FIRST READING: Immigrants denied Carney his majority

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. TOP STORY The immigrant vote, long considered a reliable vote store for the Liberal Party, is quickly emerging as an important factor in having denied Prime Minister Mark Carney his expected majority. Not only did immigrants break for the Tories in any number of pre-election polls, but immigrant-heavy ridings were the most likely to see their share of the Conservative vote increase as compared to 2021. An analysis published Thursday by The Economist found that among the 31 Toronto-area ridings whose population was at least 40 per cent immigrants, almost all of them experienced a shift to the Conservatives as compared to the 2021 federal election. The reverse was true in ridings where the Liberals picked up support. The fewer new Canadians in a riding, the more likely they were to flip red. The Economist concluded that while Canada’s 2025 election yielded effectively the same result as in 2021, underneath the surface the country had undergone an electoral realignment similar to what’s occurred in the United States. “Just as in the United States, working-class and immigrant voters swung right,” wrote the publication. “The immigrant community of Canada just blocked the Liberals from forming a majority,” declared Angelo Isidorou, executive director of the B.C. Conservative Party, in a post-election assessment. “These new Canadians share our conservative values of hard work and the Canadian dream.” The B.C. Conservatives experienced a similar phenomenon in their own election in October. Although they lost to the B.C. NDP, the party saw its most dramatic gains in the immigrant-heavy suburbs of Metro Vancouver. Mainstreet Research polls leading up to the Oct. 19 vote also found that the B.C. Conservatives were conspicuously preferred by non-white voters, be they Black, East Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern or South Asian. This trend wasn’t as noticeable in Monday’s federal election, as the Liberals were able to capitalize on a wholesale collapse in NDP support and head off Conservative gains. But the trend was there: A comprehensive map of 2025 Liberal-Conservative vote shifts making the rounds on reddit on Thursday showed that the more immigrant and non-white a Vancouver riding, the harder their shift to the Conservatives. One of the few Canadian ridings to flip from Liberal to Conservative on Monday, in fact, was the majority Chinese-Canadian riding of Richmond Centre—Marpole. In the final week of the campaign, a survey by Innovative Research Group had noted that B.C.’s Chinese-Canadians had been emerging as far more Conservative than average , with this support almost entirely concentrated among first-generation immigrants. Among Chinese-Canadians who had immigrated to Canada since 2011, Conservative support stood at an overwhelming 65 per cent. This was compared to just 18 per cent of Canadian-born Chinese-Canadians. Conversely, the B.C. capital of Victoria has long charted rates of ethnic diversity and new immigration that were well below the national average. On Monday, the city ended up posting some of the most dramatic vote shifts to the Liberals in the country. The 2025 election also saw a noticeable shift among younger voters, with a plurality of Canadians under 34 supporting the Conservatives. A post-election Nanos poll concluded that 41 per cent of Canadians under 34 voted Conservative, against 32 per cent who voted Liberal. Among the over-55 cohort, meanwhile, the Liberals dominated at 52 per cent to the Conservatives’ 34 per cent. The 2025 election thus represents one of the few times in Canadian history where the average 25-year-old was more likely to vote Conservative than the average 65-year-old — and where the average immigrant was more likely to vote Conservative than the average native-born Canadian. As to why both groups are shifting right at the same time, one explanation is that both have been disproportionately vulnerable to the decline in living standards that has defined Canada’s last 10 years, particularly in the area of housing affordability. Increasingly unaffordable homes have not only shut out young people from real estate ownership, but large numbers of new Canadians. A July 2024 poll published by the Angus Reid Institute found that recent immigrants were some of the most likely to report being overwhelmed by high shelter costs. “Many recent immigrants are departing the country because of the high cost of living, and especially housing,” read an accompanying analysis. A Leger poll from that same year found that 84 per cent of recent immigrants to Canada reported that they found life “more expensive” than they’d anticipated. New Canadians have also started to emerge as prominent opponents of some of Canada’s more liberal social policies, including harm reduction, repeat bail for chronic offenders and even lax integration of other immigrants . This was highlighted by Abacus Data’s David Coletto in a comprehensive Friday breakdown of how the election fared in the Toronto suburbs, where Coletto concluded that — even in the face of a nationwide Liberal upsurge — Conservatives “maintained their base and grew it.” Coletto pointed to large populations of South Asian and Chinese Canadian voters in the suburbs bordering the City of Toronto and said they jibed with the “cultural conversatism” represented by the Tories. “They value family, faith, entrepreneurship, and community order,” wrote Coletto. “For many, the Liberals’ progressive stances on gender, parental rights, and criminal justice reform felt out of touch.”   IN OTHER NEWS The King is coming to Canada. Although King Charles III has been our head of state for more than two and a half years at this point, he hasn’t yet made a trip to Canada, which is somewhat understandable given that he was diagnosed with cancer early last year. But Prime Minister Mark Carney, who spent a lot of time with the King while governor of the Bank of England, appears to have convinced him to read the speech from the throne when Parliament reconvenes on May 27.

Ujjal Dosanjh is one of the only Canadians who might be able to empathize with what just happened to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. In 2000, Dosanjh was leader of the B.C. NDP when it suffered one of the most lopsided defeats in Canadian history, going from a majority government to just two seats. But Dosanjh, who also served as minister of health under then prime minister Paul Martin, didn’t mention any of that in a recent blog post . Instead, he welcomed the new government of Mark Carney, said he trusted him on fiscal issues, but warned the Liberals to be more diligent about requiring new immigrants to assimilate. “We need immigrants but not the kind that tell us to bend to their whims, religious or otherwise,” he wrote. “I hope Mr. Carney doesn’t believe one can come to Canada and not change even a bit and be in Canada ‘who you were where ever you were.’”

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