The Current - Voters most worried about tariffs didn’t vote Liberal, analysis suggests

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

The Canadians most vulnerable to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs voted for the Conservatives in last week’s federal election, according to analysis from Jennifer Robson, a professor of political management at Carleton University. She explains how she crunched the numbers, and what it might mean for how Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney engages with those anxious communities.

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This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the Current Podcast. It has been a week now since Canadians went to the polls and it turns out there's a lot you can learn by sifting through the results. For Carleton University's Jennifer Robson, there was one particular voting pattern that caught her eye had to do with the parts of the country that stand to be the most affected by US tariffs and have the most to lose. She's done some analysis and found that perhaps in those places, Mark Carney's elbows-up message

was not exactly a winning one and that may have implications for how he might govern. Jennifer Robeson is an associate professor of political management at Carleton University, visiting fellow at the Institute for Research on Public Policy. She's in Ottawa. Jennifer, good morning. Good morning. Why did you want to look into this? Oh, come on. You never had a question and created like a complicated spreadsheet with geospatial data? Exactly? Exactly. That's just a meeting? Okay. No, I literally was just curious, right? Because we'd had this campaign where Donald Trump clearly played a huge role.

We just saw that same dynamic take place in Australia as well. And we'd had these two competing offerings from parties. And I was just really curious. I knew that my fantastic colleagues at the Institute for Research on Public Policy, Ricardo Cefchak in particular, had done this great interactive map of communities in Canada that are tariff exposed. And I just wanted to know, how did they end up voting? What are some of the communities?

I mean, we just talked about Oshawa, and that's obviously one of them. But there's a big range in terms of the number of places and the types of places that you're talking about, right? Yeah. So I found 36 in total. Now these are writings, right? Ricardo's original work is looking at census divisions, which are a little smaller than writings, but these span from like St. Margaret, sorry, South Shore, St. Margaret's in Nova Scotia, all the way up to, obviously, Fort McMurray, Cold Lake in Alberta.

Interestingly, these 36 writings that I identified, so I basically set a cut off of saying like if 7% of your local workforce or more is in these very trade exposed, like US trade exposed industries then I included them in the data. And I was expecting to find an awful lot more in Western Canada, but actually there's really only one riding in Manitoba. There's one or two in Alberta. The largest share are actually, believe it or not, in Quebec. And how are we defining, I said in the introduction, that these are parts of the country that stand

to be the most affected by US tariffs. They're not just border communities, obviously. So how are we defining how they're affected? Yeah. So Ricardo had done this fantastic work of being able to look at, again, at the census division level, so fairly localized, what is the share of local employment that is in goods exporting industries, where those industries locally are doing a huge part of their export to the United States. So in a world of trade disruptions and tariffs and whatnot, this is where we would expect

to see some of the impacts on those emerging difficulties and disruptions to that relationship play out first. I know in the previous hour you were speaking about General Motors, for example. So, for example, the shutdowns that are taking place and the layoffs that are taking place, unfortunately, in Ingersoll, Ontario, that's in the riding of Oxford. So it's those kinds of examples, right? These are ridings that contain communities where there's the risk of layoffs as those trade disruptions play out. And so take us to the spreadsheet. What did you find?

Okay. So 36 communities and the majority of them, so 22 out of the 36 actually voted conservative. So you said in the intro that it sounds like maybe Mark Carney's elbows up message didn't resonate there. That's possible. That's possible. What I also found though, was that there was just very little change between the 2021 results and 2025. So I don't know enough to, again, normally I just do public policy stuff. I just happened to have a question and did some of this work because I was curious. So I don't know enough about the other local issues that might have been playing out. So was it in fact that actually there were huge affordability challenges that were resonating more with local voters or is this kind of a more just, you know, you stick with the

tribe kind of an approach? I don't know yet. So very little change between those two elections. Most of the MPs that were elected are conservatives. Only nine out of the 36 are going to be sitting in the same caucus as Prime Minister Carney. And then we have a small share who are Bloc Québécois as well. So what are the public policy implications of this? I mean, I think learning why would be really interesting and perhaps that's further scraping and analysis. But if the results are the results, what are

