Why Canadian women are suddenly breaking for the Liberals

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First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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TOP STORY

The 2025 election has featured one of the most whiplash-inducing polling turnarounds in Canadian history.

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Only three months after facing down the possibility of a near-total blowout in the next election, every available survey is putting the Liberal party on course for a majority.

This turnaround is being driven largely by women, to the point where the Angus Reid Institute declared in a recent analysis that “the faceoff between men and women appears to be one of the key factors in this campaign.”

The pollster found that if only men voted, this election would be a narrow race between Liberal and Conservative. If only women voted, Canada would be on track for one of the most overwhelming Liberal majorities of all time.

Gender gaps have been a mainstay of Canadian politics for years, but never quite like this.

Justin Trudeau was famous for his appeal to women voters, but in the 2015 election that first brought him to power, polls showed that about as many men found him appealing (51 per cent) as women (56 per cent).

In the last federal election, the average millennial woman supported the Liberals at about the same rate as the average millennial man. And a similar metric held among baby boomers.

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In the final Angus Reid Institute poll conducted before the 2021 election, women aged 55 and older were planning to vote Liberal at a rate of 29 per cent — which was fairly comparable to the 22 per cent of men in the same age cohort who intended to do the same.

And among voters under 34, the rate of Liberal support between the genders was basically identical: 22 per cent for men, 21 per cent for women.

This time around, the Angus Reid Institute is finding that the Liberals are dominating these cohorts of women unlike any other Canadian demographic.

Among women aged 55 and over, a commanding 57 per cent are voting for Mark Carney’s Liberals, compared to just 30 per cent who plan to vote Conservative. Among women under 34, the rate is 50 per cent (compared to 27 per cent Conservative).

Men, by contrast, are much more mixed in their political intentions. Forty-five per cent of men under 34 plan to vote Liberal, while 39 per cent say they will vote Conservative. Men over 55 are 46 per cent Liberal, 42 per cent Conservative.

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Only a few months ago, public dissatisfaction with Trudeau’s government was so total that a lot of these trends were being buried.  As recently as January, an Abacus Data poll found the Conservatives garnering a plurality of women voters for one of the first times on record.

As to how this reversed so quickly, a major contributor has been the utter collapse in support for the NDP. Women — and particularly young women — used to be the strongest base for the party of Jagmeet Singh. With that support having “evaporated,” in the words of the Angus Reid Institute, all those progressive women have seamlessly migrated to the Carney Liberals.

“The resurgence of the Liberals fueled by Carney’s election to leader is partially driven by women voters returning to the party after abandoning it at the end of 2024,” wrote the institute.

And while Conservative leaders are never overly popular among women, Pierre Poilievre has struggled with female voters ever since becoming leader in 2022.

With Canadian men and women now increasingly cheering for opposing political teams, the country is suddenly privy to an emerging global trend of women and men disagreeing on politics like never before.

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In recent elections everywhere from Poland to the United States to South Korea to Tunisia, a “great gender divergence” is opening up between male and female voters.

As it is in Canada, this differential has been most noticeable among younger voters.

The 2022 South Korean presidential election, for one, saw the electorate split into feminist and anti-feminist voting blocs over issues such as a populist promise to abolish the country’s Ministry of Women and Family. “Koreans have historically largely voted along ideological and regional lines. For the first time, younger voters have begun to split according to gender,” reads an analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Last year’s U.S. presidential election saw an unprecedented 16-point gap open up between men and women voters under 29. Fifty-six per cent of under-29 men voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump, against just 40 per cent of under-29 women.

LET’S POLL

Betting markets are generally considered the most reliable indicator of how an election is going to go, as you’re essentially taking thousands of pundits – all with different bits of information – and having them back up their guesses with money. Just a couple months ago, every single bookmaker making odds for the Canadian election had the Conservatives as the favourite. Now, that’s all flipped. According to a summary by the National Post’s Tyler Dawson, the most likely outcome is now a Liberal majority, with every other outcome (Conservative majority or minority, Liberal minority) rated as “less possible.”

MULRONEYS EVERYWHERE

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre sat down on Wednesday for what is the first one-on-one interview of the campaign. It was with broadcaster Ben Mulroney, who was about the age of Poilievre’s children when his father Brian was running for prime minister in the 1980s. One of the more surreal parts was when Mulroney asked Poilievre about being endorsed by his sister Caroline Mulroney, a minister in the Ontario government of Doug Ford. “A lot has been made about … the relations between the federal (Conservatives) and the Ontario analogue, is this a signal of things changing on that front?” asked Mulroney.

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In her endorsement, Caroline mentioned that one of Poilievre’s first donors was her father Brian, who died just last year. It makes sense that Brian Mulroney would have played a role in the ascension of the current Tory leader, but one of the more unusual things about the elder Mulroney was that he was doing this while also being an unabashed fan of Poilievre’s one-time chief rival, Justin Trudeau. At a dinner in 2023, Mulroney effusively praised Trudeau for navigating the COVID-19 pandemic (“the greatest challenge that any prime minister has had to deal with in 156 years”) and dismissed his government’s various scandals as “trivia,” “trash” and “rumours.”

GAFFETERIA

Although no Conservatives have joked about having bounty hunters kidnap their opponents, the party did see three candidates drop out in the course of 24 hours on Tuesday. They are:

Mark McKenzie
Windsor-Tecumseh
This is a relatively competitive riding for the Conservatives, but McKenzie was dropped like a stone due to his appearance on a 2022 podcast where he joked about executing Justin Trudeau. “We fired him, he’s gone,” Poilievre said when asked about McKenzie at a press conference.

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Stefan Marquis
Laurier-Sainte-Marie
This is former environment minister Steven Guilbeault’s riding, and basically hasn’t been held by a conservative since the First World War. On Tuesday, Marquis was told only that he was being dropped due to his social media posts, which have included posts praising U.S. President Donald Trump, or accusing NATO of provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Marquis didn’t take it well; he posted an image of an automaton in a suit, and accused the Conservatives of cutting loose “a devoted ally willing to operate in a proven complicated political landscape.”

Lourence Singh
New Westminster-Burnaby-Maillardville
This is also long-shot riding for the Conservatives (they garnered a distant third place in 2021). And Singh’s fate is also the most mysterious. On Tuesday, his name was quietly dropped from the official list of Conservative candidates with no explanation given.

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