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

8 Comments

View story

Comments

To the Editor

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

Story Comments (8)

10/16/09 at 07:10 pm

By koby best

It is high time Liberals surch as John McKay address the non-religious elephant in the living room. When it comes to religion, by far the quickest growing group in absolute terms is non-religious Canadians. 16.2 % of Canadians describe themselves as non-religious in the 2001 census; this represented a 44% increase since 1991 and increase of nearly 1.5 million. According to 2008 stats Canada study by 2005, that number had reached 22% amongst those over 15. There are far more non-religious Canadians than there are evangelicals Canadians and non-religious Canadians are younger. Your average non-religious person is 31. Your average baptist, for example, is 39. Furthermore, the extent of such a trend is masked by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Quebecers still identify as being Catholic even as Church attendance in Quebec continues to plummet there and 43% of Canadians did not attend a place of worship in the last year. Add to all of this the fact that growth of non -religious voters is concentrated in the very areas in which the Liberals stand a chance of winning some seats. For instance, 42% of Vancouverites describe themselves as non-religious.

While SSM might have driven away evangelicals in regions of the country that never vote Liberal anyway, there is amble evidence that SSM helped the Liberals in Lowermainland in 2006. There the Liberal vote held steady or increased as it dropped in the rest of the country. Furthermore, it is clear that the Conservative's achilles Heel in Quebec is their social conservatism.

Dion's decision to turn away from social issues and place all his eggs in the carbon tax helped Harper appear more mainstream and this in turn helped Harper make inroads in Toronto and Vancouver.

10/16/09 at 07:10 pm

By koby best

The contention of the authors that evangelicals left the Liberals because they felt hard done by is simply not supported by the evidence. For starters, as mentioned above the 1996 and 2003 polls are dubious. Take away those polls and it is questionable, at least in the West, as to whether the evangelicals ever voted Liberal in great numbers. Two, the number of evangelicals grew quite a bit during the 1990s and these new evangelicals could very well have voted different then evangelicals that had been in the fold longer. Three, some of issues mentioned, such as Kinsella's comments, as reasons why evangelical voters proportedly left the Liberal party are not backed up by any evidence whatsoever. A highly dubious 1996 poll and a slightly less dubious 2003 poll that shows Liberal evangelical support in Ontario at over 40% does not prove anything.

Furthermore, there is little evidence for that the evangelical voters left the Liberals for the NDP for the reasons stated above. Sure, between 2006 and 2008 there does appear movement from the Liberals to the NDP in Ontario However, this is not matched elsewhere and seems to have more to do with NDP taking northern Ontario away from the Liberals. Indeed, 2008 the evangelicals in Western Canada left the NDP in far greater numbers than they did the Liberals. Furthermore, that poll seems to have understated Liberal and Conservative support; it put the Liberals at 28.2 and they finsished with 33.8; and it put the Conservatives at 35.3% and they finished with 39.2%.

Finally, even the notion that evangleical voters left the Liberals because of SSM is problemtic albeit plausible. Only 25% of evangelical voters listed "moral issues" as determining how they voted and this included both SSM and the sponorship scandal. Based strictly on the numbers one would have to say that Green Shift drove more evangelicals away than SSM ever did.

10/16/09 at 06:10 pm

By koby best

One look at the 1996 is enough to cast doubt on their conclusions.

Among decided voters, the 1996 poll showed the Liberals leading the Reform party 45.7% to 24.7 in Western Canada and 58.8 to 8.2 in Ontario. The poll also had the Liberals ahead of the Bloc 49.2 to 33.8 in Quebec and ahead of the PCs 60 to 21.3 in Atlantic Canada. A Year later, this is how things broke down in the 1997 election. Reform finished with 42.8% in Western Canada and 19.1% in Ontario. The Liberals meanwhile captured 27.7% of popular vote in Western Canada and 49.5% in Ontario. The Liberals captured 36.7% of the vote of the popular vote in Quebec and 34% in Atlantic Canada.

There is no basis for considering this poll. It is an obvious outlier.

The 2003 poll is better, but still support for Canadian Alliance looks to be massively understated.

The 2003 poll put the Liberals at 53.3% in Ontario and the Canadian Alliance at 10%. The same poll had the Liberals leading the Canadian Alliance 34.8 to 24.7% in Western Canada.

In the 2000 election the Canadian Alliance took 49.6% of the popular vote in Western Canada and 23.6% of the vote in Ontario During the 2004 election, the Conservatives took 31.5 of the vote in Ontario and 45.3% in Western Canada.

Still based on the other polls, there is evidence of evangelical Canadians having left the Liberals for the Conservatives in slightly greater numbers than the rest of the population in Ontario between 2004 and 2006 and that this trend increased much more so between 2006 and 2008. In the whole of Canada, the Liberal evangelical vote collapsed in 2008.

10/13/09 at 04:10 pm

By Barry Barclay

Evangelicals should realize by now that Mr Harper is not the Messiah. He is at best a lesser prophet- not Moses but moses with a small "m" or perhaps mooses having failed spellcheck, not the brightest spark in the firmament. In any case the best he is doing is leading the Canadian people as the anti-prophet, out of the promised land into the wilderness.

10/12/09 at 02:10 pm

By Michael Tripper

Being liberal cvlasic or otherwise is to be against allowing one religion or another impose it's values upon everyone else.

There are far more people in Canada who do not want faith-based policies forced upon them by Government than do.

All the items listed are simply the opposite of the opinion of the majority of citizens in this country. Why cannot the hardcore religious leave the rest of us alone as we do them until they try and impose their views upon everyone else?

And truthfully it is only an extremely small vocal minority of faith people who think they should be imposing themselves upon others.

10/12/09 at 01:10 pm

By Ron Gaudet

How the Liberals every managed to con the faith communities into supporting them in the first place is amazing to me. When you examine the core beliefs of many faiths (pro-life, one man/one woman marriage, family bonds, self-reliance, etc) you will find they are diametrically opposed to the modern Liberal party. How a party that promotes abortion, soft on crime, legalization of marijuana, gay marriage, big government etc managed to hold sway over faith based communities for so long is the mystery, not that those groups are now moving away from the Liberal party. Another group (immigrants) that have little in common with the left wing ideology of the Liberals is starting to understand they were misled by the party and they, too, are moving to other parties. Liberals have always relied on pandering to groups and buying votes with tax dollars. The connections were never ideological or values based. Without the bonds of tax dollars to keep them close, these groups are finding a more comfortable home in other parties.

10/12/09 at 11:10 am

By Michael Tripper

The idea that there is enough so-called evangelical voters is perhaps the ruse.

Faith is losing ground all over Canada and stories like this are generally promoted by those self-same faith.

The vast majority of Canadians most definitely do not want religion in Government whereas evangelicals DEMAND it.

Stories like this seek to ratchet their importance over their actual influence.

Don't buy it Libbies - the CPC has a lock on brutal cold cruel and punishing religion.

Your support of C-15 is the worst sort of policy possible. Canadians are not Americans we understand crime beyond the red-faced shouting that goes on south of the border.

10/12/09 at 11:10 am

By hollinm

Its not surprising because the Liberal party and its supporters constantly ridicule people of faith.

Make a Comment

You must be a subscriber or a registered member to make a comment.

OPTION 1 Subscriber Login Forget your password?	Email Password
OPTION 2 Subscribe to The Hill Times	Subscribe to the print and electronic editions and get instant access to The Hill Times online.