It’s Friday night and I’m at a party on King Street. But instead of slinging shots and dancing the night away, I’m rubbing elbows with young, university-going Conservative women dressed modestly in business formal and hoping to score some face time with one of the MPPs in attendance.

The panel and networking event, open exclusively to women, is hosted at the Albany Club, a swanky members-only establishment for Canada’s Conservative elite. Old money practically oozes out of the walls. The ornate room is decorated with treasured pieces of Canadiana: framed letters from fathers of Confederation, portraits of Sir John A. Macdonald, and heavy wood bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes.

The students—a diverse, enthusiastic group—listen intently as the Conservative MPPs discuss “bringing back the Canadian dream.” They all chuckle in recognition, as if on cue, when Hamilton Mountain’s newly elected MPP Monica Ciriello says that “coming out” as a Conservative was one of the hardest parts of her candidacy.

When I speak to a few attendees that Friday night in late March, exactly a month before election day, they’re enthusiastic about Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives and how the “lost Liberal decade” has contributed to their anxieties about their fast-approaching futures—one where housing, stable careers, and the ability to start a family are all in question.

It’s a far cry from 2015, when a record number of newly eligible voters propelled Justin Trudeau and the Liberals from third-party status to a commanding majority government. Today, the Conservatives lead in popularity among young Canadians in just about every poll. An early April poll by Liaison Strategies found 45 percent of 18- to 35-year-olds said they’re voting for the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), the highest of any age group. An Abacus poll from last year found that Poilievre’s Conservatives saw a sharp increase of the vote share in this age group—from 21 percent in 2015 to 37 in July 2024.

But what’s behind the party’s popularity? When I spend time with young Conservatives, seeking them out at campus events and campaign launches, I see a mix of contradictory policy beliefs, a desperate search for a strong leader who can resuscitate their flagging future prospects, and a willingness to bet more on feelings than facts to get there.

For many young people, the economy is the biggest issue right now.

At the Albany Club, I strike up a conversation with Anita Dianatinasab, a 22-year-old University of Toronto-Scarborough student just one week away from being sworn in as a citizen. When I ask her why she’s voting Conservative, she tells me in a hushed tone that she’s actually “more of a moderate,” looking around to make sure no one overhears her treachery. But, this election, the most important issue for her is Canada’s broken economy—which she believes only the Conservative party can fix.

She tells me that if she were voting emotionally, with her heart, she might vote Liberal—especially since she feels like she’s a beneficiary of the Liberals’ immigration policies. The right’s tendency towards xenophobia is troubling to her, she says, admitting that this position might be counterintuitive as a new immigrant. But this election is too important for matters of the heart; the logical part of her brain says that the Conservatives will do more for the economy, which is more important for her now that she’s about to become a citizen. “Taxes and the economy are the issues that matter to me most at this moment,” she says.

A few days later, at a canvassing event for CPC candidate James Lin in Willowdale, John Tyminski, 17, tells me that the carbon tax is his top issue. “The amount of money families are losing is awful,” he says. (Tyminski, who describes himself as very politically engaged, having canvassed for Conservative politicians in his riding since age 14, doesn’t seem to be aware that newly-minted Prime Minister Mark Carney axed the consumer carbon tax before calling the election.)

Though the Liberals criticize Conservatives’ economic promises as failing to line up with reality, the CPC has enticed some fiscally concerned young people to the party. But a short political memory might also be fuelling this infatuation. “Amongst young people, the alternative to what has screwed them over is the Conservatives,” says Laura Stephenson, chair of Western University’s department of political science and co-director of the Consortium on Electoral Democracy. In other words, older voters aren’t flocking to the CPC because they remember the last Conservative government.

“Anybody with a sense of the policy history knows that Conservatives are the authors of most of the policies that put young people in the position they’re in today,” says Dennis Pilon, the chair of York University’s department of politics. He lists the Conservatives cutting rental housing support in the 1980s and ‘90s and the subsequent lack of purpose-built rentals as a key factor in young Canadians’ lack of housing stability. “To look to the Conservatives for solutions is the height of irony.”

At Lin’s campaign launch and canvassing event, I’m surprised to see many of the same faces I met at the Albany Club just a few days earlier, as well as some students I recognize from various Conservative student social media accounts. The room is teeming with young people, called into action by campus Conservative groups that promise the opportunity to network with party staffers (many of whom are alumni of the same schools) and MP-hopefuls. It’s a tactic I’ve begun to notice: the Conservatives promise university students career advancement, the students return the favour by padding out rooms, promoting events online and sharing Conservative talking points with their peers. It’s a relationship that ostensibly gives the students the short end of the stick—a legion of youth ready to pound the pavement in exchange for 30 seconds with potential Conservative MPs.

Still, the students clamour for Lin to make a speech, and swarm the CPC’s deputy leader Melissa Lantsman for selfies—many of which make it onto Instagram accounts and are dutifully reposted by Lantsman. A lot of attendees wear their beliefs proudly: there is some “Canada is not for sale” merch, a man in a thin blue line hat, T-shirts emblazoned with “Canada First.” The event has the fervour of a sold-out concert.

