For the second time, TIME is awarding the World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025, in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data and rankings. The result of this quantitative study: 350 companies dedicated to the development and provision of educational technologies, encompassing both products and services. Here’s how the winners were selected.

Methodology

The research project “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025” is a comprehensive analysis conducted to identify the top performing EdTech companies in the United States. First, companies had to primarily focus on developing and providing educational technologies, products, or services. The 350 companies with the highest score were awarded as “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025.”

The ranking is built on two pillars: financial strength and industry impact. Statista gathered and scrutinized data from over 7,000 companies through desk research, online application forms, and collaborations with other data and market intelligence companies. A company received scores in each of these dimensions, which were then combined into an overall score.

For the first dimension, financial strength, Statista analyzed revenue, employee, and funding data, obtained from publicly available sources like annual reports, company websites, through media monitoring, and via databases. Additionally, company disclosures submitted via an online application form, which was freely accessible via the TIME website, were considered.

For the evaluation of the industry impact, Statista cooperated with HolonIQ and LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions to assess companies in different impact dimensions, encompassing factors such as:

• quality and impact of their product/service portfolio
• quantity and value of a company’s IP (intellectual property) portfolio

In addition, Statista researched various metrics around web traffic, to assess the relevance of the products and services to the respective target groups.

The evaluation process involved assessing all relevant companies within the global EdTech sector that exhibited above-average performance on financial metrics in their geographical region. Subsequently, the selection was narrowed down to include only those companies that not only excelled financially but also demonstrated significant industry impact within their specific categories. This selection process allowed us to establish our final ranking of the World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025. Once the data was collected and evaluated, it was consolidated and weighted within a scoring model. The final score was calculated as follows: 70% x financial strength score + 30% x impact score. The companies with the highest score were awarded as “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025” by TIME and Statista.

Alongside the list of 350 top EdTech companies, Statista and TIME are also publishing a “Rising Stars Ranking” highlighting the companies with the highest revenue growth rates over the past three years out of those who submitted company data via the online application process.

Applied criteria:

• company age 10 years and younger
• minimum revenue of 1 million U.S. dollars in 2022
• revenue growth rate of more than 20% over the last three years
  

Disclaimer
The selection of the companies and the definition of the evaluation criteria were based on independent journalistic criteria of TIME and Statista. The evaluation was carried out by the statistics and market research company Statista. TIME and Statista make no claim to the completeness of the companies examined.

The ranking only includes companies that qualify according to the criteria described in this document. A position in the ranking is a positive recognition based on research of publicly available data sources at the time and information received via an application process and through collaboration partners.

In addition, events after March 14, 2025, were not considered in the analysis. As such, the results of this list should not be used as the sole source of information for future deliberations. The information provided through this ranking should rather be considered in conjunction with other available information about a company.

The quality of companies that are not included in the ranking is not disputed.

For millions of people across Spain and Portugal, power was lost in an instant yesterday. Communications came to a halt, water was not running in places, metro systems ground to a standstill, and travellers were strained in airport departure lounges.

This morning, Spain’s electricity grid is almost entirely restored and all homes in Portugal now have power restored, some 18 hours later. The Madrid Metro has been busy as usual this morning, and residents in the Spanish capital cheered this morning as lights came back on.

It is one of the most significant power outages in European history, and the largest since a blackout hit Italy in 2003 that lasted three hours and affected 57 million people.

Read More: What to Know About the Power Outage that Hit Spain, Portugal, and France

What is believed to have caused the outage?

During Monday’s abrupt outage, it was reported that a possible cause could have been an astrological phenomenon, according to Portugal’s grid operator. 

However, Spain’s meteorological agency has since reported no such phenomena occurring across the country, nor any sudden fluctuations in temperature.

President of the European Council António Costa said on Monday afternoon that there were “no indications of any cyber attack.”

That conclusion has been supported by the operator of Spain’s national grid, Red Eléctrica, which has located where outages began on Monday. Two separate incidents of power outages led to instability in the grid leading to a “breakdown in interconnections with France,” leaving the Iberian grid isolated.

On Tuesday, Red Eléctrica ruled out a cyber-attack as the cause.

Investigations from both Portuguese and Spanish grid operators and cybersecurity teams are ongoing, but there is no clear answer as to what caused the outages yet.

A technical analysis to fully understand the outage could take weeks or even months, Kristian Ruby, secretary general of Eurelectic, a trade body, told the New York Times.

What was affected?

Everything from sport to transport was hit by Monday’s outage, with tens of millions affected. Tennis star Coco Gauff’s post-match interview was cut short as systems went down at the Madrid Open.

Metro services and trains across both countries were also halted, as well as traffic systems, causing havoc in multiple cities. Members of the public in Madrid were seen trying to get rides home from others as transport came to a halt. 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has said that his government will “demand responsibility from private operators,” in response to the outage while urging caution over misinformation about causes at this stage.

Sánchez said that determining the cause was essential so that a similar event “never takes place again.”

It was deep into World War II when Mark Wang’s father, who worked for China’s military intelligence, left Shanghai to meet with U.S. General Douglas MacArthur in Melbourne, Australia. Since China had no functioning consulate in the city, they chose to talk in the home of a prominent local businessman, whose family had first emigrated from China in the mid-1830s. In between discussions on how best to expel the Axis Powers from China, the pretty daughter of his host caught the older Wang’s eye.

