Over the past two decades, voting districts in and around Toronto with large immigrant and nonwhite populations have moved steadily toward the Conservative Party.
Some of the biggest swings in the 2025 federal election came from these same areas. In one heavily racialized district outside Toronto, the Conservative vote jumped by more than twenty points, flipping the seat. Across similar suburbs, including Scarborough where I live, gains outpaced the party’s national average.
These shifts matter. Elections are won and lost in places like this. Parties that win over these voters ultimately win power.
What makes this rightward shift striking is how recently it would have seemed unlikely. For decades, racialized voters—particularly immigrants and their children—were treated as a stable pillar of liberal multiculturalism. The centrist Liberal Party built much of its modern identity around that assumption, from the introduction of official multiculturalism in the 1970s to more recent appeals to diversity and inclusion. And for a long time, it held.
It doesn’t anymore.
As the political map shifts in places once treated as safely liberal, familiar explanations have emerged. Chief among them is the Conservative Party’s deliberate “ethnic outreach”. Indeed, when Pierre Poilievre took over party leadership in 2022, he promised to “restore Canada’s promise in a country where it doesn’t matter … if your name is Smith or Singh, Martin or Mohammed, Chang or Charles.” The line worked on two levels. It echoed a familiar Trumpian language of national restoration—a dog whistle to white, culturally conservative voters—while also conceding a political reality the party could no longer ignore: that the most electorally decisive districts are the ones where nonwhite voters hold the balance of power.
This kind of strategic repositioning is one explanation for why conservative politics have gained traction in places once considered reliably liberal. But others argue that strategy only works when it finds an audience, and that audience has been shaped by a broader economic decline. Rising living costs, mounting housing pressures, and a growing sense of insecurity have reshaped how many people understand their place in society. These accounts matter. But they still don’t explain why these conservative ideas resonate and come to feel like common sense.
To get at this, for an article recently published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, I interviewed second-generation South Asian and Chinese Canadians about their political views. Many had grown up watching their parents struggle after immigrating to Canada, working long hours, and facing barriers in the labor market. I expected those experiences to push them toward redistributive politics.
Instead, many moved in the opposite direction.
Interviews revealed that turning to conservatism was a way to distance themselves from the stigma of dependence. It became a form of racial passing: signaling that you belong, that you are self-reliant, and that you align with those at the white center of social and economic life.
One respondent described “deprogramming” the Pakistani side of himself—unlearning what he saw as a tendency toward group loyalty and grievance—and replacing it with a more individualistic way of thinking. As he put it, “I began to think more like a Canadian.”
Yet this wasn’t the only direction people moved in. Others with similar backgrounds moved left, finding a political home in the New Democratic Party (NDP). What was driving that divide?
Across interviews, a clear pattern emerged. A relatively small number of young people encountered social science classrooms that taught them to see inequality as structural and connected personal experience to larger systems of power. Many more, however, learned politics through YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other algorithm-driven platforms, where right-wing influencers offered emotionally charged explanations rooted in common sense and personal responsibility. Politics was increasingly learned through a digital conservative ecosystem built for scale, repetition, and certainty.
How did political education become so shaped by profit-driven platforms and algorithms?
Not long ago, political understanding was cultivated very differently. For much of the twentieth century, the work of political education belonged less to markets than to collective institutions embedded in everyday life.
Unions were central to this. Organizations like the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers, and the Canadian Labour Congress ran extensive education programs. They organized workshops, published materials, and trained members to connect workplace grievances to broader questions of ownership, policy, and power. Shop-floor frustrations were understood as symptoms of capitalism.
Political parties played a similar role. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation—a democratic socialist party founded during the Great Depression by labor organizers, farmers, and socialists—saw political education as central to its project of building an alternative to capitalism. After merging with organized labor in 1961 to form today’s New Democratic Party (NDP), that tradition continued through study groups, conferences, and local meetings where members debated policy and learned to connect their personal struggles to broader political and economic structures. Participation meant more than voting.
