The Conservative Party Made Strides in Predominantly Immigrant Communities. Why?
How the “model minority” myth and wanting to align with power structures are impacting the Asian diaspora in Canada.
A person enters a polling station in the Vancouver East riding on federal election day in Vancouver on Monday, April 28, 2025. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns)
Syed is a 34-year-old man from Thorncliffe Park in Toronto. He’s watched his parents, immigrants from Pakistan, work minimum wage jobs for decades. And yet, all that work resulted in them not having enough to retire on.
He spent his early 20s in university, hoping to study law. Today, he’s had to abandon it all to support his parents. Syed has spent years working as a bank teller, providing for them.
This experience has led him to become a proud supporter of the federal Conservative Party of Canada within the last few years, with a strong belief that all immigrants should assimilate.
It’s a sentiment that became attractive to Syed after he started working with wealthy, white clients in Toronto. He started following the markets and reading the National Post. It led him to characterize his parents’ home country in a way that is objectively racist, with beliefs like Pakistan is not as “evolved” compared to Western countries and is a “feudal” society” filled with racialized people who engage in “tribalism.” Though he previously voted for the Liberals in 2015, he has since changed his mind.
The more homogenous Canada is, the more stable it will be, he feels. “I began to think more like a Canadian and less like a Pakistani,” he told Emine Fidan Elcioglu, an associate professor in sociology at the University of Toronto, in 2023. She included Syed and dozens of other children of South Asian and Chinese immigrants who are voting right in research published this year.
Graph from a University of Toronto/School of cities study outlining changes in immigrant voting patterns in the Greater Toronto Area.
Syed’s voting patterns are part of a strong shift to the right in ridings where predominantly immigrants live.
The aforementioned research shows that the federal Conservatives have been gaining ground in those regions since the early 2000s, when CPC Leader Stephen Harper, who became prime minister in 2006, had begun targeted campaigns towards diaspora communities. This was not due to any kind of altruism—Harper and his party spent years promoting that immigrants can be categorized on whether they are "good” or “bad”—but out of recognition that courting these growing communities would help them stay in power.
And those inroads had staying power. The U of T research shows that ridings where more immigrants live in the GTA were more likely to vote Conservative in the April federal election. Academics who study these voting trends and the reasons behind those ideological shifts say it’s an indication of people specifically of Asian heritage contending with their “model minority” status and seeking proximity to white power structures in order to find perceived success in a system that they know seeks to oppress them.
“I wouldn’t say these respondents were trying to uphold systems that harm them. They were trying to find safety in a political landscape that offers very few guarantees,” Elcioglu told Blossom Mental Health Fund.
[Ideological shifts are] an indiciation of people specifically of Asian heritage contending with their ‘model minority’ status and seeking proximity to white power structures in order to find perceived success in a system that they know seeks to oppress them.
The economic and social conditions of the last decade, which has been marked by a housing crisis, stagnant wages and upheaval from the pandemic, have “deeply shaped” how second-generation Canadians are making sense of the world, she says.
The plot below traces the correlation between party vote share and percentage of immigrants in each riding, for all federal elections. The closer to +1, the more likely a party is to receive votes in ridings with more immigrants. (Source: University of Toronto/School of Cities).
In Canada, national myths and ideals around “multiculturalism” can mask inequality— and racialized voters could be compelled to reach for “strategies that perform success rather than demand justice.”
“Many of the second-generation South Asian and Chinese Canadians I spoke to saw voting Conservative not as a denial of inequality, but as a way to escape being associated with it,” she says.
Elcioglu interviewed 50 children of immigrants from Asian countries. She found that rejecting more left-leaning parties that spoke on racial justice and equality signalled alignment with white power structures, as a way to gain acceptance and “distance from racial foreignness.”
“The Liberal Party had come to symbolize the racialized immigrant, the welfare state, the person who still needs help. That proximity felt dangerous. Voting Conservative became a way to signal that they had made it, that they were no longer outsiders asking for inclusion,” she says.
“Many of the second-generation South Asian and Chinese Canadians I spoke to saw voting Conservative not as a denial of inequality, but as a way to escape being associated with it.”
Racialized communities aligning with populist authoritarianism and general right-wing views is a growing phenomenon worldwide, she explains. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi fronts a right-wing Hindu Nationalist party that seeks to disenfranchise minority religious groups. In the U.S., media has documented that Asian voters in several states decided to vote for President Donald Trump.