“It was love at first sight,” says Mark Wang, the CEO of the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Melbourne, of his parents’ first meeting. “And that’s why I’m here!”

It’s a sweet anecdote that also illustrates how the fates of Australia, China, and indeed the U.S. have long been intertwined. While Australia has been inhabited by Aboriginal peoples for at least 65,000 years, the first European settlers arrived in 1788, with the first Chinese following just 30 years later. It was not always a harmonious melding with periodic race riots culminating in the 1901 White Australia Policy, which effectively halted legal migration from Asia to the self-styled “Lucky Country.” After that policy was repealed in 1975, Chinese immigration ebbed and flowed corresponding to the various crises that blighted the continent, from the Vietnam War, Tiananmen Square massacre, and recent crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong. Today, persons of Chinese heritage comprise some 5.5% of Australia’s 26 million people.

“The Chinese-Australian community are major contributors to our cultural life, economy, business, to every aspect,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told TIME in a February interview. “Chinese Australians have been a large part of our multicultural community for 200 years.”

And they may prove pivotal to Australia’s future as federal elections approach on Saturday. Polls have Albanese’s center-left Labor Party neck-and-neck with the opposition right-leaning Liberal-National Coalition, with observers believing a hung parliament—whereby no party reaches the 76 seats required to form government—remains a likely outcome.

The tight race has led to a surge in political advertising and campaigning on popular prominently Chinese-language apps such as WeChat and Red Note targeting marginal, multicultural constituencies in recent weeks. Since January, the RECapture Project has found more than 220 authorized Liberal ads on WeChat and about 35 for Labor. Even non-ethnic Chinese candidates have embraced the platforms, sharing videos of themselves eating Sichuan hotpot and drinking bubble tea.

Fan Yang, a University of Melbourne research fellow who leads RECapture, says that campaign posts are often sophisticated and appear tailored with the help of outside agencies. “Red Note is known for lifestyle and e-commerce, which means political content is less prioritized by the platform algorithm,” she says. “One way that politicians navigate the algorithm is to approach third party influencers to increase their online visibility.”

The fact that some neighborhoods with the highest proportion of ethnically Chinese voters are also the closest fought is galvanizing this strategy. The Labor-held ultra-marginal Sydney seat of Bennelong has around 30% residents of Chinese heritage and is now notionally Liberal due to a redrawn boundary. According to RECapture, Liberal candidate Scott Yung has appeared in more than 100 authorized ads since January. Meanwhile, Sydney’s Bradfield constituency has the fifth largest population of ethnically Chinese voters nationwide and has been inundated with WeChat ads for both main parties’ candidates as well as independents. Attack ads targeting both party leaders have also proliferated as the election draws near.

Still, the brazen courting of Chinese Australians—both Albanese and Coalition leader Peter Dutton have been recently filmed enjoying Chinese meals on the campaign trail—is a welcome departure from Australia’s last federal election in 2022, when anti-Chinese sentiment had reached an unfortunate peak amid a severe chill in Sino-Australian relations as well as COVID-related racism. According to a 2021 report by the Lowy Institute, almost one in five Chinese Australians reported being physically threatened or attacked in the previous year.

The pandemic marked a crescendo, but anti-Chinese bigotry had been building since around 2016, when then Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull ordered an investigation into alleged Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference, leading to an Espionage and Foreign Interference Bill the following year. A slew of high-ranking local and national politicians were subsequently accused of being in the pay of the Chinese government. The election of U.S. President Donald Trump on a Sinophobic ticket and his subsequent railings against the “China virus” and “kung flu” also helped normalize anti-Asian sentiment, say local community members.

In October 2020, Liberal senator Eric Abetz sparked outrage when he asked three Chinese Australians called before the chamber to discuss non-White parliamentary under-representation “whether they are willing to unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship” in what one of the participants subsequently denounced as a “McCarthyist” loyalty test.

Of course, anti-Chinese sentiment goes back to Australia’s Gold Rush period. In 1855, the state of Victoria imposed a £10 levy on every Chinese immigrant arriving in the colony. To circumvent this “poll tax,” many Chinese immigrants landed in South Australia and then walked the over 350 miles to Melbourne, which on the back of the mining boom was soon to become the richest city in the world.

In 2017, Jimmy Li, president of the Chinese Community Council of Australia Victoria Chapter (CCCAV), helped organize a walk to retrace this epic journey to raise awareness of the historical injustice. “One of the proudest aspects of Australia is our multiculturalism,” he says. “People live peacefully together, maintain their cultures, but also we connect, interact, and work together.”

It’s a view that has broad public support, with a 2023 survey finding that nearly 90% of respondents believed that “multiculturalism has been good for Australia.” Indeed, an internal review by the Liberal Party following their 2022 election defeat found that many Chinese Australians—which had traditionally backed the party—had shifted their support due to geopolitical tensions and the COVID backlash.

Under the Albanese government, bilateral relations have warmed significantly, and Dutton has also toned down his hawkish rhetoric, saying last year that he was “pro-China and the relationship we have with them.” Still, the pall of Chinese interference continues to dog this election. In recent weeks, both Yung, the Liberal Bennelong candidate, and independent lawmaker Monique Ryan have had to fend off allegations of CCP backing.

