fair as Canada grows and people move between regions.

The most recent redistribution took effect for the 2015 federal election (when seats grew from 308 to 338). The next redistribution, based on the 2021 census, will take effect for upcoming elections.

The term comes from the Old English *þriding* — meaning a "third division" of Yorkshire in medieval England. It travelled with English settlers to Canada and stuck around as the informal name for an electoral district. It has nothing to do with horseback riding.

Common citizenship-test questions:

• What is a riding? *(An electoral district — see [How Many MPs Are in the House of Commons?](/blog/how-many-mps-canada-house-of-commons))*
• How many ridings does Canada have? *(338)*
• Who represents your riding? *(Your MP — you can look this up by postal code on the Elections Canada website.)*

Try our [free practice test](/practice-test) — it covers ridings, MPs, and the rest of the federal-election system in the same format you will see on test day.