The most recent election has been exceptional. It has been dominated by a completely new factor: threats to Canada posed by the current President of the United States.
It is widely reported that there was a collapse in votes for the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Green party. Less noticed was the drop in votes for the far-right People’s Party of Canada (PPC), from 4.9 per cent in 2021 to 0.7 per cent now, while the vote shares of the two leading parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, rose by 11.1 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively.
The collapse of the PPC, however, obscures findings of new research on the outcomes of the 2019 and 2021 elections. People living in ridings that elected a Conservative or NDP MP in 2021 had a shorter life expectancy than those living in a Liberal-won riding.
Moreover, for Conservative ridings that saw a surge in PPC support between the 2019 and 2021 elections, the difference in life expectancy grew to two years.
Residents of ridings won by the NDP also had shorter life expectancies. These ridings are poorer but better educated on average than residents of Conservative-won ridings.
These first ever data suggest problematic health, educational and social disparities within provinces and regions across Canada, not only regarding longevity, but also for electoral outcomes.
The 2019 and 2021 federal elections saw little change in the parliamentary seat count, but there was one notable difference. Even though they did not win any seats, there was a surge in votes for the PPC led by Maxime Bernier, from 1.6 per cent in 2019 to 4.9 per cent in 2021 (though down to 0.7 per cent in 2025).
Analyses after the 2021 election showed that the PPC surge was driven in large part by those opposed to COVID vaccines and lockdown mandates.
In my recently published study, the first of its kind in Canada, data at the census tract level, the smallest geographical area feasible, were assembled to estimate life expectancies. These estimates had already been generated for another study comparing variations in life expectancy across the largest cities in Canada and the U.S.
In this study, census tract results were pooled by federal electoral district, and linked to Elections Canada data on winning political party vote counts. Additionally, data on key socio-economic factors for each census tract were drawn from the 2011 population census.
Life expectancy was one year shorter for Conservative-won compared to Liberal-won ridings. However, in ridings where the PPC vote share increased by at least five percentage points between 2019 and 2021, life expectancies were two years shorter.
Notably, province level factors were not important in the statistical analysis. For example, while all or almost all ridings in Saskatchewan and Alberta were Conservative-won in 2021, the PPC vote surge was not dominant in either province. Further, there were wide ranges in life expectancies across all the Conservative-won ridings in these two provinces.
The considerable variations in life expectancy played out across ridings and census tracts not only within these two Conservative dominated provinces, but also in other provinces.
In line with a great deal of previous evidence, these data show higher poverty rates were strongly associated with shorter life expectancy, as was living in a riding with a smaller population.
The study did not have data on access to healthcare. However, healthcare is largely a provincial jurisdiction, and, in principle, should not vary across small geographic areas within each province. Thus, differences between provincial health systems are unlikely to account for the observed variations in life expectancy across federal ridings within each province. But such differences in health access and quality at the sub-provincial level could well be a key factor, including between rural and urban areas.
The NDP-won ridings also had lower life expectancies than Liberal-won ridings. However, the driving factors appear to have been quite different.
Compared to Conservative-won ridings, especially those with large surges in their PPC vote share, the NDP-won ridings had lower family incomes, double the number of renters versus homeowners and higher poverty rates — factors that could account for their shorter life expectancies.
On the other hand, these NDP-won ridings had somewhat higher post-secondary education than Conservative-won ridings, a factor associated with higher life expectancy.
The Liberal-won ridings by far had the highest proportions of allophones and recent immigrants as well as the longest life expectancies, so immigrants per se were not contributing to shorter life expectancies, likely the contrary. NDP-won ridings also had much higher numbers of allophones and recent immigrants than Conservative-won ridings
While this new study reinforces much evidence regarding the socio-economic determinants of health, there must be more involved, as the Conservative-won ridings, especially those with a PPC vote surge, had higher incomes than NDP-won ridings, yet even poorer longevity.
While corresponding results for the 2025 election must await new analysis, the probable shift of the PPC vote to the Conservatives does not bode well for life expectancy in the ridings they won.
Vaccine hesitancy clearly contributes directly to poorer health. Too many Canadians have ungrounded fears of potentially life-saving vaccinations. Research already shows that this fear and anger at the vaccine mandates and lockdowns may be influencing Canadian elections.
This new study and related evidence makes one wonder whether the kinds of underlying attitudes and beliefs, indeed anger, that motivated the occupation of downtown Ottawa by the “Freedom Convoy” may contribute more fundamentally to shorter life expectancy.
Photos By TVA Nouvelles, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=156774016 and By Policy Exchange – https://www.flickr.com/photos/policyexchange/19631517244/ , CC BY 2.0 , https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110682795