The question remains how to get more Chinese Australians actually into political life rather than simply being courted by the nation’s establishment. While Chinese Australians are active in philanthropy and local politics, the cohort remains underrepresented at the federal level. “It’s a work in progress,” says Yan Ma, a CCCAV committee member. “Politicians from every part of every spectrum who care about multicultural communities are actively recruiting Chinese speaking or Chinese background staff members. So that’s a good sign.”

Donald Trump’s name wasn’t on the ballots Canadians marked on Monday, but he looks like the night’s big loser.

Mark Carney won the election by running against Trump every day for six weeks, delivering an anti-annexation message that allowed him to bring the Liberal Party back from the grave, a sudden, 30-point turnaround without precedent.

In January, the race looked like a lock for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who had been leading the deeply unpopular Justin Trudeau in the polls for more than two years. Poilievre had convinced Canadians that the Liberals needed to be fired, and he was measuring the drapes in the Prime Minister’s office.

“Canada is broken,” he said, over and over again, and many agreed.

He put together a stable-looking coalition of support for his plan to axe the consumer carbon tax, defund the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, crack down on crime, and fire the gatekeepers blocking housing and free enterprise.

Then Trump started threatening to make Canada the 51st state, terrifying Canadians. Desperate Liberals finally managed to ditch Trudeau and replaced him with Carney. Overnight, Conservative support tanked, which left them wondering where they had gone wrong.

Ontario’s Conservative Premier, Doug Ford, has some ideas about that. A folksy, larger-than-life gladhander from suburban Toronto, he won a third majority government in February by promising to protect Ontario during the trade war. As a former fan of the U.S. president, he reflected the sense of betrayal that Canadians feel after their longtime ally and only neighbor turned on them.

Ford sat down with Carney for a friendly breakfast in a Toronto diner in March. The stuffy central banker and the down-to-earth businessmen got along well, and have formed a good-cop-bad-cop team trying to manage the never-ending threats from south of the border.

That gave Carney a crucial boost. “Ford signalled to voters in the Greater Toronto Area that Carney was a change from Trudeau, especially on the economy,” says Gerald Butts, an advisor to both Trudeau and Carney. “A bunch of voters who had closed their minds to the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau got interested in Mark Carney.”

Whereas Poilievre had been slow to react when Trump started calling Trudeau “governor,” blaming the Liberals for failing to take action on border security instead of forcefully rebutting Trump’s attacks.

That didn’t fly in Ontario, which does about $500 billion CAD in annual trade with the U.S., and almost 100,000 jobs depend on the auto business. Nor did it in much of the rest of the country. “We saw in a period of roughly six weeks, 8 million voters moving from different places to the Liberal Party of Canada,” says pollster Frank Graves, of EKOS Research. “That is not something superficial or casual. There was a visceral force driving this. That force was the recoil effect from Donald Trump 2.0 cavalcade of craziness that was going on.”

A swifter change in tone on Trump might have kept Poilievre in the race, but he has a reputation as a fierce attack dog, not a coalition builder. For years, Poilievre’s take-no-prisoners attacks on the Liberals were influenced by the MAGA movement, which made him a fearful figure for progressives.

That helped cause large numbers of voters who normally support the left-wing NDP and the separatist Bloc Quebecois, also on the left, to shift to the Liberals. The electorate has somewhat polarized, so Canada looks more like a two-party system, with the Liberals the bigger party.

Since Poilievre is so unpopular with much of the electorate, he had no option but to try to convince Canadians that Carney was unfit for office. But Carney, a rookie to politics, has a strong resume. He steered the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis, and then the Bank of England during the Brexit years.

Poilievre’s Tories called him “sneaky,” said he was “just like Justin,” and accused him of dishonesty. Their friends in the media even trotted out former British Prime Minister Liz Truss—whose premiership did not outlast a head of lettuce—to attack him, but nothing worked.

Carney can’t fire up a crowd like Trudeau or Poilievre, but his bland aura of confident competence has reassured a rattled nation.

And though Carney looks like a centrist, he has promised to increase spending beyond Trudeau’s record-setting deficits, arguing that Canada needs to build its way out of the trade war that threatens to plunge the country into a recession.

Poilievre had a shot if the election was about taxes and spending, taking steps to improve affordability, and get the economy moving, but Trump would not stay out of it. On election day, he posted a message to the “Great people of Canada,” urging Canadians to choose to become “the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America.”

Canadians don’t want that, and it will now be Carney’s job to make sure it doesn’t happen.

It’s easy to forget this now, but, not so long ago, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared poised to win the Republican primary. Mega-donors were lining up behind him. The New York Post, on behalf of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, dubbed him “DeFuture” on its front page. Polls showed him neck-and-neck with the scandal-plagued Donald Trump. DeSantis had, apparently, figured out a way to stuff Make America Great Again into a sleeker, less objectionable package, one that appealed to both traditional Republican business interests and the newly influential far right.

Then DeSantis bombed on the national stage. He was a terrible retail politician, his utter lack of charisma a death knell in the early-voting primary states. He dropped out in January 2024 after blowing at least $160 million without a single victory to show for it.

