Although the Canadian electorate is more leftwing than that of the United States, the two counties have similar electoral geographies (see the previous GeoCurrents post). In both the U.S. and Canada, population density figures prominently in the political divide: the more urban the location, the higher the vote tends to be for parties and candidates on the left.
There are, however, some important exceptions to this generalization. Canada’s three very sparsely inhabited northern territories, along with the thinly settled northern reaches of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec, opted for left-leaning parties in the 2025 federal election, as they generally do. Such voting behavior stems largely from the fact that many or most of their inhabitants are indigenous (First Nations), a group that generally supports the Liberal and NDP parties. A similar pattern is found in the United States, where sparsely inhabited but heavily indigenous areas in central and western Alaska, western South Dakota, and northern Arizona usually vote for candidates in the Democratic Party. (Urban Native Americans and those without reserved lands, however, have recently been trending in a decidedly Republican direction; according to exit polling, 68 percent of “Native American/American Indian” voters supported Donald Trump in 2024.)
The tendency for rural areas and small cities to support conservative parties is exemplified by southern Ontario, which has 94 percent of the province’s population on 14 percent of its land. As the map posted below shows, all but one of this region’s sizable cities supported the Liberal Party in the 2015 federal election. Southern Ontario’s rural areas turned, as usual, to the Conservative Party, as did Toronto’s northwestern suburbs and exurbs. In the Ottawa area, city and suburbs alike supported the Liberals. The one metropolitan area that went “blue” (“red” by U.S. conventions) in 2025 was Windsor, immediately south of Detroit. Intriguingly, the city of Windsor has long been a stronghold of the leftwing New Democratic Party. Note, however, the city’s light shade of blue on the map, showing that the Conservative victory came through minority support, owing to the multiple parties on the left. The Conservative Party’s success in the Windsor area has generally been attributed to the rising cost of living and concerns about public safety, but such issues are equally prominent in other Ontario cities, where the Conservatives gained votes but did not achieve victories. Windsor’s troubled manufacturing sector and its close economic ties with the United States may have contributed to its 2025 swing to the right.
Southern Canada’s major exception to the urban/rural political divide is found in Quebec. In the western half of southern Quebec, most rural districts usually support candidates in the separatist-oriented Bloc Quebecois, as they did in 2025. Although this party has some conservative aspects, it is usually classified as center-left (see the discussion forum for the previous GeoCurrents post). The Bloc also did well in sparsely settled areas of far eastern Quebec. But it was a different story in the lower Saint Laurence Valley in the southeast, where the Conservatives prevailed in rural areas and small cities, as they usually do. Although the Liberal Party triumphed in Quebec City in 2025, its suburbs voted blue (red, by U.S. conventions). Outside this southeastern region, support for the Conservative Party in Quebec is very limited.
The compelling question here is why most rural and small-city voters in areas surrounding Montréal support the socially liberal Bloc Quebecois whereas those near Quebec City turn instead to Conservative Party. Quebec City is much smaller and less cosmopolitan than Montréal, which is probably of some significance (Quebec City 2021 population, 549,459 city and 839,311 metro; Montréal 2021 population, 1,762,949 city and 4,291,732 metro). It is also much more francophone than largely bilingual Montréal. The French language and Quebecois culture have historically been more threatened in the west than in the east. Such precarity may have fostered protective ethno-nationalist politics in the west. Such reasoning, however, cannot account for the success of the Bloc Quebecois in far-eastern Quebec.
In discussion forums on Reddit, a different factor behind southeastern Quebec’s conservatism tends to be highlighted: rightwing talk radio. In the 1980s and 1990s, the radio-host turned politician Gilles Bernier gained influence across the Quebec City region. From 1984 to 1997, he represented the riding of Beauce, south of Quebec City, in the Canadian parliament. As Wikipedia notes, Beauce “has the highest percentage of people who answered “Canadian” as their ethnic origin in the 2006 Census” and has the “highest percentage of White people of European descent (99.3%)” in the country. The current influential radio figure in southeastern Quebec is Éric Duhaime, described by Wikipedia as both “openly gay” and as “a Canadian conservative columnist, radio host and politician serving as leader of the conservative party of since April 17, 2021.” The same article further claims that Duhaime “has been associated with radio poubelle(literally ‘garbage radio’), a style of provocative right-wing radio popular in Quebec.” But while it is tempting to attribute a conservative regional orientation to right-wing radio, one must ask why radio poubelle proved much more popular in the east than in the west. This importamt question deserves more investigation than I can provide.
British Columbia is another interesting place for examining the urban/rural electoral divide. Outside the three largest urban areas, Vancouver, Victoria, and Kelowna, only one electoral district did not vote Conservative in 2025* (Courtenay-Alberni, which supported instead the leftwing New Democratic Party.) But rural and small-city voters in this “left-voting” province proved to be much less conservative than rural and small-city voters in neighboring “right-voting” Alberta. In several districts of British Columbia, the Conservative candidate in 2025 won with less than 40 percent of the total vote (see the map posted below). The only dark-blue riding in British Columbia, with a more than 70 percent Conservative vote in 2025, is found in the northeast, an area demographically anchored on the agricultural “Peace River Country,” the core of which is in conservative Alberta.
Although the Conservative Party narrowly won most rural ridings in British Columbia in 2025, it had been a different story in previous recent federal elections. In 2021, the leftwing New Democratic was victorious across the province’s non-metropolitan western districts and triumphed as well in central Vancouver. Even in 2025, if one were to combine the vote tallies of the Liberal, NDP, and Green parties, western British Columbia would not be mapped in “conservative blue.” Some of this region’s electoral districts have large indigenous communities, which constitute more than a third of the population of the massive Skeena-Bulkley Valley riding. Overall, however, rural and small-city voters of all ethnic groups in western British Columbia tend in a leftwing direction The same pattern is found in several non-metropolitan counties in northwestern California and far-western Washington and Oregon.
Finally, most rural and small-city voters in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in far eastern Canada also favor the political left. Contrastingly, most of New Brunswick follows the more typical pattern, with the larger cities voting “left” and the more rural areas voting “right.” The exception to this rule in New Brunswick are several mostly French-speaking rural ridings in the north and east, which opted for the Liberal Party in 2025, as they usually do.
I thought it would be interesting to compare recent voting patterns in Canada’s Maritime provinces and in neighboring northern New England in the U.S. The map that I made is crude and impressionistic, but it is still suggestive. Extensive areas on both sides of this trans-border region have left-voting but mostly rural elecorates. The adjacent low-density areas of interior Maine and central New Brunswick, however, have a decidedly conservative orientation.
*The “West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country” riding might seem mostly rural on the map, but it encompasses West Vancouver as well as the ski-resort town of Whistler.