Tri-Cities' NDP voters flocked to both Liberal and Conservatives in 2025 election

Hamilton Spectator

02-05-2025

Conforming to a trend seen across the country, the Liberal Party's success in the Tri-Cities came at the expense of the NDP.
Liberals swept all three ridings, gobbling up two ridings from incumbent NDP MPs. And while local Conservative candidates also gained a significant share of votes from the floundering labour party, Liberal candidates were able to edge out the win.
'The Tri-Cities has certainly gone red,' said long-time Coquitlam–Port Coquitlam Liberal MP Ron McKinnon.
Across Canada, the Liberals and Conservatives each captured more than 40 percent of the popular vote. Such binary voting has not occurred in a federal election since 1930.
Voters in the Tri-Cities followed a near identical pattern in its two main ridings – Port Moody–Coquitlam and Coquitlam–Port Coquitlam – with NDP voters flocking to either Conservative or Liberal tents. All three ridings had higher vote counts than 2021's federal election.
Stewart Prest, a political science professor at UBC, said the collapse of the NDP was the story of the 2025 federal election, which he described as particularly 'unusual.'
Prest said there were essentially two questions on voters' minds. Those most worried about the threat of Trump gravitated towards the message of Mark Carney and the Liberals; while voters really worried about the direction of the country over the past 10 years turned to the Conservatives.
'Voters, I think, really saw it as a high stakes election. In that situation, voters – given the vagaries of the first-pass-the-post system – really do respond to make their vote influence the outcome,' Prest said. 'It becomes much less likely that voters will think about a third option. We saw that again and again.'
Port Moody–Coquitlam's Liberal candidate Zoe Royer – now the first Liberal MP to represent Port Moody federally since 2000 – saw her party's vote share jump to 43.6 percent. That's a 16.4 percent bump from the previous election. Conservative candidate Paul Lambert saw his party get an 8.5 percent bump from 2021, receiving 40.4 percent of the vote. NDP incumbent Bonita Zarrillo, on the other hand, saw her vote share plummet by 22.2 percent to 15 percent.
Similarly, in Port Coquitlam–Port Coquitlam, MP Ron McKinnon received 47.4 percent of the vote, an 8.9 percent boost. Conservative challenger Iain Black increased his party's vote share by 12.7 percent, receiving 43 percent of the votes. While the NDP's Laura Dupont, who also ran in the 2021, dropped 19.5 percent from 2021 to just 7.4 percent of the votes.
Mckinnon emphasized that courting NDP voters was in no way part of his team's strategy, rather their plan was simply to share the Carney and Liberal platform.
'We were out there looking for everybody who was interested in supporting our vision,' McKinnon said. 'Certainly, we found NDP people, but we found a few Conservatives as well.'
Even in ridings seen as NDP strongholds, such as New Westminster–Burnaby–Maillardville, Liberals and Conservative both made significant gains.
Incumbent MP Peter Julian, who achieved 48.8 percent of the vote in 2021, saw that support drop by 17.2 percent in 2025. The Liberals, under newcomer Jake Sawatzky, won with 35.1 percent of vote, up 11.4 percent; while the Conservatives, under Indy Panchi, reached 31.3 percent, up 11.6 percent.
One surprising aspect of the election was that the NDP flight did not entirely translate into Liberal support; it also cut towards the Conservatives.
Across B.C., the Conservatives picked seven new seats, while the Liberals only picked up four, and the NDP lost 10 – 40 percent of their total seats won in 2021.
NDP vote share in the province fell by over half, dropping from 29 percent in 2021 to just 13 percent in 2025. The Conservatives picked up 41 percent, up 8 percent; while the Liberals picked up 14.8 percent, rising to 41.8 percent.
Prest said a Conservative strategy has been to woo union and working class voters.
He pointed to a similar effort employed by Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party under Doug Ford, who have successfully secured votes from private sector unions, which are much more likely to focus on the health of the economy.
Working class voters traditionally linked to labor or social democratic parties have been weakened across the democratic world, according to Prest.
'The fact that this was an unusual election doesn't mean that those voters are all going to come back to the NDP either,' he said. 'I think this is a real wake up call for the NDP. It's going to require a period of reflection for the party to figure out what it actually stands for, and what role it plays in the Canadian landscape.'
But Prest added the Liberals and Conservatives cannot rely on the newfound NDP voter support either, noting the outcome was completely upended by an outside threat of Donald Trump.
He said the result underscores the vulnerability of both parties: the Liberals have to show concrete progress on issues frustrating millions of Canadians, particularly around affordability; while Conservatives can't count on outrage against the current government to launch them into power.
'We are going to forever mark this election with something of an asterisk,' Prest said. 'Assuming for the moment, we don't have a similar kind of threat to Canadian sovereignty in the next election, we wouldn't necessarily expect the same result.'
While some commentators have suggested the 2025 election could be signalling Canada's transformation into a two-party system, Prest is skeptical.
He said the long-term trend in Canada is moving in the opposite direction, towards a greater diversity of parties. Over the decades, Conservative voters have split and rejoined, the Bloc Québécois has carved out a seemingly permanent place, and the NDP have emerged on the scene.
'I think it is only because this election was seen as of such high stakes that we did see the collapsing of choice,' Prest said. 'It seems unlikely that two parties are going to fully express the choices and concerns regarding Canadians.'
Even with the collapse of the NDP, issues of federal spending priorities people could easily breathe new life into the party.
'Of course, the NDP has to figure out how to make the case to voters again. But we have seen parties have near death experiences before.'