Liberals losing evangelical voters, says EFC study Liberal MP John McKay says the Conservatives have engaged the evangelical community, finds study 'discouraging' for Grits. By CYNTHIA MÜNSTER Published October 12, 2009    10 Comments

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Evangelical support for the Liberals has dropped throughout the country in the last decade, according to a new study by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, which means more work for the Grits' outreach efforts on top of trying to turn around their sagging support in the polls.

Liberal MP John McKay (Scarborough-Guildwood), a special outreach adviser to faith communities for his party, called the findings "discouraging" but "consistent" with his own experiences.

"I think the Conservatives are doing two things right," Mr. McKay said. "I think they have engaged the community at large. I think they've opened up relational space with evangelicals. They have a lot of members in their caucus who are evangelicals and there's a certain comfort zone that I think they've created. In that respect, they've done right. On the other hand they've not listened very carefully or seriously to a lot of the concerns that the evangelical community has around social issues."

Mr. McKay said he has raised the issue with Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff (Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Ont.) and has been trying to arrange meetings with faith communities throughout the country.

According to the recently-released EFC study, "Canadian Evangelical Voting Trends by Region, 1996-2008," which uses a series of electoral polls by Ipsos Reid and Angus Reid Strategies, in 1996 the Evangelical support for the Liberals was 35 per cent and it has been rapidly going down to 11 per cent in the last election, as the Conservative vote rose. The Conservatives' support from evangelical Christians peaked in 2006, with 60 per cent of the Evangelical vote and then dropped to 48 per cent in 2008. The NDP vote in 2008 was at 16 per cent among evangelicals.

Evangelicals make up about 12 per cent of Canada's population, or four million people distributed throughout Canada and to a lesser degree in Quebec.

The EFC attributes the drop in support for the Liberal Party to the party "closing their doors" to evangelicals. The EFC identifies six incidents through which the Liberal Party "demonstrated again and again that for electoral gain it was willing to marginalize religious groups generally and evangelicals specifically." The list includes Liberal pundit Warren Kinsella mocking then-Alliance leader Stockwell Day's creationist beliefs during the 2000 federal election, not challenging the Ontario Court of Appeal's decision on same-sex marriage in 2003 and federal Liberal statements that followed the ruling until the 2006 election, among other reasons.

"There are two things that are fairly important for evangelicals, as they are important to Canadians who engage in the political system. The first thing is that there's space created for engagement; so we have identified in the paper some of the incidents where it appeared that the Liberal Party was closing down the opportunity for evangelicals to engage on equal footing with non-evangelicals in the party and we've also identified where the Conservative Party had opened some place for evangelicals to engage on an equal footing," said Don Hutchinson, EFC vice-president and co-author of the report.

"The other trend is issues-oriented. There are issues that are important to evangelicals as well as other Canadians and so we see evangelicals that are moving with the issues so I think part of that accounts for, for example, the increase in support for the NDP. There are social issues that are considered politically left or politically right to deal with and some of the social issues that are of greater interest to evangelicals would fit on the political left of the spectrum, some would fit in the centre and some on the right so, sometimes it's a matter of what are the key issues that are being presented during an election campaign or by particular candidates," said Mr. Hutchinson.

Evangelicals, or fundamentalist Christians, have historically been more likely to vote on the right of the spectrum, as have Protestants in general, but since 2000, Catholics, who had been historically more likely to vote Liberal, have also been moving their votes away from the Liberal Party, according to research by McGill University professor Elisabeth Gidengil.

Historically, Catholic voters in Canada have voted for the federal Liberal Party, long puzzling observers of this "religious cleavage," who couldn't find an explanation for this allegiance. In recent years the Liberals have seen this traditional support crumble, which accounts for part of the shrinking Liberal core, according to research by Prof. Gidengil, director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship at McGill University, and the author of a study of the last federal election, "Anatomy of a Liberal Defeat."

According to this research, Catholic support for the Liberal Party has dropped 24 points since 2000. In 2006 they were as likely to vote Conservative as Liberal and by the 2008 election, they showed preference for the Conservative Party.

Prof. Gidengil said a new religious cleavage seems to be taking place.

"Protestants have traditionally been more likely to vote for the party on the right: Progressive Conservatives, and then Reform, Alliance and now the Conservative Party of Canada so that hasn't changed. It is the Catholics that have changed but it is the ones who have the fundamentalist beliefs and the ones who have socially conservative views on issues like same-sex marriage. We seem to be seeing I think evidence of a new religious cleavage so it's no longer so much of Catholic versus Protestant as those who are socially conservative and/or hold fundamentalist beliefs versus those who are more secular," she said.

Mr. Hutchinson and co-author Rick Hiemstra, director of the Centre for Research on Canadian Fundamentalism, explained their findings to MPs from all federal parties during a breakfast on Oct. 6.

Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro (Peterborough, Ont.), who attended the event, said that being a member of a church himself, he wasn't surprised by the findings of the study, because he thinks the values of his party are "consistent with the majority of Canadians and evangelicals fit into that."

"Things like justice for example, our government's position on justice and care to ensure that the victim is part of the justice system, that they're considered and that we have a just justice system I think is resonating with the new evangelical thing," said Mr. Del Mastro.

NDP MP Tony Martin (Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.), one of the founders of his party's 'Faith and Justice Commission,' a five-year-old outreach effort started by NDP MPs of faith, said the study was interesting and useful to his party and he has arranged a meeting for his committee to discuss the study with the EFC.

Mr. Martin said the relationship between politics and faith is always sensitive and as a Catholic who worked for his church before working for politics, "you hung your political coat at the door when you went in. Coming to politics, I thought it would be much freer. Instead I found when I was elected first in 1990, a long time ago, that you were in many ways maybe not so overtly told to hang your religious coat or your faith coat at the door when you went in." Five years ago, he decided he would not leave religion out of his politics any more and started the committee.

"There are some people I'm sure within every party who I believe that the church and state should be completely separate and that there's no space in the public square for religion and we get that from time to time. As a matter of fact, when we first started the commission, we got a fair bit of that: those who saw a red flag go up responded quite quickly to this and suggested that this was not a good thing to be doing," said Mr. Martin.

cmunster@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times