How Conservative is the Fraser Valley?
The 2021 federal election may not have held many surprises for the Fraser Valley, but small changes in local votes show that the future isn't set in stone.
The Fraser Valley isnât as Conservative as it used to be.
Although the 2021 federal election provided few surprises in the Fraser Valley, a little digging shows that although the Conservatives held onto their Fraser Valley strongholds, the overwhelming support for that party is beginning to erode.
That wasnât the case federally. Across the country, Conservatives ran a campaign that saw the party slightly increase their share of the national vote. But in the Fraser Valley, four of the five federal candidates actually garnered fewer votes than just two years before.
Story continues below.Â
Get FV Current in your inbox.
Plug in to the news that matters in Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission, and the rest of the Fraser Valley.
By filling out the form above, you consent to receive emails from Fraser Valley Current. You can unsubscribe at any time. View our privacy policy here.
Having trouble with the form? Contact us at contact@fvcurrent.com.
*A note on the terminology: In an election, âwinsâ in individual polling stations do not determine the winner for the riding; only the total votes do that. However, in this article we refer to individual polling station âwinsâ as a stand-in for how neighbourhoods wanted the election to go. A party âwinsâ a polling station by having a higher percentage of the vote than its competitors. In rare cases, two parties are tied.
The Conservative decline

Across the Fraser Valley, the Conservative vote has been declining since at least the mid-2000s, when 60% of voters cast their ballot for the Tories. In 2021, only 44% of the vote went to the Conservatives. (In 2019, nearly 46% of the vote went to the Conservatives.)
Hamish Telford, a political science professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, spoke about the change during The Currentâs Changing Valley panel in March.
âI thought 2015 was going to be something of an anomaly, a Trudeau wave. But it hasnât really bounced back,â he said. âThe Conservatives arenât going to lose these ridings any time soon, but I think we are witnessing a fairly Conservative community⌠[becoming] much less so.â
Although the valley may be less blue, certain areas were still guaranteed wins for the Conservatives in 2021. Farming areas in Chilliwack, Langley, and Abbotsfordâs Matsqui and Sumas prairies remained the most Conservative out of anywhere in the Fraser Valley, as they were in 2019. But Conservative votes declined even in those blue havens.
In the 20 most Conservative polling stations in the valley, the Conservatives saw their share of the vote decrease. Those voters went to both the left and the right. The Peopleâs Party of Canada saw the most significant increase proportionallyâgoing from an average of 2% of the vote to 7% of the vote. But both the NDP and the Liberals made inroads in those areas as well.
The trend wasnât just happening in the Tory strongholds. Across the valley, polling stations just werenât as blue as they were before. Telford noted that was likely due to demographic changes: an increasing number of new residents who had moved from areas with what he called âprogressive urban values,â along with more young voters who are less conservative than their elders.
Across the valley in 2021, the Conservatives won fewer polling stations than two years prior. After garnering the most votes at 90% of polling stations in 2019, the party won âjustâ 78% of sites in 2021. Most of the losses headed to the Liberals instead.
The Liberal switch

The Fraser Valley is not easily turned red. In the 2019 election, the Liberals claimed the most votes at only 6% of the Fraser Valleyâs polling stations. In 2021, that amount nearly doubled, despite the party struggling to make ground elsewhere in the country.
Many of those flips occurred in Cloverdale-Langley City, where polling stations that had given the most votes to Conservative candidate Tamara Jansen in 2019 switched to support Liberal John Aldag. Jansen was the centre of controversy prior to the campaign, after using a bible quote to oppose a ban on conversion therapy and using the phrase âlesbian activityâ in the same speech.
The Conservatives lost 10 previously held polling stations to the Liberals in the Langley part of the riding. (They also took three polling stations that had formerly been Liberal wins.) Some polling stations in rapidly growing parts of the neighbouring Langley-Aldergrove riding also flipped to the Liberals. Having a well-known candidate (long-time township councillor Kim Ritcher) likely played a role in that switch but demographics and migration from Vancouver, as well as the fraught campaign one riding over, may also have had an impact.
More central Abbotsford polling stations also went Liberalâlargely in the western portion of the city. The area was already a relatively strong Liberal fortress, with roughly half of residents casting votes for Liberals in 2019. But in 2021, it only became more so, with Liberal votes exceeding 55% of the total in many places.
Those areas have a significant South Asian population, and Telford has noted the strength of Liberal brand among those communities. In Abbotsford, the Conservatives lost 14 polling stations they had previously won in 2019.
The Liberals werenât the only party to dig into former Conservative votes. The NDP also increased their Fraser Valley vote share in 2021âand nowhere was that more obvious than in Chilliwack-Hope.
A tale of two Chilliwacks

