Two new solitudes — rural and urban — now define the Canadian political landscape
CBC
According to Elections Canada, the metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — the country's three biggest cities — account for 116 of Canada's 338 ridings. And the results in those ridings help to tell the story of both the Liberal victory and a fundamental split in federal politics.
Of those 116 ridings, the Liberals won 86 — more than half of their national total. The Conservatives won just eight.
That Liberal strength in cities is part of an urban-rural split that now defines the electoral map in Canada. New research suggests the urban-rural divide between the Liberal and Conservative parties has never been wider.
But that split raises questions that go beyond partisan competition.
That new research was produced by professors David Armstrong and Zack Taylor of Western University and Jack Lucas from the University of Calgary. Using data on population density, location, economic activity and social diversity, they developed a new measure of "urbanity" that allows them to track long-term trends in party support since Confederation.
What they found is that Canada's two major parties began to diverge in the 1960s: Liberal support began to get more urban, Conservative support began to get more rural. That trend accelerated after the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties merged in 2003 to become the modern Conservative Party. The gap between the two parties was larger than ever before in 2019.
Then it got even bigger in 2021. According to the work done by Armstrong, Lucas and Taylor, the Liberals won all 25 of the most urban ridings in Canada and 109 of the top 150 most urban ridings. The Conservatives won just 23 of those urban ridings.
The new owner of Ontario steelmaker Stelco says his company "will not disappoint the people of Hamilton and Nanticoke," where the business's major facilities are based.
A Winnipegger is warning others about an intricate scam she says she almost fell for.
Fort William First Nation is opposing a planned redevelopment of the Ontario Power Generation's (OPG) 117 year old Kakabeka Falls Generating Station, which is located in their traditional territory.
A building that sits at the corner of Sussex Street and Brunswick Avenue has had many lives over the last century — being a church, a school and offices. Now it's set to become housing, at a time when the city sorely needs it.
A Waterloo, Ont., elementary school principal will be sentenced in the new year after pleading guilty to child sexual exploitation charges following a joint investigation that involved the London, Toronto and Waterloo police services.
Students at UPEI have let their student union know what they want from the province this fiscal year, and those priorities are reflected in a 2024-2025 advocacy document brought to the legislature on Wednesday.
Larger communities in the N.W.T. will soon see a boost in their territorial funding to maintain infrastructure and deliver services — like water and waste management — but the increase still falls short of what communities need.
The toxic drug crisis has taken more than 47,000 lives in Canada since 2016 and the synthetic opioid fentanyl has become a household name. But now, what's believed to be an even more potent class of synthetic drugs is showing up in drug busts across the country: nitazenes.
The Liberal government and the NDP have agreed to introduce a two-month GST vacation on certain items before the holiday season, Radio-Canada has learned.
Veterinarians are warning Londoners to make sure their dogs are vaccinated and keeping clean after a deadly virus outbreak was declared in London this week.
Registered nurses rallied in St. John's Wednesday as part of a week-long convention, again calling on the Newfoundland and Labrador government to create permanent solutions to staff shortages and workplace violence.