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

ABSTRACT

Why has the Conservative Party of Canada largely supported high immigration rates and multiculturalism, and put considerable effort into recruiting New Canadians into its electoral coalition? More generally, why is Canada perhaps the only Western democracy without a major, consistently anti-immigrant or nativist party? I argue that none of Canada’s major national parties have adopted an anti-immigration or nativist platform because of incentives established by the interaction of the concentrated metropolitan geography of immigrant settlement, the geography of representation under the single-member plurality electoral system, and the regionalization of parties’ support bases. I demonstrate that Canada’s national parties have a strong incentive to reduce the cost of assembling electoral coalitions by appealing to densely institutionalized cultural communities, principally in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

KEYWORDS:

• Political geography
• immigration
• voting behavior
• party strategy
• ethnic voting

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Phil Triadafilopoulos and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, Reform’s 1996–97 “Blue Book” policies and principles document links immigration rates to the unemployment rate, proposes to restrict family reunification, and describes culture as a private matter in which the state should have no involvement (Reform Party of Canada 1996). The Canadian Alliance’s 2000 platform pledged to “maintain the current level of immigration” while “locking it tight to those who would abuse the system” (Canadian Alliance 2000, 22).

2. Calculated from Statistics Canada’s 1996 and 2016 Public-Use Microdata Files. All computations, use, and interpretation of these data are entirely those of the author.

3. A riding is coded as metropolitan if at least 75% of its population is located within a Statistics Canada-designated census metropolitan area. This calculation is performed separately for the 1996, 2003, and 2013 representation orders. Seats in the territories are excluded from the analysis. All demographic data is from the Census of Population, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016, Statistics Canada. Election results are from Elections Canada (n.d.).

4. Census data reported in this paragraph pertain to 2016 and the 2013 representation order.

5. These seat shifts across elections are directly comparable because the 2004 through 2011 elections were held under the same representation order.

6. As the 2006 survey did not include a visible minority question, the 2006 data in the vote choice models is constructed from the 2008 survey, which asks which party respondents voted for the previous election.

Additional information

Funding

The author reports no funding for the preparation of this article.

Notes on contributors

Zack Taylor

Zack Taylor is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance at the University of Western Ontario. His research interests are on urban politics and political geography.