Community organizations extended this infrastructure. Feminist groups developed consciousness-raising circles that connected personal experiences to systemic inequality. Black political organizations built spaces for collective analysis rooted in lived experience. State-supported initiatives like the Company of Young Canadians placed organizers in communities to foster political engagement and collective action.
These institutions varied in form and effectiveness. But they shared a commitment to helping people understand their lives politically. Through organizing campaigns, study groups, and countless one-on-one conversations, they taught people to see personal struggles as part of a larger system.
Much of this infrastructure has been dismantled. Union density has declined, and even where unions remain, they are less likely to function as spaces where people learn to connect personal troubles to public issues. Increasingly professionalized and service-oriented, many invest less time and resources in sustained political education and collective analysis. Political parties, too, have followed a similar path, narrowing their focus to elections rather than ongoing political engagement. Meanwhile, community organizations operate with fewer resources and diminished reach. The result is the thinning of the institutions that once helped people make sense of the world collectively.
But the university remains one of the few places where this kind of thinking still occurs in a sustained way. That is no accident. Not long ago, universities—and public education more broadly—were understood as institutions meant to cultivate informed citizens capable of participating in democratic life. Students who pass through social science classrooms today can still encounter concepts like class, race, and power that make inequality legible as something structural rather than personal.
But universities, like political parties and unions before them, have also changed. Today, higher education is increasingly organized around employability rather than critical inquiry. Funding priorities follow that logic. Programs associated with direct economic returns expand, while those oriented toward critique lose ground. At the same time, rising tuition and growing debt burdens have made university a riskier proposition, especially for students without financial support.
The result is that access to critical forms of education is increasingly uneven. Students from more secure class backgrounds can afford to pursue fields like the social sciences, where the payoff is less immediate even if the intellectual rewards are substantial. Those without that cushion are pushed toward programs that promise stability and income. Over time, the university becomes less a space for cultivating democratic participation and more a sorting mechanism for the labor market.
One might ask: what’s so bad about that?
Nothing—if you’re comfortable leaving the work of political education to places like YouTube. Because, as universities retreat from their role as sites of critical inquiry, another system of political learning has rushed to fill the gap.
That came through clearly in my research. For many young people, YouTube is now a primary way of encountering political ideas. It is immediate, accessible, and built to capture attention.
The form matters as much as the content. Videos arrive in a constant stream, reinforcing the same assumptions and interpretations over time. Eventually, certain explanations stop feeling ideological at all. They begin to feel like common sense. Figures like Ben Shapiro build their appeal on precisely this claim: that one does not need to take a sociology course to ‘see things for what they are.’
That language of ‘common sense’ has a longer political history. Mid-century neoconservatives often used it to dismiss structural critiques of inequality as elitist, ideological, or out of touch with ordinary life. Today’s conservative digital influencers inherit that same playbook. They present themselves as people simply telling hard truths that universities, journalists, or “experts” refuse to say out loud. Structural explanations are cast as indoctrination, while individualistic explanations appear realistic and self-evident.
This creates a political divide. The same conditions of inequality and insecurity come to mean very different things depending on where people learn to make sense of the world.
As unions, parties, and public institutions retreat from political education, platforms like YouTube increasingly colonize the space they leave behind. Individualistic explanations circulate widely and effortlessly, carried by algorithms designed to turn attention, outrage, and certainty into profit. Over time, inequality comes to be understood as the outcome of personal choices, while success reads as evidence of merit. Structural explanations, by contrast, are recast as ideological, excessive, or out of touch with ordinary life.
The recent rightward movement among segments of young, racialized voters becomes easier to understand within this landscape. These ideas do not emerge from nowhere. They are made available, repeated, and normalized. As conservative explanations become common sense, embracing them can become a way of signaling belonging: proof of self-reliance, respectability, and proximity to power.
The question is not whether young people care about politics. They do. The question is who is teaching them how to make sense of the world around them.
Emine Fidan Elcioglu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.
This article is based on Emine Fidan Elcioglu, “I began to think more like a Canadian”: how second-generation south Asian and Chinese Canadians confront racism by becoming conservative voters, Ethnic and Racial Studies, OnlineFirst March 19, 2025, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2025.2474628
Image: Sketch drawn and provided by the author