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Originally Posted by Acajack
Well, for one thing the U.S. compared to Canada has very few rural resource industry regions that don't at least have at least some agricultural or ranching activity taking place in the region. Canada has many, many areas where it's resource industries only with almost no local farming at all.
And we all know farmer types tend to be politically conservative. That explains why even in Canada most of the Prairies and rural Ontario are fairly conservative. (There is a notable exception to this rule in Quebec where agricultural areas don't tend to be conservative, and to a lesser degree is Atlantic Canada as well, where there are other factors at play.)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lrt's friend
Likely the equivalent in Canada was the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) that was founded on the Canadian prairies during the Depression. This eventually became the NDP in Canada.
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Yeah, but the NDP grew out of a labor movement in the prairies, a farming region.
The connection between political conservatism and population density (sparser being more conservative) seems stronger in the US but less clear cut in Canada.
I think for a number of reasons. As mentioned earlier, sparsely populated areas in Northern Canada have more aboriginal people. There's also probably places where people have government jobs in sparsely populated areas (so you'd have less of the "anti-big government" conservatism political views for those people). Also, labor unions declined much more in small town America than in Canada. Additionally, suburbs of bigger Canadian cities can be conservative much more than further, outlying rural regions, because those suburbs are voting conservative on economic grounds.