 

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Unlike the women-only environment at the Albany Club, I find it difficult to start conversations with the young men in attendance. This demographic is not only one of the most likely to vote Conservative, but also to identify publicly with the party. An Abacus poll from March found that 41 percent of men under 30 are voting for the CPC compared to only 30.4 percent of women. But at Lin’s event, the loudest attendees, wearing the boldest declarations of their politics, are the least willing to talk. Perhaps it’s my gender or my race, or maybe it’s because I’m a member of the press. But while young women open up to me right away, the men I approach mostly pretend to be too busy to talk, or tell me they’re not interested. I approach mixed friend groups, hoping that if their female friends will talk, so will they. No such luck.

Instead, throughout the afternoon, I move around the campaign office feeling invisible. There, I hear constituent after constituent grumble about how the Liberals destroyed Canada, how government spending and bureaucracy is at an all-time high and how Poilievre will reinstate the Canadian dream—whatever that means. Among the complaints is the idea that there are too many immigrants, which is ironic considering the event is taking place in Willowdale, an immigrant-rich riding.

According to Randy Besco, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s department of political science, attitudes toward immigration in particular have switched by age. “Traditionally, older people are opposed to immigration—but as of 2024, the age gradient has flipped, and now 18- to 30-year-olds are the most opposed for the first time in 35 years, the furthest the data goes,” he explains, adding that it’s likely because of how immigrants have been blamed for the housing crisis.

Immigration isn’t the only social policy that has young conservatives conflicted. Dianatinasab says she doesn’t like that Poilievre and his candidates have been dismissive of LGBTQ+ rights and that she “respects and supports LGBTQ+ people.” However, she does “think it’s getting out of hand,” and that LGBTQ+ issues shouldn’t be discussed publicly.

This isn’t the only perspective I hear in the course of these conversations that harkens back to some bygone era of conservatism. When I speak to Lotan Wider, an 18-year-old York University student active in his campus Conservative club and pro-Israel organizing, he tells me that he’s worried about communist protesters on campus whom he sees as radical and aggressive. “Karl Marx is their hero and we hear them talking about the abolishment of private property,” he says passionately. Don’t get him wrong—he believes in freedom of speech. Members of the Freedom Convoy, for example, “have a right to protest if they don’t believe in vaccines.” (While more than 500 charges were laid during pandemic-era convoy protests in Ottawa—many for assault, weapon possession and uttering threats—there have been almost no such charges for campus protests.)

There’s been plenty of discussion, between the 2024 U.S. election and this one, of young people, especially young men, making a massive shift to the right, shattering the notion of young people as inherently progressive. The internet has given a platform to longstanding far-right ideologies, says Pilon, making them more visible, more accessible. There’s lots of evidence that young people today get most of their political information online. Tyminski, the 17-year-old, tells me he gets almost all his information from the internet and through social media. And research from Elections Canada found that while older generations trust traditional journalism more, Gen Z has equal trust in traditional journalism and social media news, making them more susceptible to consuming and believing fake news.

At the Women in Politics event at the Albany Club, I met an 18-year-old aspiring journalist. Dressed in an oversized blazer and nursing a diet Coke, she refused to meet my eye, and instead intently gazed over my shoulder at a Conservative staffer she wanted to meet. The conversation went from awkward to deeply uncomfortable when I told her that I was a journalist, too. She asked me which publications I wrote for. When I mentioned, in addition to The Local, the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail—some of the country’s most widely read (and fairly centrist) outlets—she began to visibly back away from me. “Oh, you’re a liberal,” she said as she looked around desperately for someone else to talk to, anyone but me.

The online spaces we all inhabit are today more siloed than ever before: algorithms are designed to feed you more and more extreme versions of what you’re already seeing.

This is especially the case for young men. While online radicals are a tiny fraction of the population, “it’s still a real phenomenon that’s actually about gender,” Besco says. “It’s about the relative status of men falling.” For example, women are much more likely to have university degrees than men—for every 100 Canadian women who have completed post-secondary education, there are only 83 men. These disaffected young men are ripe for online radicalization, and turn toward conservatism. A lot of young men are scared of what they perceive to be the too-fast pace of progressive social change and landmark movements of the last 10 years, like MeToo and Black Lives Matter. A CBC study found that just 22.3 percent of men aged 18-30 think that “much more” should be done for racial minorities, compared to 41 percent of women. And when it comes to gender equality, just 52.3 percent of men believe that “somewhat more” or “much more” should be done for women, compared to nearly 80 percent of women in that cohort.

Poilievre and other Conservatives have been leaning into the hypermasculine energy fostered by the manosphere and its acolytes, figures like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson (whose audiences are overwhelmingly young and male). In an election cycle where Poilievre and representatives of the Conservative party have refused to grant full access to the press, the party leader used a two-hour appearance on Peterson’s podcast to lay out his goals and election strategy. He denounced “wokeism,” claimed that young Canadians yearn for “traditional values,” and attributed rising hate crime rates to talking about racism. “Everything is broken in this country right now,” he said.

And, there are certainly some young men who feel drawn to Poilievre’s combative and shit-disturbing nature in Parliament, his tacit endorsement of the Freedom Convoy and his tendency to verbally attack anyone who isn’t firmly on his side. “There is certainly a bro culture that is going to be chest-bumping their way to the polls because they like his F-U style,” Pilon says.