Something similar looks set to befall Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party. Canadians head to the voting booth today, and, if the polls are accurate, the country will elect a Liberal government for a fourth consecutive term. Just a few months ago, this would have been unthinkable. The Conservatives enjoyed a 25-point lead over a Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau. But then Trump started talking about annexing Canada, the deeply unpopular Trudeau resigned, former banker Mark Carney took his place, and a trade war got underway. Suddenly, Poilievre—who has spent the last several years remaking himself, and his party, in Trump’s image—started sounding like the enemy. Now he’s found himself in the very same predicament that DeSantis once did. The two men are an object lesson in the pitfalls of trying to do Trumpism without Trump.

Their similarities begin with their personalities. Neither man is exactly likeable. Both Poilievre and DeSantis look and sound like overgrown children, and that has made them vulnerable to ridicule. During his primary campaign, DeSantis was variously accused of wearing lifts in his cowboy boots, eating pudding with his fingers, and wiping his snot on other people. For his part, Poilievre appeared to stop wearing glasses after being compared to Milhouse from The Simpsons. (Unfortunately for him, Poilievre without glasses still looks like Milhouse without glasses.)

At the same time, both men struggle to talk like normal humans, especially when it comes to their pronatalist obsession with other people’s bodies and sexual proclivities. Poilievre, for example, can’t stop talking about women’s “biological clocks,” prompting a rival leader to quip, memorably, “I don’t think any woman wants to hear Pierre Poilievre talking about their body.” It would be petty to focus on their appearance and disposition were cruelty not so central to their political brands. Poilievre and DeSantis, both infamously thin-skinned, are the epitome of being able to dish it out but not take it.

Which brings us to another challenge both men face: they can’t stand up to Trump. Even as they copied his language and playbook, they couldn’t predict, control, or outdo the man himself. The basic premise of DeSantis’s primary candidacy—that Republicans wanted Trumpism without Trump—fell apart once the former president started hoovering up media attention and gained a wide lead in the polls. He was especially brutal with DeSantis, making fun of his height and name, and baselessly accusing him of being a pedophile.

Poilievre’s predicament might be worse. Even more so than DeSantis, he cribbed Trump’s talking points, railing against woke ideology and globalist elites so often that the Liberals, in an attack ad, intercut clips from Poilievre’s and Trump’s speeches, just to drive the point home. But his campaign has struggled amid resurgent Canadian nationalism and voters’ deep dislike of the president.

Over the past decade, the far-right resurgence around the world has prompted a lot of comparisons between Trump and other leaders. But most of these politicians—Hungary’s Viktor Orban, France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and so on—speak in their own vocabularies and draw on their countries’ deep-rooted traditions of reactionary populism. DeSantis and Poilievre, on the other hand, are mere imitators. This was especially egregious in Poilievre’s case; he imported culture-war dogma from the U.S. even as the Canadian government slapped actual U.S. imports with reciprocal tariffs. There has never been a worse time for a Canadian politician to sound American.

In some ways, both DeSantis and Poilievre are pitiable. They’re classic Napoleon-complex figures: minor men with big dreams and a self-regard at odds with the limits of their talents. Like DeSantis, Poilievre was thought to be the face of conservatism’s future; he’s reportedly told allies he has no right to lose this race. But it looks as though he will.

Of course, it’s possible that the polls are wildly inaccurate, and that Canada’s Conservative Party will somehow eke out a win tonight. But, right now, Poilievre, like DeSantis, looks an awful lot like one of Trump’s favorite insults: a loser.

A countrywide power outage impacted Spain—as well as swaths of Portugal and smaller portions of France—Monday afternoon, affecting essential services and wreaking chaos across the Iberian Peninsula. 

The cause of the outage is currently being investigated by Spanish and Portuguese officials and ministers. 

“We have activated the procedures planned for restoring power supply; in this phase of the work, the objective is to provide power to the generating units so they can start up and propagate power to the grid and other units,” electricity company Red Eléctrica said in Spanish in a press release on Monday. 

But in the interim, residents are experiencing traffic delays as traffic lights stopped functioning, the shutdown of nearby grocery stores, and other disruptions.

Spanish officials have asked residents to steer clear of the roads and only request emergency services in serious cases. Similarly, Portuguese police asked locals to only travel if necessary, warning that street and traffic lights could collapse.

“Something like this has never happened before,” Red Eléctrica told El Pais. Eduardo Pietra, director of operations for the electricity grid added that there was “no record of the cause of the incident” and that the company could not “speculate about its origin.”

Red Eléctrica shared that there was a drop in power at about 12:30 p.m. local time. Power began to be restored shortly thereafter, by about 1:00 p.m. local time. The restoration process, however, has been gradual, more than one-fifth of the peninsula has seen their electricity return thus far. The company estimates that power will return throughout Spain between 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Electricity is now available in some areas of Catalonia, Aragon, the Basque Country, Galicia, Asturias, Navarre, Castile and León, Extremadura, and Andalusia, Red Eléctrica told TIME.

