it's hard to really tell if the weird demographic flip in the canadian election and electorate is a fleeting mistake made by stupid children that don't understand what they're voting for or something more nefarious, as a longterm consequence of choices the canadian government has made about immigration. it seems to be that these young men voting conservative are also overwhelmingly from conservative cultures, like cultures in the middle east or africa that are fundamentalist muslim or christian. this is kind of exactly what jason kenney wanted to happen when he resdesigned the immigration system in the 00s.

so, there's two competing hypotheses that will have to work out:

- it could be that the young people are being tricked by social media and have no idea what they're supporting but are rather just trying to be "cool". if that's the case, polievre will go out of fashion soon enough. you have to win on the first try when you do this, or it backfires.

- or it could be that this is indicative of demographic changes in canada brought on by large amounts of immigration from conservative societies - they brought their kids here and raised them as conservatives, and they grew up to become conservatives.

i think it's a little of both and we'll have to let it work itself out to see which is the more dominant truth.

what i will say for right now is that the examples of societies that flip like this are minimal, but alarming. for example, this is a similar political coalition to the one we saw in iran in 1979 or in chile before the rise of pinochet. when the kids swing to the right like this, fascism tends to follow fairly quickly.

canadians should hope option a is more real and be extremely vigilant about the consequences of option b, as it could challenge the liberal foundations of our secular society.