Aniket Kali, who co-authored research at U of T about changes in immigrant voting patterns in the Greater Toronto Area, says both federal and provincial conservative parties have worked to make connections in these communities. He says the shifts in voting emphasizes that these neighbourhoods do not contain monoliths of “immigrant groups”—they are multifaceted with motivations that can’t be put into a neat box.
He says it’s also important to keep in mind that many immigrants do not vote because they aren’t able to yet. There are many permanent residents in these communities who are waiting to get citizenship.
Kali also says it’s a failure of other parties for not engaging with these communities enough. He cites a 2018 article published in Briarpatch Magazine that explains how the provincial PC party created a targeted campaign to engage the Chinese diaspora in the GTA to win their vote that year.
He says in the last few years, the NDP has not made a similar effort in these neighbourhoods to put forward a compelling alternative to the Liberals or Conservatives and, in turn, he has watched their support dwindle.
“The NDP wrote these communities off and just said, ‘they don't vote for us anyway, so there's no point in canvassing’,” he says. “There’s another layer here of who's willing to do that work, of actually reaching out and building that alignment.”
Correlation between percent immigrants and party vote share for the Conservatives in the 2025 Ontario election. (Source: University of Toronto/School of Cities).
Terri Givens, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia, says identifying with the right has become more common in young men and some immigrants.
The demonization of diversity, equity and inclusion policies as seen in the U.S. has driven some diaspora groups into not wanting to be associated with being a “bad” immigrant, to be unfairly blamed and scapegoated for society’s ills, she says.
Givens adds that some of these communities can be more conservative on social issues like abortion and/or support the LGTBQ+ community, which does align with the right. (For instance, Doug Ford attempted to appeal to these communities in the 2018 election by fueling uproar around the provincial Liberals’ sexual education curriculum. However, several immigrant groups said they supported the curriculum and were being unfairly characterized as conservative.)
More data and analysis is needed on immigrant communities from the most recent federal election to gain further insight into the trends, says Givens.
Through her research interviews, Elcioglu says what has stayed with her is that the respondents were very thoughtful about race, class and inequality. In addition, structural violence had been very present in many of their own lives and their parents’ lives.
“But instead of naming it as something that required redress, they reinterpreted it as something to be overcome through effort, through grit, or through alignment with power,” she says.
In her research, Elcioglu also provides an overview of the model minority stereotype and how an abundance of studies show it can influence the political behaviour of people of Asian descent. Being a “model minority” creates a narrative where these groups are portrayed by white power structures as law-abiding, hard-working and successful—often as a way to further discrimination and hate against Black people.
Asians are praised by these power structures if they are seen as “apolitical” and quiet in the face of oppression—and valorized compared to Black folks. They are promised rewards for forwarding their own disenfranchisement and furthering hate towards these other communities. This encourages anodyne political behaviour. If Asian people don’t speak up against hate, they don’t challenge white power in exchange for the promise of safety in the system, which actually never comes. This also obfuscates the reality that Asians face disenfranchisement and hatred when any Asian person deviates from the “model minority” stereotype.
Which is how and why voting right can become a strategy for Asian people in an attempt to feel belonging and protection in the current society, even though they see up close the hatred they and their families have faced, she says.
“What it reveals is the deep dissonance between the story Canada tells about itself and the reality many immigrants live,” she says. “Parents arrive with degrees and dreams, only to be pushed into low-wage work, deskilled and made to prove themselves again and again.”
Asians are praised by these power structures if they are seen as “apolitical” and quiet in the face of oppression…They are promised rewards for forwarding their own disenfranchisement and furthering hate towards these other communities.
Other people she interviewed in her study described parents who used to be doctors, who ended up cleaning floors for income in Canada. Another young man saw his mother beg for food outside a grocery store after emigrating. These experiences have propelled them to the Conservative party.
“That hardship isn’t just economic; it’s deeply psychological. It reshapes families, aspirations and the way people come to understand what’s possible,” she says.
But national narratives about immigrants celebrate “resilience,” without asking why the hardship exists in the first place.
“For some second-generation Canadians, voting Conservative was about trying to escape the stigma of needing help,” she says. “It’s what happens when a country expects gratitude and resilience, but fails to deliver justice.”