While hospitals will continue operating thanks to generators, other sectors remain impacted. Transportation has been temporarily paused across airports and train stations. In a post on X, Spanish train company Renfe said that all trains are detained and will have no departures, citing the fact that the national electricity grid was cut. Portuguese airline TAP Air asked its customers to not go to the airport as flights remain suspended. Air Europa asked patrons to remain patient due to expected delays. “Flexible date changes are being made to assist all passengers,” the airline said in a post on X.  Spain’s flagship airline Iberia said that their systems were fully operational despite the outage, but were giving passengers the option to reschedule their trips given the problems reported at numerous airports. 

Renfe did not respondto TIME’s request for comment.

The outage also prompted the suspension of the international tennis tournament Madrid Open. 

Canadians head to the polls today to cast their vote in a snap election called by Prime Minister Mark Carney, in what may be the most consequential vote in the country’s history.

The contest has been completely transformed by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has launched a trade war on arguably his nation’s closest ally, and threatened to annex Canada and make it the “51st state.”

These actions have infuriated Canadians and helped spur a stunning Liberal comeback. The Conservative Party—led by the populist Pierre Polievre—had been ahead of the Liberals by 25 points before Justin Trudeau resigned in January and Carney replaced him as leader.

Read More: Why Canadians Are Giving Mark Carney a Shot

On election day, Carney’s Liberals sit at almost 43% in the opinion polls, compared to 39% for the Conservatives. The Liberals are heavily favored to win the most seats in Parliament. 

Here’s what you need to know about the 2025 Canadian election.

How does the Canadian election work?

The election was called by Carney on March 23, a week after he was sworn in as Liberal Party leader and therefore Prime Minister following Trudeau’s resignation.

The first polls have already opened in Newfoundland, Canada’s most eastern province, at 7 a.m. E.T. Polls in other provinces will open later, staggered by timezones. The last polls close in British Columbia at 10 p.m. E.T.

Canadians will vote for a candidate from one of the political parties in their federal “riding,” or district. Whichever candidate gets the most votes in a riding will become a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons, and the party with the most MPs wins the election.

The Liberal Party currently has a minority government with 153 seats, the Conservatives have 120, followed by the separatist Bloc Québécois with 33, the social-democratic New Democratic Party with 25, as well as the Greens with two, and four Independent MPs.

What are Canadians saying about Trump?

Trump’s dealings with Canada have angered many, with sports fans booing the U.S. national anthem and Canadians boycotting American goods.

Carney, who did not hold elected office before becoming Prime Minister, has taken a firm line on Trump. In his first address, he said: “We will never, in any shape or form, be part of the U.S.”

He recently revealed that Trump had brought up the 51st state issue in their most recent conversation on March 28. “The president brings this up all the time,” Carney added.

Carney has been vocal about his approach toward U.S. tariffs. After President Trump’s announcement of global tariffs on April 2, or “Liberation Day,” the former central banker responded with a promise of retaliatory tariffs.

Poilievre has taken aim at Carney’s approach to Trump and tariffs, arguing that he failed to secure relief even as other countries managed to.

But a March poll by Ipsos suggested more Canadians think Carney is better able to deal with Trump and tariffs. The Liberals have also worked to paint Poilievre as a “Maple MAGA” and “Trump-inspired” figure at a time of resurgent Canadian nationalism.

Read More: How Trump Revived Canada’s Liberals

When can we expect a result for the Canadian election?

The counting of ballots begins once polls close in each province and territory. Mail-in ballots can be counted ahead of polls closing if there is a high volume of them. This year has seen a record 7 million votes cast ahead of election day.

Early indications of the results should come after 9:30 p.m. E.T., when polls close in Quebec and Ontario. These provinces are home to the majority of Canadians, and could give a good indication as to how different demographics and ridings nationwide have voted.

The CBC usually declares a winner on Election Night based on results from Elections Canada. But a close contest could mean it will take more time to determine whether Canadians elected a minority or majority government.

What are polls saying?

At the start of the year, the Conservatives looked set for an election win for the first time since 2011. Support for the Conservatives had been on a steady rise since June 2023, amid a global anti-incumbent wave and anger over the cost-of-living crisis.

Despite hitting a low of 20% at the start of January, according to CBC polling, the Liberals are now on track to win the election. Much of this climb has been at the expense of the more left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), which has fallen by roughly 11 points in the same period.

The CBC is projecting 161-204 seats for the Liberal Party. The Conservatives are projected to win between 111-146 seats, the Bloc Québécois between 19-26, and the NDP between 3-15. The Economist’s election model gives the Liberals a 72 in 100 chance of winning an outright majority in parliament, which is equivalent to more than 170 seats.

The Lapu-Lapu Festival in Vancouver on Saturday was meant to be a celebration of Filipino heritage, but a car-ramming attack that killed at least 11 and left dozens injured has left the community reeling from tragedy.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as well as his election rival conservative leader Pierre Poilievre extended their sympathies, as did Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. after the attack.

The suspect was arrested and faces murder charges. Police say his motive remains unclear.

David Eby, the premier of British Columbia, a province home to some 174,000 people of Philippine descent, described the local Filipino community as one “that does nothing but give, has nothing but love,” adding: “The grief right now and the solidarity with the Filipino community is not just Vancouver, it’s not just British Columbia, it’s national, and it’s even international.”

“We are in incredible pain,” provincial lawmaker Mable Elmore said at a press conference on Sunday. “The Filipino community will show true resilience, and we will come together out of this catastrophe with the support and the love from the broad community, from all of you in the public across British Columbia and around the world.”

