Alexandra Park, in Toronto's downtown core: walk-ups, semis, and mid-rise rentals in the foreground, the condo wall behind. Photo: Canmenwalker, 2025, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In Toronto Centre, fewer than one in three households own the place they live. The neighbourhood is condos, walk-ups, and basement apartments; people renting, often for years, often paying more than half their income to do it. Unsurprisingly, this riding ranks 5th among Canadian ridings for share of households spending more than 30% of their income on housing (shelter stress), a whopping 39%. In the April 2025 federal election, Toronto Centre voted Liberal with 64% of the vote.

In Vaughan–Woodbridge, just past the northern edge of Toronto, almost nine in ten households own their homes. The streets are lined with detached homes with finished basements and double driveways. The percent of shelter-stressed households drops to 23%, ranking 102 out of 343 in the country. Vaughan–Woodbridge voted Conservative with 60% in the last election.

A Liberal landslide in one. A Conservative landslide in the other. Same province, same month, two ridings only twenty kilometres apart. That's not a coincidence. Once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere.

We sorted all 343 ridings by their homeownership rate, the share of households who own (rather than rent) the place they live, and grouped them into three buckets.

1. Renter-heavy ridings: fewer than 45% of households own. These are dense urban cores: downtown Toronto, downtown Vancouver, parts of Montreal. There are 14 of them. The Liberals won 11 of these. Their average margin over the Conservatives was 26 points which, in Canadian politics, is a blowout win.

2. Mixed ridings: between 45% and 70% home ownership. These are the inner suburbs, university towns, mid-sized cities. 86 ridings. The Liberals are still ahead on average, but only by 10 points; the difference between a safe seat and a battleground.

3. Owner-heavy ridings: more than 70% ownership. These are the outer suburbs, exurbs, and most of rural parts of Canada. 162 ridings, nearly half the country. Here the Conservatives lead by 11 points on average and won 108 of them last April.

Move from the most renter-heavy ridings to the most owner-heavy and the Liberal–Conservative margin shifts 37 points. To put that in perspective: a 5-point national swing typically reshuffles enough seats to flip government, and decides who becomes Prime Minister. The density of homeownership in your riding moves the needle more than seven times further. This suggests that homeownership, or at least the ability of the majority of the population in a given riding to have the means of buying the place they live in, is correlated with the political leanings of each riding.

Each dot is one federal riding, coloured by which party won it in the 2025 election. The x-axis is the share of households that own their home (Statistics Canada 2021 Census). The y-axis is the Liberal vote share minus the Conservative vote share. The dashed line is the best-fit trend. The annotation shows the raw correlation and the correlation that survives after controlling for income, age, urban/rural classification, and immigrant share. Non-Quebec ridings only.

Why this is real and not just disguised income

The obvious objection is that homeowners are richer than renters, older than renters, and more likely to live in places where Conservatives win. So perhaps the pattern is just income or age or city-versus-country, disguised as housing.

We checked. We controlled for the four most obvious suspects - average income, urban-versus-rural, share of seniors, and share of residents who immigrated to Canada - and the moderately strong correlation remained. Income, age, urbanism, and immigration can't explain the relationship away.

A few honest caveats are worth naming. This is data at the riding level, a pattern across neighbourhoods doesn’t tell us how any individual homeowner or renter casts their ballot. We can’t say from this analysis alone whether owning a home makes people vote Conservative or whether Conservative-leaning places just tend to be more affordable to buy into; both are likely at least partly true. And the homeownership numbers come from the 2021 census, so the picture has only shifted further since then.

What we can say: the pattern is large, it shows up across the country, and it doesn’t go away when you account for the obvious suspects. That’s enough to take it seriously.

Why it makes sense

Once you say it out loud, the divide isn’t mysterious.

If you own your home, your single biggest financial asset sits on a specific street. A lot of what matters to you politically is whatever protects that asset - property values, mortgage rates, the character of the neighbourhood, who gets to build what next door. Caution becomes rational and tied to your economic future.

If you rent, especially if you rent in a city where ownership has drifted out of reach, your political interests are nearly the mirror image. You want more abundant housing supply, stronger tenant protections, and a path to becoming a homeowner yourself someday. Caution about the status quo feels expensive, especially when you are paying for someone else’s mortgage.

Neither party in 2025 ran on an explicitly pro-owner or pro-renter platform. But the Liberals’ housing message centred on supply, curbing corporate landlord power, and direct intervention; the Conservatives’ centred on tax cuts, deregulation, and market-led solutions. Each party’s coalition lined up with its message.

Where the rule breaks

Two places, both worth understanding.

The first is Brampton. Several Brampton ridings, Brampton East, Brampton North–Caledon, Brampton South, sit above 78% homeownership and still vote Liberal. Comfortably in the first two and narrowly in the third.

The reason is likely community history more than housing economics: large Punjabi-Canadian populations bought homes in Brampton through the 1990s and 2000s and have voted Liberal in federal elections for decades. High ownership, but the political loyalty is older than the mortgage. Brampton is the cleanest reminder that the housing pattern is a tendency, not a law.

The second is Carleton, just outside Ottawa. At 89.5% ownership, Carleton is the most owner-heavy riding in the country, exactly the kind of place that should have gone Conservative by a wide margin. Instead it voted Liberal, 51% to 46%.

The Conservative candidate in Carleton was Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative party leader and contender for Prime Minister.

Like in Brampton, this explanation is also local. Carleton is full of federal public servants — more than a third of working-age residents work in the public sector: government, schools, and hospitals. Poilievre's 2025 campaign promised deep cuts to government spending, including the consultants and contractors many of those public servants work alongside. When your paycheque is the thing being cut, the question of whether you own the house becomes a smaller part of how you vote.

