FIRST READING: Canadian youth just keep getting more Conservative under Carney

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Youth are now the single most Conservative demographic in Canada and an election decided exclusively by voters under 30 would be an easy Tory victory, according to figures released by Abacus Data.

The poll is yet more evidence of a uniquely Canadian phenomenon of young people becoming increasingly right-wing while the reverse happens among their elders.

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Overall, the Abacus poll released Sunday confirmed what every other pollster is finding: Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals are enjoying a near-indomitable lead, and would likely win any snap election call in a landslide.

Poll respondents backed the Liberals at a rate of 46 per cent – a 12 point lead over the Conservatives’ 34 per cent.

But it was an entirely different story among Canadians aged 18-29 – which is to say, Canadians born between 1997 and 2008. Those respondents backed the Conservatives at a rate of 42 per cent, with the Liberals in a distant second place with 32 per cent.

This means that an election decided exclusively by Canadian 20-somethings would likely install a Conservative majority government. It also means that a voter under 30 is second only to an Albertan in the category of Canadians most likely to vote Conservative.

Among seniors, meanwhile, the precise opposite phenomenon is underway. Abacus found that Canadians over 60 are endorsing the Liberals at a near record-high of 59 per cent, against the 26 per cent still backing the Tories.

The whole phenomenon is an inversion of how these things usually go. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian electoral demographics followed the more conventional pattern of young people favouring progressive options while older people favoured conservative ones.

The 2015 federal election, most notably, saw then Liberal leader Justin Trudeau catapulted into power thanks in large part to outsized youth voter turnout.

But the phenomenon of disproportionately conservative Canadian youth first began showing up in 2022, after Pierre Poilievre became Tory leader on a “fire the gatekeepers” leadership campaign that stressed the issue of housing unaffordability for younger generations.

In the immediate wake of Poilievre’s installation as opposition leader, Abacus Data published its first poll showing a plurality of 18-29 voters backing the Conservatives as compared to the cohort’s usual favourites of the Liberals or the NDP.

In the interim four years, polls have consistently shown Poilievre’s Tories doing best among younger voters.

One Leger poll from last November, for instance, found that a young Canadian was about as likely to vote Tory (38 per cent) as a rural Canadian (39 per cent) – and both were noticeably more Conservative than the average senior (34 per cent).

As to what’s driving the generational divide, young Canadians have been at the sharper end of some of Canada’s most conspicuous economic woes, be it rising rental prices or skyrocketing youth unemployment.

The latest unemployment data showed youth unemployment was more than double the national average. Last week, Canada’s dearth of entry-level jobs was most noticeably illustrated by a lineup of more 1,000 job seekers massing outside a newly opened Windsor, Ont., Costco.

The 18-29 cohort also neatly comprises a group of people most likely to have been affected by extended school shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. A 25-year-old voter would have been in Grade 11 when Canada first imposed major pandemic lockdowns in 2020.

Young voters are also least likely to care about the one issue on which Carney has typically done best: U.S. relations and the tariffs imposed on Canada by U.S. President Donald Trump.

An Abacus Data poll from last September, for instance, found that when respondents were asked about the greatest “threat” to Canada’s future, a majority of young voters readily identified “domestic problems” like health care and affordability, while a majority of voters over 60 instead identified “Trump’s policies and unpredictability.”

At the very outset of the current trade war, in January 2025, a particularly illuminating Ipsos survey found that more than four in 10 Canadians aged 18 to 34 would endorse some kind of union with the United States if it meant access to comparative U.S. prosperity.

Although 77 per cent of under-34 respondents initially said they would “never” vote for Canada to become part of the United States, that figure dropped to 43 per cent when they were offered the option of U.S. citizenship and the automatic conversion of their assets into U.S. dollars.

Canada is not the only developed country to see a rightward shift among its youth, but Canada remains unique for producing younger voters who are consistently more conservative than older voters.

In both the U.K. and U.S., for instance, polls continue to track the more conventional pattern of older voters leaning for right-wing options as younger voters lean for left-wing ones.

In the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, for instance, voters under 29 were largely a lock for Democratic candidates, including those endorsed by the far-left Democratic Socialists of America.

One of the few exceptions to the rule would be Japan, where conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi won election last year thanks in part to an explosion of youth support, with some polls finding her with a 90 per cent approval rating among Japanese voters under 30.

At the exact same time that the B.C. Conservatives appear to be suddenly poised to take power in B.C. after nine years of NDP government, the precise opposite seems to be happening in Alberta. The Alberta NDP is now tied with the incumbent UCP in a new poll by Janet Brown Opinion Research (both are polling at 35 per cent). The most likely reason for this being the issue of Alberta separatism, which is set for a preliminary referendum vote next month. (Voters will choose whether or not to hold a second vote on full independence). The UCP government of Premier Danielle Smith has come out strongly against separation, but the issue has lost her support on two fronts: Separatists who no longer support the UCP, and federalists who now see the UCP as too tainted by separatists. Luckily for Smith, however, her next election date isn’t for another year.

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.

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