Federal election 2025: Everything you need to know about voting in Nepean

Nepean riding cuts through Barrhaven and Craig Henry, now contested by Liberal Leader Mark Carney. Photo by Map by Dennis Leung; graphic by Sofia Misenheimer /PostmediaArticle content

Quick facts

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Size of the riding: 172 square kilometresPopulation: 122,305 (2021)Density: 711 people per square kilometreMedian household income: $121,000Median age: 30.8 (2021)Estimated number of electors: 87,292Knowledge of official languages: English (68.8 per cent), French (0.5 per cent), English and French (28.6 per cent), neither English nor French (2.2 per cent)Article content

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Where is Nepean?

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The riding sits neatly in the middle of the City of Ottawa. It stretches from Barnsdale Road in the south to the Canadian National Railway line in the north, and east from Highway 416 to the Rideau River. The riding includes the sprawling suburb of Barrhaven, along with the mature neighbourhoods of Arlington Woods, Craig Henry and Tanglewood.

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2021 federal election results

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Liberal: 27,348 (45.7 per cent)Conservative: 19,953 (33.4 percent)NDP: 9,700 (16.2 per cent)People’s Party: 16,31 (2.7 per cent)Green: 1,162 (1.9 per cent)Article content

Recent electoral history

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The federal riding of Nepean has been dominated by the Liberals in recent years. Liberal Chandra Arya won the past three elections with the help of the riding’s large South Asian community. Arya, an engineer and businessman, was the first member of the Liberal caucus to declare himself a candidate to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister in January. But the backbench MP was rejected as a leadership candidate by the Liberal Party, which deemed him “manifestly unfit” for the job without explaining why. His candidacy in Nepean was then revoked by the party — again without an explanation — just days before Prime Minister Mark Carney called an election.

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It has been reported that Arya’s candidacy was rejected because of his ties to India. In August 2024, Arya travelled to India on his own accord and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi while relations between the two countries were at a nadir. The visit came in the aftermath of accusations, levelled by Trudeau, that agents of the Indian government had shot and killed Canadian citizen and Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C.

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Who are the candidates running in the Nepean riding?

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Liberal leader Mark Carney is the first sitting prime minister to contest an Ottawa riding since Conservative John A. Macdonald, the country’s founding prime minister, ran in Carleton. (Macdonald won Carleton in 1882 and 1887, but sat as Kingston’s MP after the 1887 election.) Born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, Carney is an economist with an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, and a master’s and PhD from Oxford University. He spent 13 years with the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs before moving to Ottawa as deputy governor of the Bank of Canada in August 2003. The following year, Carney jumped to the finance department as senior associate deputy minister. He was appointed governor of the Bank of Canada in February 2008, then left that job after five-and-a-half years to serve as governor of the Bank of England. Carney won the Liberal leadership contest on March 9 in a landslide vote. He lives in Rockcliffe.