The Political Geography of Immigration: Party Competition for Immigrants’ Votes in Canada, 1997–2019

The Development of the Urban-Rural Cleavage in Anglo-American Democracies

“…Compositionally, Canada’s urban regions are now extremely ethnically diverse, with the three largest metro areas absorbing the overwhelming majority of the country’s large immigration totals each year. While patterns of party support within Canada’s immigrant population are diverse, and the Conservative Party has made serious efforts to attract the immigrant vote, the Liberal Party has enjoyed a longstanding advantage among immigrant voters ( Taylor, 2021 ). The Liberals also have a strong advantage among the highly educated, who are concentrated in cities.…”

Voting Behaviour in Canada: The State of the Discipline

“…The Canadian Election Studies (CES) approach to measuring racial identity has also been problematic. First, it used to mix cultural and geographic labels (Taylor, 2021), leading studies to use non-European origin as a proxy for belonging to a racialized minority. Second, it failed to recognize that identity should be "what the individual says it is rather than a product of external assignment" (Thompson, 2012(Thompson, : 1414.…”

Policy Success in Canada

“…The fact that both the 1976 Immigration Act and the IRPA are framework laws has further enabled the exercise of executive power and discretion. Third, the pro-immigration consensus among Canada's major political parties is based on a fortuitous concatenation of immigration settlement patterns, citizenship policy, and Canada's Single Member Plurality (SMP) electoral system Taylor, 2021). The overwhelming majority of Canada's immigrants settle in the most densely populated parts of the country, also home to the greatest concentration of federal electoral ridings.…”

“…Small swings in the vote preferences of regionally concentrated groups can translate into large swings in the seat counts of competing parties, particularly when those groups are concentrated in areas with a significant share of competitive seats (Linzer, 2012). Immigration since the 1990s has amplified this basic effect of the electoral system (Westlake, 2018;Taylor, 2021). The growth and concentration of immigrant and visible minority voters in urban Canada, generally, and the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA), in particular, has transformed these ridings into electoral battlegrounds that no party interested in governing can afford to ignore.…”