A Conservative rallying groundâbut also a place of burgeoning NDP support.
Thatâs the new reality in Chilliwack-Hope, where the NDP made significant inroads in a riding that had once been a sea of blue.
Chilliwack-Hope still has Mark Strahl as its member of Parliament, but tides are clearly shifting in the electoral district. More than two dozen formerly Conservative polling stations switched to NDP for the 2021 election, and Strahlâs share of the vote went down too, to 46% of the vote from 50%.
Most of the new NDP polling stations centred in the cityâs core, a few Vedder-area neighbourhoods, in the Yarrow and Cultus Lake areas. There was even one in Hope. Part of the switch could be due to the strength of the NDPâs candidate in 2021.
In 2019, when the NDP ran parachute candidate Heather McQuillan in the riding, the NDP only garnered the most votes at four polling stations: two in the cityâs downtown core, one in the Garrison area, and another in Cultus Lake. In 2021, there were 33.
Unlike in 2019, NDP candidate DJ Pohl was a Chilliwack resident who received vocal support from local businesspeople. The drift to the left also continues a trend that The Current identified in the 2019 election, where areas with lower incomes (downtown Chilliwack) or more newcomers (Garrison) were more likely to vote Liberal or NDP.
Story continues below.
Get FV Current in your inbox.
Plug in to the news that matters in Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission, and the rest of the Fraser Valley.
By filling out the form above, you consent to receive emails from Fraser Valley Current. You can unsubscribe at any time. View our privacy policy here.
Having trouble with the form? Contact us at contact@fvcurrent.com.
The future
Despite vote tallies that seemed to stay more or less the same on the surface, the Fraser Valley saw significant changes in particular neighbourhoods. How exactly that translates into future elections remains to be seenâbut itâs worth considering the potential implications.
Chilliwackâs NDP swing wasnât newâareas that had an orange wave in 2021 also had a fair number of NDP supporters in 2019. But as more newcomers arrive in the region from left-leaning communities in Metro Vancouver, the shift could become more pronounced. As The Current has reported in the past, these interprovincial migrants are already changing the face of the valley, and will likely continue to have impacts on future elections.
The candidates for each party matter too, as Chilliwackâs NDP run showed. Conservative incumbents have strong name recognition in the valley, and itâs not easy to shake them from office. Local ties and aggressive campaigns, however, can make an impact. Chilliwackâs NDP success was not just from newcomers, but also from DJ Pohlâs locally-rooted campaign that pulled in Chilliwack business owners and other well-known residents.
These factors are not a guarantee for a win. Abbotsfordâs Liberal candidate Navreen Gill may have won western Abbotsfordâs suburbs, but she failed to take much of the ridingâs farmland or the cityâs core. Similarly, Pohl secured large swaths of the Chilliwackâs urban areas, but little of its extensive farming communities.
The strong name recognition of Conservative incumbents only lasts as long as those politicians (or, occasionally, their progeny) remain in office. In Abbotsford, Conservative Ed Fast has served as MP for more than 15 years. Itâs hard to predict how the riding would vote in his absenceâa question of particular relevance given that he has recently criticized Pierre Poilevre, a frontrunner in the race for the leadership of his party.
The electoral fate of Cloverdale-Langley Cityâs Tamara Jansen also shows that a lot can happen between electionsâeven if the space between them was only two years. Her politically divisive comments likely helped to split the riding between Liberals and Conservatives, potentially polarizing some voters that may have otherwise considered other candidates.
And of course, thereâs the question of how strong the Conservativesâ right-wing base will remain. Some voters were clearly pulled to the left, but others went to the right, voting for the Peopleâs Party of Canada rather than the Conservatives or the Greens. With no PPC members of Parliament anywhere in the country, itâs unclear how much this will affect the Conservative vote in the next electionâbut the shift does show that vote splitting on the right could be a real concern for the future Conservative candidates.
Look through the interactive map below to see how each neighbourhood voted in the 2021 federal election. You can see what the Fraser Valley looked like in 2019 here.
Join more than 25,000 other Fraser Valley residents by subscribing to our newsletter. Every weekday morning youâll get a new feature story and other stories, news, and events from Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Langley, Mission and the rest of the valley.
Weâre bringing independent, local-first, in-depth reporting to serve you and our community.
Subscribe for free and plug in to the news that matters in Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission, and the rest of the Fraser Valley.
By filling out the form above, you consent to receive emails from Fraser Valley Current. You can unsubscribe at any time. View our privacy policy here.
Having trouble with the form? Contact us at contact@fvcurrent.com.