Four Ontario ridings where high homeownership did not deliver a Conservative win. For each, the chart shows the Liberal–Conservative margin the homeownership trend alone would predict (open circle) versus the actual margin in 2025 (filled circle). The arrow length is how far the riding broke the pattern; the labelled number is that gap in points.

What this means going forward

The share of Canadians who own their home has been falling for more than a decade. The 2021 census put it at 66.5%, down from 69% in 2011. That sounds small until you realise the decline happened in every province. It was steepest exactly where federal elections are decided: among younger Canadians and in cities. The net shift is roughly one Canadian household in forty moving from owning to renting over those ten years, and the curve has almost certainly continued downward since.

Canada’s national homeownership rate at each census from 2006 to 2021. The rate peaked at 69.0% in 2011 and has fallen 2.5 percentage points since — roughly one in forty Canadian households shifting from owning to renting in a decade.

If this pattern holds, that demographic drift has real political weight. The renter coalition is growing, and growing fastest in the places that swing elections. Whichever party can reach those voters without losing the homeowner coalition wins the 2030s.

Northern Vibe tracks homeownership rate, alongside income, age, and the full simulation, at the riding level. You can look up your own riding at northernvibe.ca

Stay curious,

Matt, from The Northern Vibe Project

Edited by Caitlin

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Sources: Statistics Canada 2021 Census, Federal Electoral District profile (2023 redistribution). Election results: Elections Canada certified totals, April 2025. Homeownership rate = owner-occupied households as a share of total occupied private dwellings. The “statistically subtracted” analysis is a partial correlation: the LPC–CPC margin was regressed on each control variable (average total income, urban/rural classification, share of residents aged 65+, immigrant share) and the correlation was recomputed on the residuals. Raw correlation r = –0.46; partial correlation after controls = –0.40. n = 265 non-Quebec ridings with complete data on all controls. Quebec ridings are excluded because the Bloc Québécois complicates a clean Liberal–Conservative comparison.

Alexandre Boulerice has held Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie since 2011, when Jack Layton’s orange wave swept through Montreal and turned one of Quebec’s most sovereigntist urban ridings into an NDP stronghold. He held it through four subsequent elections, most recently winning the 2025 election with 41% of the vote.

Then he left the NDP to sit as an independent. Now he’s expected to resign from Parliament in the coming months to run in the upcoming provincial election for the sovereigntist, left-leaning Québec Solidaire (QS).

What he leaves behind is one of the most genuinely unpredictable ridings on the map: a three-way race between a weakened NDP without their biggest Quebec draw, a BQ with a natural claim on a sovereigntist electorate, and a Liberal party that wants to repeat last month’s success in the Terrebonne by-election. The simulation flags it as one of the seats it can’t model cleanly given that national polling averages don’t capture what happens when a personal-vote incumbent walks out the door.

Track this riding as polling evolves; current win probabilities for Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

It’s a good encapsulation of where Canadian politics sits right now. The Liberals swept three by-elections on April 13 and now hold a majority at 174 actual seats, but the map still has live questions. Here’s where the current-polls simulation puts things today.

ISSUES CANADIANS CARE ABOUT

This Month: What’s on Canadians’ Minds

Data from the Northern Vibe issues pipeline as of May 3, 2026 (aggregate of weekly CTV/Nanos surveys)

Top issues by importance this month:

1. Economy (21.8%) — The broadest issue category dominates by a wide margin. This is the category that contains everything from tariffs and trade to jobs and wages. In the current environment, it’s almost entirely driven by the US trade file. Coverage has run net positive for the government through Carney’s economic sovereignty argument, while simultaneously surfacing anxiety about what the USMCA review means for Canadian exports. No other issue comes close to this volume.

2. US Relations (12.3%) — Running at just over half the volume of the economy issue, and tightly coupled to it. The July 1 USMCA review is the forward story every political journalist is writing toward. Coverage here has run net positive for the government; the “standing up to Washington” narrative has been durable. The issue carries inherent uncertainty, though, which keeps the picture from fully settling.

3. Cost of Living (11.2%) — The May issues picture tells a government in a relatively strong position on the issues that matter most. Economy and US relations are generating positive coverage; cost of living is the vulnerability. The gap between the government’s macro story - sovereignty, trade diversification, housing deals - and what voters feel week-to-week (groceries, rent, affordability) is the central tension.

Coming up next: The housing file raises a deeper structural question we’ve been sitting on for a while. Why does housing matter so much politically in the first place? In our first deep-dive article, we’re going into the data on homeownership rates at the riding level and what they predict about how Canadians vote. It’s one of the sharpest demographic divides in the electoral map, sharper than income, sharper than age. We’ll show you exactly where the fault line runs.

SEAT PROJECTION SNAPSHOT

The Map This Week

Majority threshold: 172 seats · LPC majority probability: 95.8%

What this means:

The Liberals are well into majority territory if the election were held today with 213 seats, with the simulation assigning majority probability at just over 95% — confident, but not a certainty. In contrast, the Conservatives sitting at 99 seats have no current path to government. The coming months will test Pierre Poilievre’s ability to push the narrative away from trade and national unity, where Carney has dominated, and back toward cost of living and accountability, where the Conservatives have historically had more room to run. The NDP holds at 9 projected seats, consistent across recent runs, a historically weak floor with no upside momentum visible in current polling. Avi Lewis has an uphill battle in front of him, one he seems more than willing to charge at. Lewis has been pushing big ideas loudly and on his own terms in a way the party hasn’t in years. While the polling reflects a party at its floor, Lewis is betting that's the place to build from.

Keep an eye out for our issues on homeownership rates at the riding level and what they can tell us about how Canadians vote.

Stay curious,

Matt, from the Northern Vibe Team

Edited by Caitlin