The Philippine Consulate General in Vancouver provided hotlines for those affected. But it also issued a warning to those who want to help against unverified fundraising campaigns that have emerged soliciting donations.

“It has come to the Philippine Consulate General’s attention that certain individuals have set up GoFundMe pages claiming to raise funds to support the victims of the Lapu-Lapu Day Incident, using a screencap of the Consulate’s official message as a backdrop as part of its material on the said fundraising page,” the consulate warned, declaring that it has not created or sanctioned any such effort. “The public is also advised to exercise vigilance and prudence to avoid being victimized by unscrupulous and malicious actors attempting to exploit this tragedy that has befallen the Filipino Community in British Columbia.”

Joel Castro, 44, who was at the festival and witnessed the attack, told TIME, “Just personally, I think I’m a bit traumatized. It’s not something that you could easily forget.” But he added that in the aftermath so far, “what I’m seeing right now is like a solidarity … solidarity from other politicians, other nations.”

Local community leaders on the ground tell TIME that the Vancouver Filipino community has rallied resources to support its members, asking those who wish to help from afar to exercise patience.

“There are sharks—I don’t know whether they’re Filipinos or not—who have used this tragedy, these people suffering, to scam people,” said Erie Maestro, 72, a founding member of local migrant worker organization Migrante BC.

“It’s only the first day after the incident. People are still trying to find out who got killed, who got injured,” Maestro told TIME late Sunday, as victims had not yet been publicly identified.

Maestro emphasized the importance of the “community rallying together” for both emotional and concrete support.

“There is more than enough” being done within the community, “from folks that are offering meal trains, social workers offering mental health support,” says Sammie Jo Rumbaua, 43, a board officer of local cultural organization Mabuhay House Society. “The focus is the victims and the families and how to give the help that people need right now.”

Mabuhay House compiled and shared a list of resources, including a site set up by local organizers to coordinate requests for and offers of support within the community in response to the attack.

“Please note there are no monetary requests on our forms, we just want to connect folks with each other,” the site says, though it promotes links to several GoFundMe fundraisers “directly going to the impacted families.”

Filipino BC, the organizer of the Lapu-Lapu Festival, also posted on its social media page contact details to crisis lines. “We are focused on supporting our community right now, in addition to experiencing this trauma,” the group said in its post. “We also want to make it clear that we discourage the viewing and sharing of the videos that are currently circulating of the tragedy.”

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A 30-year-old man was charged with multiple counts of murder on allegations he killed 11 people when he rammed a crowd of people at a Filipino heritage festival in Vancouver, as hundreds attended vigils across the city for the victims and the Canadian prime minister visited the site on the eve of a federal election.

Kai-Ji Adam Lo, 30, was charged with eight counts of second degree murder in a video appearance before a judge on Sunday, hours after he was arrested at the scene, said Damienne Darby, spokeswoman for British Columbia prosecutors. Lo has not yet entered a plea.

Investigators ruled out terrorism as a motive and said more charges are possible. They said Lo had a history of mental health issues.

An attorney for Lo was not listed in online court documents and The Associated Press wasn’t immediately able to reach an attorney representing him.

Those killed were between the ages of 5 and 65, officials said. About two dozen people were injured, some critically, when the black Audi SUV sped down a closed street just after 8 p.m. Saturday and struck people attending the Lapu Lapu Day festival. Authorities had not released victims’ names by Sunday evening.

Nathaly Nairn and her 15-year-old daughter carried flowers to one of the vigils. They had attended the festival on Saturday, and Nairn recounted seeing the damaged SUV and bodies on the ground.

“Something really dark happened last night,” Nairn said, as she and her daughter wiped away tears.

Emily Daniels also brought a bouquet. “It’s sad. Really sad,” she said. “I can’t believe something like this could happen so close to home.”

Police Interim Chief Steve Rai called it “the darkest day in Vancouver’s history.” There was no indication of a motive, but Rai said the suspect has “a significant history of interactions with police and health care professionals related to mental health.”

Video of the aftermath showed the dead and injured along a narrow street in South Vancouver lined by food trucks. The front of the Audi SUV was smashed in.

Kris Pangilinan, who brought his pop-up clothing and lifestyle booth to the festival, saw the vehicle enter slowly past a barricade before the driver accelerated in an area packed with people after a concert. He said hearing the sounds of people screaming and bodies hitting the vehicle will never leave his mind.

“He slammed on the gas, barreled through the crowd,” Pangilinan said. “It looked like a bowling ball hitting bowling pins and all the pins are flying into the air.”

Suspect detained by bystanders before the police arrived

Rai said the suspect was arrested after initially being apprehended by bystanders.

Video circulating on social media showed a young man in a black hoodie with his back against a chain-link fence, alongside a security guard and surrounded by bystanders screaming and swearing at him.

“I’m sorry,” the man said, holding his hand to his head. Rai declined to comment on the video.

Prime Minister Mark Carney canceled his first campaign event and two major rallies on the final day of the election campaign before Monday’s vote.

“Last night families lost a sister, a brother, a mother, father, son or a daughter. Those families are living every family’s nightmare,” Carney said. “And to them and to the many others who were injured, to the Filipino Canadian community, and to everyone in Vancouver, I would like to offer my deepest condolences.”

