By: Leo Kristal-Polci
Edited by: Victoria Percival
Thanks to the raft of tariffs, expansionist threats, and questionable foreign policy decisions coming from the new Trump administration, the past few months in Canadian politics have seen something of an obsession with the United States. For the most part, the new trends emerging in the American political arena have sparked widespread backlash and boycotts, but one rather important concern has managed to evade the public eye: the risk of political contamination. In other words, not only are all the widely recognized threats individually dangerous to Canada, so is the potential for the brand of politics that produced these changes to infiltrate Canadian policy. Given Canada’s geographic and cultural proximity to the States, contagion is a very real worry. One risk that is especially salient to any university student reading this article is the growing gender divide in how young Americans identify politically. In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won the male 18-to-29-year-old demographic by 14 points, while Kamala Harris won its female counterpart by 18 points. This sharp difference is just one of the more recent examples of a growing trend in the United States and other Western democracies: young men are voting overwhelmingly conservative, while young women are voting just as liberal.
There is conflicting evidence on the degree to which this phenomenon already exists in Canada. A March 17th Leger poll recently found that Mark Carney was favoured by five points with women as compared to men, while Pierre Poilievre was favoured by seven points with men as compared to women. A separate poll from Abacus Data found that the Liberals held a two-point lead with women and the Conservatives a six-point lead with men. Although these numbers do reflect mild congruence with the American trend, they should be taken with a large grain of salt. Because the statistics are not broken down by age group, they do not paint a clear enough picture to draw a convincing conclusion about Gen Z—at best, they might demonstrate that the groundwork for gendered voting exists. Regardless of whether or not this trend has already crossed the 49th parallel, it should be taken seriously, and the threat it poses to Canadian politics should not be underestimated.
A first facet of this potential damage is in the restructuring of Gen Z’s political clout. The term “leaders of tomorrow” gets thrown around a lot by politicians when addressing their younger audiences. Whether the phrase is taken as a sign of genuine interest in the future of the country or just a means of pandering to young voters, for years there has been an undeniable ambition among public officials of every stripe to lock down the youth demographic ahead of general elections. Whether or not this long-standing trend will continue in the future, though, seems increasingly doubtful in a world of gender-divided politics. If politicians feel that an irreconcilable chasm exists between male and female voters, they are incentivized to gear themselves entirely to the group they perform better with to consolidate its support. Rather than building platforms that target the interests of “young people”, parties instead develop exclusive interest in “young men” or “young women”. This trend is already apparent enough in the United States for scholars to have begun pegging the Democrats as the party of women and the Republicans as its male alternative. This demographic switch inherently entails a change in the key issues that parties choose to prioritize. Rather than looking to address “generational” problems like climate change that would sway youth voting, they focus their attention on more gendered topics like abortion access or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy. This is not to say that parties are bound to ignore generational issues altogether, simply that it is unlikely that something like climate change will be a core election issue. The most recent American election seems to confirm this estimate. Given that young people have a poor baseline voter turnout to begin with, their political interests are only further compromised when generational issues are removed from the ballot.
Further, voting along gender lines can lead to a kind of strategic misdirection, where voters believe they are supporting candidates who represent their concerns, but are in fact being deliberately steered toward positions that ultimately undermine their long-term interests. Gendered politics has proven itself to be prone to populist undertones that focus more on emotive appeal than policy foundations; one need only look to Donald Trump’s recent election for evidence that attests to this fact. In a feat of political entrepreneurialism, Republicans took largely valid, under-addressed frustrations of young men and weaponized them against women and Democrats for the sake of their electoral prospects. They sold the narrative that women’s success had come at the expense of men’s and that the Republican Party would be the one to rectify this supposed injustice. In backing the Republicans, many male voters, whose grievances were really financial in nature, elected a President who immediately oversaw a regime of tariffs that helped erase 7% of the S&P 500’s value in the span of two and a half months, and made life harder for business owners who depended on foreign goods. It would be a hard case to make that men and women have fundamentally opposing interests that justify such a stark voting divide—this appears less like a reflection of genuine difference, and more like the result of political gamesmanship
While political contamination might not appear as pressing or time-sensitive as some of the other issues currently being thrown in Canada’s direction, its potential impacts are arguably more dire. At the same time, this problem is one that every citizen has a real ability to address. While tariffs and foreign policy are the jurisdiction of the federal government, it is up to each young Canadian to decide whether they will allow themselves to be influenced by divisive, gender-based political rhetoric. This is a problem that demands a grassroots solution—one that begins with how young people choose to engage politically, especially at the ballot box.
References:
Image Source: Hecht, Matt. American flags near the Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Original public domain image from Flickr. Rawpixel, https://www.rawpixel.com/image/3578651.
Coletto, David. “Abacus Data Poll: Conservative lead down to 4 as Liberals reach highest vote share since August 2021.” Abacus Data, 2025, https://abacusdata.ca/canadian-politics-march-liberals-close-the-gap/.
Léger. “Canadian Politics Survey of Canadians.” Leger, 2025, https://leger360.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Leger-CAN_voting_intentions_March_17th.pdf.
U.S. Bank. “Stock market under the Trump administration.” U.S. Bank, 2025, https://www.usbank.com/investing/financial-perspectives/market-news/stock-market-under-trump.html.
Wolfson, Sam. “‘A fatal miscalculation’: masculinity researcher Richard Reeves on why Democrats lost young men.” The Guardian, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/08/young-men-donald-trump-kamala-harris.
Yerushalmy, Jonathan. “What’s behind the global political divide between young men and women?” The Guardian, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/14/us-election-donald-trump-voters-gender-race-data.