Although largely ignored by the majority of non-partisans, much has been made recently in the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race about what kind of influence Trump will have on our politics.  The post-Harper era is before us, and the number of potential directions it could take are still high.  Could the Conservative Party be met with the same powers that overtook and shook the Republican party?  I’m going to lay out some evidence as to why I think the answer is no.

Let’s look at some of the metrics.

Urban-Rural divide: On this, Canada and the US are roughly equal when it comes to levels of urbanization.  About 80% of us live in urban areas.  That number is increasing, and the urbanization favours liberal parties and policies.  Trump-esque policies, conversely, are predominantly supported in rural areas which, ironically, are less prone to immigration and crime.  So there will be an attentive Canadian audience for an anti-establishment run in rural parts sroughly equal to what Trump has experienced.

Education attainment: This is where it starts to fall apart. The Trump coalition is predominantly created on the basis of non-college educated voters.  Check out the OECD data (you may need to click on the box):

The data show that Canadians, in every age category (the square are those aged 55-64, the x represents those 45-54, the diamond represents 35-44, and the circle represents 25-34 year-olds), are more likely to have a college/university education than Americans.  And, the trend is even more accentuated among younger cohorts, meaning that the majority of Canadian voters in the next decade will continue to have an education vs. our American counterparts and that divide is growing.  You may start to understand why so many Canadians are not in love with Trump.  He’s not speaking to the vast majority of us.  We’re becoming more educated, not less.

Income Inequality:  The idea that society is rigged in favour of the elites over the masses is likely to resonate more in societies that have greater income disparity.

Exploring the above chart from the Conference Board of Canada, Canada gets a grade of C versus a D for the US.  This means that the size and growth of the middle class is more robust in Canada, but that the wealthy still are disproportionately taking a greater share.  So Canada isn’t great when it comes to wealth distribution, but isn’t as bad as the US.  Plus, what income inequality does not capture is the fact that social program spending helps to mitigate some of the pressures poorer families face (i.e. public health care and public education, for example, aren’t out-of-pocket household expenses).  As a result, while poverty remains a growing issue in Canada, it isn’t as bad as it is in the United States.

All of this is to suggest that importing Trump politics will appeal to a small segment of the Canadian population at present, but that that small segment is likely to narrow due to more urban and more educated people increasing their proportion of the overall vote.  Add to this the reality that population growth is adding to diversity, rather than the other way around, and the anti-immigration, anti-elite message, and anti-global messages that Trump supports will likely not resonate as highly here.

Thus, fellow conservatives, if you’re taking the short game in selecting your leadership support, realize that in 4 to 8 years from now, when we likely have a chance to form a government, the Canadian electorate is going to look differently than it did it 2006 and different than it looks today.  If you don’t understand this going into this leadership race, you’re about to make a big mistake.

As a 30-something, PhD-wielding, sub-urban, I’m an atypical conservative.  I’ll be called establishment, elitist, moderate, and so on. Most of that will be said pejoratively so.  However, you ‘others’ may wish to consider that my profile (exclude the PhD and replace with any degree) is that demographic you’re going to need to chase if you want to turn things around and potentially govern one day.