Young Canadians aren’t drifting toward conservative and far-right parties

When the Conservatives did unusually well among young voters in Canada’s 2025 federal election, even winning the national student mock vote for the first time in over a decade, one explanation making the rounds was that Canada was following what happened south of the border.

In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, young voters, especially young men, moved toward Donald Trump and the Republicans, a shift many credited to Trump’s strategy of going on podcasts and YouTube to reach younger audiences.

In Canada, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre would later do the same, appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast .

Some read that as Canada’s Conservatives picking up the same playbook , even though that particular appearance actually came after the 2025 election.

We reviewed results from nine elections in the Canadian Election Study between 2000 and 2025.

We wanted to know whether the same youth shift was indeed happening in Canada.

What we found was different.

Seniors moved the most The bigger shift over the past 25 years is at the other end of the age spectrum: a reliable base of older Conservative Party voters is largely gone.

For the most of the 2000s, age was one of the strongest predictors of how people voted in Canada.

In 2000 and 2004, the gap was modest.

The percentage of seniors voting Conservative sat in the high 30s, while every other age group clustered in the high 20s to mid-30s.

Then, in the Stephen Harper-era elections of 2008 and 2011, the gap blew open.

Conservative support among Canadians 65 and older surged to nearly half — 48 per cent in 2008, close to 50 per cent in 2011 — while every other age group barely moved.

Seniors were the party’s base, often ten points or more ahead of every other age group, and as much as 25 points ahead of the youngest voters.