Canada’s new Conservative coalition resembles Donald Trump’s
On the surface, Canada’s election on April 28th seemed to preserve the political status quo. As in the last election, in 2021, the ruling Liberal Party will form a minority government. The Conservatives, the main opposition party, slightly narrowed their deficit in Parliament—the Liberals now hold 25 more ridings (as constituencies are called in Canada) than the Conservatives do, down from a 41-seat gap. The Conservatives fared a bit worse in the popular vote, losing it by two percentage points after winning by one in 2021.
Underneath this apparent stasis, however, lies a striking political upheaval. On average, the margin between the two big parties in individual ridings changed by nine percentage points from 2021 to 2025, twice as much as the shift in the average American county between the presidential elections of 2020 and 2024. Some ridings swung by more than 30 points. These yawning gaps added up to modest differences in nationwide results only because for each riding that moved right, another one slid leftwards by a similar amount.
The collapse of Canada’s minor parties accounts for some of this local-level volatility. The left-wing New Democratic Party fell from 18% of the vote to 6%. The right-wing People’s Party dropped from 5% to 1%. Yet changes in ridings’ third-party vote shares are only faintly correlated to shifts in the margin between the big parties. That means that huge swathes of the electorate probably flipped from backing the Conservatives in 2021 to the Liberals this year, and vice versa.
The Liberals’ stunning comeback from a 25-percentage-point polling deficit has rightly been attributed to a repudiation of Donald Trump. Nonetheless, riding-level results look remarkably similar to the demographic trends that returned Mr Trump to office in the United States. This is a worrying sign for Mark Carney, the Liberal prime minister, that Canadian politics is realigning along American lines.
The two strongest predictors of the change in margin between Canada’s two major parties are education and immigration (see chart). Holding all else constant, the Liberals tended to gain ground relative to the Conservatives in ridings with more university graduates and native-born voters. Conversely, they fell back in places with more foreign-born residents and voters who lack degrees.
The electoral-swing map of Toronto, Canada’s largest city and immigrant capital, looks almost identical to that of New York, its American counterpart. In both places the big left-of-centre party fared best relative to the previous election in and around the city centre, where educated elites predominate. The main right-of-centre party surged in outlying areas, home to working-class immigrants who deliver takeaways to those posher people and drive them around in Ubers.
Another factor that helps explain the results is religion, and particularly the war between Israel and Hamas. Conservative candidates frequently criticised the Liberals for being soft on antisemitism. And relative to what you would expect based on immigration and education levels, the Liberals fared unusually well in ridings with lots of secular or Muslim voters. Conversely, the Conservatives outperformed this benchmark by large margins in the most heavily Jewish ridings.
The Trumpian fog
On timelines measured in years, the trends are clear. Canada’s immigrant and working-class vote is moving firmly to the right. Mr Carney may take solace from the fact that his campaign managed to reverse some of this shift. At the start of January, before Mr Carney became Liberal leader, data collected by Abacus, a pollster, showed that immigrants favoured the Conservatives over the Liberals to a greater extent than did native-born Canadians. But by voting day that had switched, and immigrants preferred the Liberals.
Perhaps Mr Trump’s belligerence prodded “new Canadians”, as naturalised citizens are known, to run to a Liberal Party that has long championed multiculturalism. Perhaps Mr Carney’s brusque ditching of the most unpopular policies of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, won them over. Regardless of the cause, what is certain is less reassuring for the Liberals: immigrant support for the Conservatives fell from historic highs in the opinion polls to lower-but-still-historic highs at the ballot box. A quarter of Canadian residents are immigrants. It should not surprise Mr Carney if they make his successor a Conservative. ■