Last November, after we made it through our thirteenth presidential election night, we decided not to spend another long one eating pizza in a local TV newsroom. (For the record, we polled internally on what food to bring in on election night, and the result was overwhelmingly in favor of pizza. The tradition is strong.) We have both triumphant and traumatic memories of election nights past. And not to have to spend months planning for another one seemed like the final call to make on the late drive home.

Leave it to our neighbors in the North to make us think about election night planning again.

You are hopefully aware of the events that led to Canada showing former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the door earlier this year, and then the new Prime Minister Mark Carney dissolving parliament and calling for “a snap election” in March. In just over a month, Canadians went to the polls this past Monday.

Watching the coverage from the national networks in Canada was eye-opening in some respects and so totally Canadian in others. We sampled coverage in the early hours of Tuesday morning from the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the nation’s public broadcaster, and its main rival, CTV, the nation’s largest privately owned broadcaster, a subsidiary of Bell Canada. We also sampled CityTV, the chain of stations owned by another telecom giant in Canada, Rogers Communications, and Global News. This Vancouver-based news operation is part of Corus Entertainment. All four of these news operations treated election night much as their southern counterparts here in the United States would, by dedicating the entire night to the “play-by-play” drama of the ballots being counted and democracy in action.

Like much of Canada’s daily broadcast news, the tone of the overall coverage we observed was very understated for the most part. There was little breathless urgency, even though the election was billed as perhaps one of the most important in the country’s history. The CBC and CTV featured large studios with casts of anchors and analysts who translated the unfolding story across the country’s six different time zones and nearly 10 million kilometers. (That’s just over 3.8 million miles for those of us who never adopted the metric system for measurements.) Global and City had smaller operations, but followed the same basic playbook.

We’d love to know if the name “Trump” was said more times during Canada’s election night coverage than it was last November here in the United States? Our estimate would be that it would be close, as the short but intense period of political campaigning in Canada became largely a referendum on whether Canadians had any interest in becoming the 51st state or take on navigating a massive economic shift resulting from the U.S. President’s moves to drastically alter trade relations with our long-time partner on our northern border.

Spoiler alert: Canadian voters surprised the Conservative Party, which at the beginning of this year seemed poised to end decades of Liberal Party governments. The Liberal Party and its leader, Mark Carney won the largest number of seats after adopting a “Canada Strong” campaign focused solely on resisting “The betrayal of our neighbors to the south.” But the story of election night in Canada for 2025 was the rise of two dominant parties and the weakening of others, in a nation that has long had multiple parties represented in Ottawa.

We focus here on what we saw from a television coverage standpoint throughout the evening. Every Canadian network had some version of the “Big Board,” made famous most recently by NBC’s Steve Kornacki. That is a large touch screen with very interactive and detailed map graphics. We’ll throw in an unsolicited and unpaid plug here for our long-time friends at Magis Media, who have made it possible and cost-effective for nearly any broadcaster to have their own local version of this kind of election presentation. Learn more about their offerings by clicking here.

The Canadian networks were not as aggressive in using virtual reality graphics and giant video walls as we saw in last summer’s elections in the United Kingdom and in other recent national election coverage across Europe. The CBC in particular did a great job with their coverage, led by their Chief Political Correspondent, Rosemary Barton–who was masterful in anchoring all of the unscripted elements of returns from “the ridings” (what Canadians call the districts for their member of parliament) along with live shots from reporters in the field and in-studio panels with political analysts.

That last element is something we’d like to zoom in on. Having in-studio panels of political analysts on an election night isn’t new, but here is one thing we took away from all of the Canadian networks we watched. There was far less reliance on in-studio interviews with other journalists about the election results, and more interactions with political insiders, be it former members of parliament or other party leaders. Those people were grouped in a single table of four, which was large enough to represent many points of view–without feeling like an overcrowded celebrity panel from an old episode of “Match Game.” (Check out the Game Show Network if that image doesn’t ring a bell for you.)

The Canadian election night unfolded much like recent American elections. While there was a relatively early call that the Liberal party would win the election, the drama that unfolded late into the night and well into the next day was whether the Liberals would capture the needed 172 seats in the House of Commons to become the majority party to form a government. Even for someone not familiar with the inner workings of the Canadian political process, the explanation and insight into just what was happening as the numbers moved back and forth into the early hours of Tuesday morning was fascinating. It made us remember when the legendary Tim Russert pulled out his low-tech whiteboard on NBC to declare “Florida, Florida, Florida” in the 2000 presidential election.

The bottom line we’d suggest remembering for your own election nights to come–you don’t need a studio cast of thousands, just enough people who understand the process and can talk about what it means in plain terms, without pushing any particular party rhetoric. Lock down those contributors early after testing them out in the months leading up to the election.

One final return in from Canada, the Liberal party fell short of winning the majority. Seems that their nation is pretty divided these days. Their political process will require negotiations and compromise to form an effective government Or, as one CBC analyst said with a wistful chuckle–“we could wind up right back here in a year to eighteen months to try this all over again.”

And we thought every four years seemed like an increasingly short interval for national election nights.