The Conservative Party was widely expected to win Canada’s April 28 federal election. As recently as January 2025, the party was polling well ahead of the governing Liberals (see the graph posted below). But after U.S. President Donald Trump began calling Canada the “fifty-first state,” support for the Conservative Party plunged while support for the Liberal Party surged. In the end, the Liberals scored a relatively narrow victory, taking 170 parliamentary seats with 43.8 per cent of the vote to the Conservatives 143 seats with 41.3 percent of the vote.
But if the election was fairly close in terms of party politics, it was a different matter regarding political ideology. In Canada, the center-right Conservative Party is the only major party with a right-leaning political stance. But three additional parties are generally located to the left of the center-left Liberal Party. All three suffered major losses in 2025, as left-leaning voters rallied with the Liberals to prevent a Conservative victory. The New Democratic Party lost 17 seats, the Bloc Québécois lost 11, and the Green Party lost one, retaining a single seat. All told, the election might be considered a landslide for the left, with its four parties taking 57.7 percent of the vote against the Conservative’s 41.3 percent.
Although the Liberal Party scored decisive victories in eight of Canada’s 10 provinces, it was a different matter altogether in the remaining two: Alberta and Saskatchewan. In these resource-rich provinces, it was the Conservative Party that scored landslide victories, taking 63.7 percent of the vote in Alberta and 64.7 percent in neighboring Saskatchewan. As can be seen in the second map posted below, the discrepancy in support for the Conservative Party between these two provinces and the rest of Canada is profound. Outside of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Conservatives took more than 45 percent of the vote only in Manitoba, while in Quebec they received a meager 23.4 percent. As will be explored in later GeoCurrents posts, the nationwide defeat of the Conservative Party has reinvigorated a separatist movement in Alberta, and, to a lesser extent, in Saskatchewan. This development potentially threatens Canadian nationhood.
As is the case in the United States and Europe, rightwing political sentiments in Canada are concentrated in rural areas and in smaller cities and towns, whereas leftwing political sentiments are concentrated in urban areas. But again, Alberta and Saskatchewan are partial exceptions (see the first figure below). To be sure, the left did relatively well in 2025 in central Edmonton and Calgary, taking three parliamentary seats. In Strathcona, located in Edmonton’s university district, the social-democratic New Democratic Party came in first, as it has in every federal election since 2008. But as the map posted below shows, all other ridings (federal electoral districts) in the Edmonton and Calgary metro areas supported the Conservative Party. In Saskatchewan, the Conservative Party triumphed in all six metropolitan ridings, located in and around the smaller cities of Saskatoon and Regina, albeit with lower vote percentages than in adjacent rural areas. Such urban support for the Conservative Party sharply differentiates Alberta and Saskatchewan from Canada’s other western provinces, British Columbia and Manitoba (see the second figure below).
But as the map posted below shows, one highly rural Saskatchewan riding, which essentially covers the entire northern half of the province, gave landslide support to the Liberal Party (with 65.1 percent of the vote, as opposed to 25.5 percent for the Conservative Party). Not surprisingly, this district – Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River – is demographically dominated by indigenous people, who constitute more than 70 percent of its population. Other parts of Canada with indigenous (First Nations) majorities also voted for parties on the left, as will be examined in a later post.