Carney joined British Columbia Premier David Eby and community leaders Sunday evening in Vancouver.

“In this incredibly difficult moment, we will comfort the grieving, care for one another, and united in common purpose,” Carney posted in French and English on X along with a photo of him lighting a candle at a makeshift memorial near the scene of the attack.

The tragedy was reminiscent of an attack in 2018, when a man used a van to kill 10 pedestrians in Toronto.

Witnesses describe how they leaped out of the way

Carayn Nulada said that she pulled her granddaughter and grandson off the street and used her body to shield them from the SUV. She said that her daughter suffered a narrow escape.

“The car hit her arm and she fell down, but she got up, looking for us, because she is scared,” said Nulada, who described children screaming, and pale-faced victims lying on the ground or wedged under vehicles.

“I saw people running and my daughter was shaking,” Nulada said.

Nulada was in Vancouver General Hospital’s emergency room Sunday morning, trying to find news about her brother, who was run down in the attack and suffered multiple broken bones.

Doctors identified him by presenting the family with his wedding ring in a pill bottle and said that he was stable, but would be facing surgery.

James Cruzat, a Vancouver business owner, was at the celebration and heard a car rev its engine and then “a loud noise, like a loud bang” that he initially thought might be a gunshot.

“We saw people on the road crying, others were like running, shouting, or even screaming, asking for help. So we tried to go there just to check what was really actually happening until we found some bodies on the ground. Others were lifeless, others like, you know, injured,” Cruzat said.

Vincent Reynon, 17, was leaving the festival when he saw police rushing in. People were crying and he saw scattered bodies.

“It was like something straight out of a horror movie or a nightmare,” he said.

Adonis Quita said when he saw the SUV ramming through the crowd, his first reaction was to drag his 9-year-old son out of the area. The boy kept saying “I’m scared, I’m scared,” Quita recalled. Later they prayed together.

His son had just relocated to Vancouver from the Philippines with his mother to reunite with Quita, who has lived here since 2024. Quita said he worries the child will struggle to adjust to life in Canada after witnessing the horrific event.

Vancouver Mayor Kenneth Sim said the city had “suffered its darkest day.”

“I know many of us are fearful and feel uneasy,” said the mayor. “I know it’s hard to feel this way right now, but Vancouver is still a safe city.”

Vancouver’s large Filipino population was honoring a national hero

Vancouver had more than 38,600 residents of Filipino heritage in 2021, representing 5.9% of the city’s total population, according to Statistics Canada, the agency that conducts the national census.

Lapu Lapu Day celebrates Datu Lapu-Lapu, an Indigenous chieftain who stood up to Spanish explorers who came to the Philippines in the 16th century. The organizers of the Vancouver event, which was in its second year, said he “represents the soul of native resistance, a powerful force that helped shape the Filipino identity in the face of colonization.”

Eby said the province won’t let the tragedy define the celebration. He urged people to channel their rage into helping those affected.

“I don’t think there is a British Columbian that hasn’t been touched in some way by the Filipino community,” he said. “You can’t go to a place that delivers and not meet a member of that community in the long-term care home or hospitals, childcare or schools. This is a community that gives and gives and yesterday was a celebration of their culture.”

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. issued a statement expressing sympathy with the victims and their families.

“The Philippine Consulate General in Vancouver is working with Canadian authorities to ensure that the incident will be thoroughly investigated, and that the victims and their families are supported and consoled,” he said.

The Philippine government is coordinating with local police to gather more details about victims and the investigation, while the Vancouver consulate has established a hotline for families, presidential palace press officer Claire Castro told reporters in Manila on Monday.

—Gillies reported from Toronto. Associated Press journalists Manuel Valdes and Lindsey Wasson in Vancouver; Teresa Cerojano in Manila, Philippines; Christopher Weber in Los Angeles; and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City, Utah, contributed to this report.

Pope Francis was laid to rest in Rome on Saturday with a moving, multi-lingual ceremony that reflected his humble approach to the papacy and the global adoration he enjoyed as the “People’s Pope.”

Hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the streets around St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican to pay their final respects to a man whose message, from the very first days of his papacy in March 2013 to his last on 21 April 2025, was that the church was a home for all—no matter their race, class, religion, or sexual orientation.

Presidents, cardinals, key world figures, and royalty attended the requiem mass held in front of St. Peter’s Basilica as Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re eulogized a man who spoke to everyone “especially to the marginalized, the least among us.”

“Rich in human warmth and deeply sensitive to today’s challenges, Pope Francis truly shared the anxieties, sufferings, and hopes of this time of globalization,” Re told an audience that included President Donald Trump, former President Joe Biden, Britain’s Prince William, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Read More: Trump Publicly Calls Out Putin After Meeting With Zelensky at Pope Francis’ Funeral

The proceedings were broadcast on large screens set up along the Tiber River and throughout the city to accommodate the mass crowds. Sister Margaret Wyrodek, of Poland, tells TIME that she wanted to accompany Pope Francis on his final journey because he had accompanied so many through their own difficult journeys. “He was the parish priest to the whole world,” she says. “He comforted the marginalized, the poor, the people who were abused, the people on the sidelines.”

