After months of political decline, the Liberal Party of Canada is showing signs of recovery, buoyed, some suggest, by a surge of national pride in the face of Donald Trump’s tariff war and threats to Canadian sovereignty.
But this apparent rebound obscures a more surprising political shift: the growing appeal of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) among immigrants and their children.
Traditionally, immigrant and visible minority communities have supported the centrist Liberal Party. In the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), where over half of all residents identify as “visible minority” (the category used by StatCan), Chinese and South Asian Canadians have long formed a key part of the Liberal base.
Yet recent polling tells a different story. An October 2024 survey found that 45 per cent of immigrants had changed their political allegiances since arriving in Canada, with many now leaning Conservative.
Meanwhile, another national survey from January 2025 found that a majority of East Asian (55 per cent) and South Asian (56 per cent) respondents expressed support for the Conservative Party, far outpacing support for the Liberals or the NDP.
Nationally, racialized citizens now make up over 26 per cent of Canada’s population, with South Asians and Chinese Canadians the two largest groups.
While detailed racial breakdowns remain rare in Canadian polling, the few available data points suggest a meaningful shift. This pattern also reflects a broader trend: South Asian and Chinese Canadians in the GTA are increasingly politically active, with rising turnout and growing partisan diversification.
Author:
- Emine Fidan Elcioglu | Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto
I have doubts about a pursuit of whiteness and model minority stereotyping. No matter what immigrants or their children do, they’ll always be hyphenated-Canadians at best, facing discrimination, suspicion, and hatred from “real” Canadians, conservative or not.
Instead the factors are much more tangible-the current government has overseen the relationships with both countries degrade severely, with severe impact to these groups. When you’re trying to care for a sick grandparent abroad or whatever else, the last thing you want is a two-faced political approach that risks having you stranded away from home.
And then what role did the government have in building up the current levels of hate towards immigrants with their policies? For decades academia has been allowed to turn international students into cash cows with zero regard for their quality of life. Businesses whining about wages getting too high after the pandemic meant that immigrants were brought in with no place to live and no livable income. And then scapegoated for cost of living increases spawned by decades of bad policy, by the governments who brought them in.
Immigrants are expected to put in to a system that’ll have them work twice as hard to get half as much, if that, and hate them for it. It’s not “I got mine, fuck you”, it’s “you’ll never give me mine, I’m just an exploitable tax base to you, we’re not going to pretend anymore”.
That’s a really good point and well explained.
But at this point is there one party that would make the situation better for them?
Why would the conservative be so popular?
I don’t think either major party will offer much better really. The Conservatives get to ride on being the opposition and the viable supposed alternative to what’s been happening recently.