Each dot represents one electoral district
Canadian electoral districts (ridings) dramatically vary in area, and are distributed very unevenly around the country. There's also a large urban popluation with very small area districts. Showing them on a normal map like this elections canada map gives too much attention to large rural districts like Nunavut, while making it very difficult to see how urban districts voted.
One way to improve the map is to build a cartogram, where the electoral data is layed out as a map. There have been lots of good attempts at this including this from wikipedia, this from electoralcartogram.ca and this from attaboy.ca. All of them give an equal area to every riding, which gives urban ridings the same weight as rural ridings.
The issue with cartograms is that they distort the geography, and can make it hard to identify where each riding is actually located. Areas like northern ontario get squeezed down while the area around Toronto get stretched to fill most of southern Ontario. Another big issue is it becomes very hard to tell apart urban and rural ridings. If you're unfamiliar with a riding's name the map can't tell you whether it's part of a city, a suburb, or fully rural.
My map attempts to bridge the divide between the two. Unlike a geographic map, each riding gets exactly 1 dot on the map. There is some distortion to make cities larger and some unpopulated areas smaller (sorry territories). But unlike a normal cartogram I have kept the distinction between rural and urban spaces. Black areas represent major cities, with Grey areas marking greater metro areas. Dots are orthogonally adjacent if they are part of the same urban area, and are otherwise separated. For very large ridings I've tried to place the dot somewhere near the largest population centers, but also those dots are more separated from their neighbors.