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis was the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires and the first non-European Pontiff in more than 1,200 years. He was a man loved for his genial humility and how he ushered the Catholic Church into a contemporary era by preaching tolerance for those that the church had long denigrated. “He made it clear that all are welcome at God’s table,” says Patrick Gallagher, a gay American who has lived in Rome for the past 15 years. “Because of Francis, I finally felt I could be a Catholic again.”

Among the mourners clustered along the riverbank next to the Vatican were scores of youths wearing bright green T-shirts and scarves. They had planned to come to Rome on a special pilgrimage that was to culminate with a papal audience and the now-postponed canonization of Carlo Acutis, a British-born Italian who died of leukemia aged 15 in 2006. Acutis became known as the “millennial saint” for his devotion to the church and inspired a new generation of Catholics worldwide. Instead, they arrived just in time for the Pope’s funeral. “I am disappointed,” says 15-year-old Julie Brugnoni, who landed in Rome on Thursday with a delegation of teenagers from the northern Italian town of Cremona. “I was so excited to meet Pope Francis, because he loved teenagers. Instead, we are here to say goodbye.”

The teenagers appreciated Pope Francis’ commitment to raising awareness of climate change, especially how it impacts younger generations. In 2015, the Pope published a landmark encyclical letter to the Catholic congregation, lamenting environmental degradation and global warming, and warning of “serious consequences for all of us” if such trends were to continue. “He preached that if we want a better world, we must protect God’s creation,” says Alberto Razzetti, 15.

The group fell silent as they watched the proceedings on a screen set up on the piazza. Pallbearers dressed in black suits hoisted Pope Francis’ coffin on their shoulders. The simple wood coffin, lined with zinc and marked with a white cross, symbolized another departure from church tradition.

Read More: The Enduring Connection Between Pope Francis and a Parish in Gaza

Historically, Popes have been buried in three-tiered caskets made of cypress, lead, and oak and entombed under ornate marble fixtures in St. Peter’s Basilica. But Francis, who had taken a vow of poverty as a Jesuit priest, typically shunned the trappings of papal luxury. That vow extended to his death. Last year, he amended the rules for papal funerals, simplifying the process and ushering a more humble approach into the Catholic Church, something that further endeared him to his followers.

“It is just another demonstration that the trappings of wealth are worth nothing in this world,” says Ricardo Montalto, an elderly Italian man who sought refuge from the bright sun under a shop awning during the funeral proceedings. “Under God, we are all the same, whether we are cardinals, migrants, or poor.”

The pallbearers loaded the coffin into a white pickup truck, which commenced a slow journey out of St. Peter’s Square, followed by thousands of mourners. Pope Francis specified in his will that he did not want to be buried in the Vatican like most of his predecessors, but at Santa Maria Maggiore, a basilica on the other side of Rome near the central train station. The church is a Baroque jewel in an area populated by migrants, the homeless, and the poor—the people Francis had long sought to uplift. He made a point to pray at the basilica before and after every foreign trip, and often requested to stop there whenever he was on his way home from his increasingly frequent hospital stays.

Sister Maria Rose Pellicioli, an Italian nun from a school for the poor outside of Rome, waited near the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore for the funeral procession to arrive. She first met Pope Francis 12 years ago when she brought a group of her students for an audience, and believes that his blessing has kept her and her students safe ever since. Coming to bid him farewell, she says, was her way of thanking him for all that he had done for the world. For Pellicioli, the day was bittersweet. “We have joy that we knew him, and pain that we have lost him. But he is coming home to God, and in this way he stays with us,” she says.

Pope Francis’ commitment to outreach and inclusion was underscored by a hand-picked honor guard of migrants, Muslims, the homeless, prisoners, and transgender people who awaited his arrival at Santa Maria Maggiore. They were among the last to bid farewell as the pallbearers mounted the steps to deposit the coffin in a plain marble tomb marked with the simple inscription “Franciscus.”

The actual burial, next to a chapel containing a famed Byzantine icon painting of the Madonna and child, was closed to the public. Outside, the crowd started drifting away, with thoughts turning to the future leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

Read More: Pope Francis’ Complicated, but Undeniable, Impact on The LGBTQ Community

In the coming days, the College of Cardinals will gather in Rome for a conclave to elect Francis’ successor. The next Pope could extend Francis’ progressive legacy or return the church to the more dogmatic tradition embraced by his predecessors.

Francis appointed roughly 80 of the 120 cardinals who will choose the next Pope, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will elect someone in his mold. Francis’ legacy is mixed. He opened communion to divorced couples and homosexuality, and he restricted the Latin Mass, which he deemed exclusionary. But he stopped short of allowing women to become deacons. He also worked to make sure the College of Cardinals better reflects the modern church by including more representatives from the global south, many of whom are more conservative on issues of homosexuality, women’s rights, and divorce.

At the funeral, however, the crowd appeared overwhelmingly in favor of Francis’ openness to the world, no matter the specific questions of church doctrine.

“That’s why I’m feeling optimistic,” says Gallagher, the aforementioned gay American who has lived in Rome for over a decade. “Pope Francis shifted attitudes. I have seen how people embraced his goodness, how they celebrated his tolerance and humility. That will remain no matter who comes next. He has changed the [Catholic] Church.”