Dan Fumano: As Vancouver Suburbs Urbanize, Conservatives Lose Ground

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Greg Lyle grew up in Surrey in the 1970s and used to ride horses on the side of the road. That is not so common these days. Today’s Surrey, says Lyle, “is not the Surrey I grew up in.”

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While people certainly still ride horses in some areas south of the Fraser River, there are also other ways to get around these days, including, in a few years, the SkyTrain from Surrey to Langley, for which it announced the first Minister Justin Trudeau. $ 1.3 billion in funding the month before an early election is called.

Surrey and other outer parts of Metro Vancouver have also changed in many ways beyond modes of transportation, including population, density, and political culture.

“Where he lived… we had 10 acres with a house and a pool. There are now 20 half-acre executive houses, ”said Lyle, a former political worker and now president of Innovative Research Group. “It is completely different.”

In Monday’s election results, many observers commented on the Liberals’ success in fending off conservative challenges in some Metro suburbs, including Surrey, Delta, and Coquitlam, while driving others away from the Tories, such as two Richmond boroughs. and Cloverdale-Langley City. On election night, former federal liberal strategist Mark Marissen commented that Vancouver’s high cost of living meant more young, often educated families were moving to the outer suburbs, which were experiencing great development and “urbanization.” . And whether they come from Vancouver, elsewhere in Canada, or abroad, those young families buying new homes in Surrey or Langley are changing the political landscape there over time.

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Andy Yan, director of the Municipal Program at Simon Fraser University, compared the results of Monday’s preliminary elections with the 2016 census data and found that, on average, the districts of British Columbia that became conservative had a density of approximately 138 residents per square kilometer. The districts of British Columbia that voted for the Liberals were, on average, more than 18 times denser, with 2,571 people per square kilometer. (NDP districts averaged 1,815 people per square kilometer.)

Of course, the built environment of a neighborhood does not necessarily dictate the voting habits of a resident. If a staunch conservative moves from the countryside to an urban area, he probably won’t change his vote overnight. But the general trend is true that urban dwellers in Canada and British Columbia are more likely to vote liberal than conservative, and Canada’s population is urbanizing as more people move to cities. and development intensifies in peripheral suburban areas making them more urban.

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Still, Lyle, who worked for the Federal Conservatives and BC Liberals in the 1980s and 1990s, doesn’t think those trends necessarily bode ill for the Conservatives’ electoral prospects going forward. He pointed to Stephen Harper’s success in those suburban districts of Vancouver and Toronto. Instead, Lyle says, the party just needs to find a way to satisfy those indecisive voters in the suburbs where they are and talk about their needs, without scaring them off and sounding like an old-school, far-right party of social and cultural conservatism.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole tried to present herself and the party as a more centrist and progressive version of the Conservatives, and parts of her platform seemed designed to reach younger urban voters.

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“But it’s not just about the leader,” said Lyle, president of Innovative Research Group, a research and consulting firm with offices in Vancouver and Toronto. “It is not the leader who has been pushing private member bills on abortion rights or things like that. There are a number of bills that have come out of that caucus that have left people concerned that there is a hidden conservative social agenda. “

And that prospect of a “hidden conservative social agenda” is more likely to be a problem for more voters in increasingly cosmopolitan places like Surrey or Langley City today, compared to a generation or two ago, Lyle said.

“There are some sensitivities in these suburban seats that you won’t see in more rural, small town areas,” Lyle said. He pointed to the conservatives’ handling of the gun control issue during this year’s elections, which he called “a critical barrier for conservatives.”

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Gun problems are likely reproduced differently in places like Cloverdale these days than in previous decades, when the area was more rural with more hunters.

Cloverdale-Langley City was one of those suburban districts that seems to have changed from conservative to liberal. Although the mail-in ballots had not yet been counted, the television networks called him up for the liberal John Aldag, ousting the current conservative Tamara Jansen.

When asked Tuesday what he thought happened at the race, Aldag said: “Cloverdale-Langley City is a growing community that becomes more and more diverse with each passing day, there are a lot of young families here, and I think that it has changed the dynamics of our community. “

Aldag said he heard at the door during the campaign that voters were concerned that Jansen had pursued an “aggressive social conservative agenda” during his tenure.

“They felt that some of the values ​​of our community were not being adequately reflected,” Aldag said. “We have this young, beautiful, rich and diverse community … So there was a motivation there for my supporters of a more progressive voice in Ottawa.”

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