the public policy implications? Because the result broadly is that there aren't a lot of liberal MPs in government who represent these areas that are in the crosshairs of the tariff threat. Yeah, 100%. So thank you for helping me bring this back into my normal area of public policy. And I'm gonna answer this both in terms of somebody who teaches public policy, but also as a, a hundred years ago as a former staffer. So number one, Prime Minister Carney joked that,

instead of running in poetry, he'd run in prose and that now he was gonna plan to govern in econometrics. And it's a niche joke. I found it kind of funny. And the challenge is going to be that the econometrics can tell you an awful lot about the local income loss if and when there are these layoffs due to tariffs and trade disruptions. It can't tell you an awful lot about local sentiment, local mood. Are people feeling hopeful and patient, are they aware of government programs and services that are available to

help them cope, or are they feeling anxious and angry? And that kind of more qualitative work or that more qualitative information is usually the kind of thing that you can get from the local elected representatives. So if you don't have those people who are sitting in your caucus where you can get from the local elected representatives. So if you don't have those people who are sitting in your caucus where you can have behind the scenes quiet conversations, you're going to have to find other ways to gather that qualitative information. That's going to mean making concerted efforts to go into those communities. I would also suggest it should mean concerted efforts to reach across the aisle to consult with opposition MPs who

are on the ground, who are representing these writings and learn from them and truly listen. So I think that it suggests a different approach to how you gather and pull together the various sources of information for policymaking. Tell me more about this because one of the things you wrote in the wake of scraping through the data was that, yeah, to your point, it's not about public opinion research, that you need to bring people into the room. And perhaps those people that you're bringing into the room, in your words, have contentious

views or differing views, and that you need to be welcoming those people into that same space. What would that do, aside from telling you what's actually happening on the ground? So aside from what's happening on the ground, it also, so it's another input and another data source in addition to that sort of econometric data-driven approach, which look, I'm not deriding that approach in any way, shape or form, but you need to complement it with other approaches so that you can actually catch the kinds of early indicators, catch the kinds of qualitative pieces of information that are super relevant for the success or failure

of your policy approach. And that's going to mean listening to people who you don't already agree with. It's going to mean, for example, going into communities like Ingersoll and spending time there to understand what are the myriad issues on the ground, in addition to the fact that, yes, you know that there were 500 layoffs just announced. Because if you're going to be trying to do what Mr. Carney has promised, which is a fairly ambitious industrial policy, you need to think about community economic development,

you need to think about workforce transformation, and to do that, you do need other voices at the table who can represent those perspectives. How difficult do you think that will be? And I ask you that as somebody who looks at public policy, but as you said, a hundred years ago, in your words, you are also a staffer. Um, politics is complicated and you have

differing political views that, that, I mean, you have premiered, uh, Daniel Smith, uh, and Scott Moe in, in Saskatchewan and Alberta who both called for a reset for their provinces and how their provinces relate with Ottawa. You have Mark Carney who has hired as Prime Minister to do a number of different things but one of the reasons people say that he was hired was because he presented this idea of how he was going to tackle this threat. So, if he's going to tackle it in a way that is going to speak to those communities,

how difficult is that to bring all those different voices into that same room? We are a big, complicated, but beautiful country. And federalism, those federal provincial relations that you just mentioned, those have become fraught in the last couple of years. So I think that there is a huge opportunity here for improved communication and coordination at the inter couple of years. So I think that there is a huge opportunity here for improved

communication and coordination at the intergovernmental level, having a federal government that respects the provincial role in policymaking and in areas of jurisdiction. And, you know, we've seen, I think, frankly, some overstepping of the boundaries in terms of use of the federal spending power, at least some testing of the boundaries in a serious way. So in order to marshal all of the resources and opportunities that Mr. Carney has been talking about in terms of his plan for the country, you do need to be able to bring people along. And that includes people in Alberta, that includes Premier Smith, that includes people who are in Fort Mac, Cold Lake. The only way to do that is actually through engagement and dialogue, and that is going to take time.

And I realize an efficient outcome is like, it's quick and it's clean and it's clear, but that's not the nature of our country. So to do the hard work of figuring out how do we pivot, it behooves the government, I think, to bring in those diverse voices and to do that serious engagement. Let's see whether the government is listening. Jennifer, thank you very much.

Thank you. Jennifer Robson is an associate professor of political management at Carleton University and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Research on Public Policy.