Two new solitudes — rural and urban — now define the Canadian political landscape

According to Elections Canada, the metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — the country's three biggest cities — account for 116 of Canada's 338 ridings. And the results in those ridings help to tell the story of both the Liberal victory and a fundamental split in federal politics.

Of those 116 ridings, the Liberals won 86 — more than half of their national total. The Conservatives won just eight.

That Liberal strength in cities is part of an urban-rural split that now defines the electoral map in Canada. New research suggests the urban-rural divide between the Liberal and Conservative parties has never been wider.

But that split raises questions that go beyond partisan competition.

That new research was produced by professors David Armstrong and Zack Taylor of Western University and Jack Lucas from the University of Calgary. Using data on population density, location, economic activity and social diversity, they developed a new measure of "urbanity" that allows them to track long-term trends in party support since Confederation.

What they found is that Canada's two major parties began to diverge in the 1960s: Liberal support began to get more urban, Conservative support began to get more rural. That trend accelerated after the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties merged in 2003 to become the modern Conservative Party. The gap between the two parties was larger than ever before in 2019.

Then it got even bigger in 2021. According to the work done by Armstrong, Lucas and Taylor, the Liberals won all 25 of the most urban ridings in Canada and 109 of the top 150 most urban ridings. The Conservatives won just 23 of those urban ridings.