Canada Does Not Have The Same Racial Voting Polarization As USA

Print this article

Demographic data on Canada’s April 2025 election is now available, and the results are interesting. The Canada Projections Twitter account broke down voting patterns by factors including age, language spoken at home, gender, and education level – but the factor I am highlighting is the breakdown of voting patterns by race.

First, let us define the terms. “White” is straightforward enough, as is “Indigenous”. “Visible Minority” is the federal government’s strange term for all non-white people who are not Indigenous (in other words, non-white Canadians of immigrant stock).

Now, first note that the “Indigenous” category favoured the Conservatives by a wide margin – perhaps an unexpected pattern. At a brief glance, you may notice that the “Visible Minority” category favours the Liberals, but this is somewhat deceptive. Look closely, and you will see that white Canadians voted Conservative (blue square) at a rate of 41.01%, while visible minorities voted Conservative at a rate of 39.89%. This is basically a negligible difference.

Support for the NDP (orange square) and the Greens (green square) was also almost identical for white Canadians and visible minorities. The higher overall support for Liberals among visible minorities appears to mainly derive from much lower support for the Bloc Quebecois (fleur de lis) among visible minorities in the province of Quebec, rather than a preference for Liberals over Conservatives. In other words, while the April 2025 election results do point to some degree of regional racial voting polarization in Quebec, they reveal that Canada outside Quebec appears to be free of this phenomenon.

This is a stark contrast to the USA, where researchers in 2023 studied all 435 congressional districts across the country and found that “race explained 60% of variation in voting preferences for the last two presidential elections”.