How young men are changing what conservatism looks like in Canada

Adam Beattie was walking with a friend in downtown Vancouver on a rainy winter day in 2023 when a stranger, who appeared to be high on fentanyl, punched him in the head.

They reported the attack to police, but Beattie says he was told that even if arrested, the attacker would likely be released a few hours later.

Beattie dropped the matter, but ended up moving to a Vancouver suburb where the rent was cheaper and he would feel safer.

“It was a radicalizing experience,” Beattie said. 

The assault confirmed for Beattie something he had long suspected: that the promise of a secure middle-class existence had been undone by Liberal policies aimed primarily at older generations. 

“We’re on the front line of all the crap that’s going on,” Beattie, 30, said of his fellow male Gen-Zers and young millennials.

“The only people who are capable of living life without having to face that, frankly, are an older generation who live in protected neighbourhoods, who bought into those neighbourhoods when those neighbourhoods were inexpensive.”

After the attack, Beattie, who was working for B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad at the time, started using his social media accounts to discuss crime and drug policy.

Now, with more than 180,000 followers, he’s one of the most popular conservative influencers in Canada on TikTok, where he uses the name Robin Skies, a holdover from his days as a musician.

In recent videos, Beattie has accused boomers of not giving a “flying fudge” about younger generations and argues “Canada is 100 per cent broken.” He has described Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s vision for the country as “f–king glorious.”

Young influencers like Beattie have refashioned what conservatism looks and sounds like in Canada. It’s an energy that Poilievre tapped into as he rebuilt the Conservative Party following its defeat in the 2021 election.

Gen-Z support made the Tories look edgy, connected to digital natives and poised to capture the anti-incumbent vibe that ricocheted across democracies after the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the second term of U.S. President Donald Trump has upended the polling lead Poilievre carried into 2025, young men have, so far, remained an unshakeable part of his base.

“The demographic most likely today to say they’re going to vote Conservative in our polling are men under the age of 30,” said David Coletto, founder and CEO of the polling firm Abacus Data in Ottawa. “That is a complete change to the last few decades of Canadian politics.”

But the political priorities of these young men do not seem to be shared by women of the same age.

Not only are they supporting different political parties, there is gathering evidence that young men and women see the world in fundamentally different ways.

Not your parents’ conservatives

In every federal election since 2015, voters aged 18 to 30 have overwhelmingly tended to back either the Liberals or the NDP, according to self-reported data from the Canadian Election Study, a survey with a representative sample of Canadians run by social scientists before and after federal elections. 

Since the 2021 election, however, polling has suggested young men are increasingly likely to support the Conservatives. 

A poll conducted by Abacus Data in late March suggested 41 per cent of men under 30 backed the Conservatives, compared to 23 per cent of women in the same age bracket.

That 18-point gap stands in marked contrast to the results of a poll Abacus conducted on the eve of the 2021 election, which suggested 27 per cent of young men and 29 per cent of young women would vote Tory. 

But there are signs these young people aren’t “conservative” in the same way that, say, Brian Mulroney or even Stephen Harper were. 

In a survey of 1,500 people conducted in December, Abacus suggested 34 per cent of young men could be categorized as economically progressive but culturally conservative.

According to Abacus Data, these are young men who support raising taxes on high-income earners and want to see governments provide a range of social services. At the same time, they also support cracking down on illegal immigration, are concerned about free speech online and oppose trans athletes playing on gendered sports teams that match their gender identity.

Only 11 per cent of young women, on the other hand, were listed as economically progressive but culturally conservative in the Abacus data. It was on those cultural questions where the genders diverged.

“I think young men are most resistant right now to change on a cultural level, not so much on an economic one,” Coletto said.

“I think they feel very anxious about the scale and the speed at which change is happening, particularly in societal power structures.”

WATCH | Why more young men are leaning conservative:

They’re young, male and swinging conservative

There’s been a growing divide in the last four years between how young women and young men identify politically. CBC’s Jonathan Montpetit breaks down why more young men are leaning conservative and how it’s reshaping the landscape ahead of the Canadian federal election.

Deepening divide

The modern conservative movement in North America is often thought of as a “fusion” between social and fiscal conservatives. But in recent years, cultural conservatives have come to occupy an important place in the movement, changing the focal point of conservative politics in the process.

“The extent to which the [conservative] coalition has changed … would be very shocking to people,” said Ginny Roth, a partner at Crestview Strategy in Toronto and a conservative activist who served as director of communications for Poilievre’s leadership campaign.

Cultural conservatism skews younger and male. It accepts the need for a social safety net but is concerned about the breakdown of social order, which it blames on the rise of liberal or progressive values.

It is a conservatism that is less likely to invoke religion or economics in public policy arguments, and focus instead on values, such as family or freedom. 

“Conservatives for a time were scared, I think, of putting forward a set of values. They sort of fought on the territory of saying, let’s just go back to a … sort of small-L liberal neutral orientation,” Roth said.

“Poilievre is more fearless. He actually thinks that Conservatives can win and build a bigger, more successful coalition with new voters in it, if it speaks to a values-oriented worldview.” 

Underlying the cultural conservative mindset is also the belief that society has lurched radically to the left in recent years, propelled by progressive social movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and Land Back.

Many young conservatives see themselves pushing back against “wokeness,” which they see as a social justice concept that has been pursued at the expense of other priorities. 

“The only reason why young people on the right are talking about all of this woke stuff is because people on the left are obsessed with it,” Beattie said. “Like, I don’t care. I want a job. I want a house. I want a family. I want safety.”

In a TikTok video from January that’s been viewed 1.7 million times, Beattie says Canadian women don’t feel safe because of the country’s “broken immigration system,” adding that some cultures are “just willing to scare the hoes,” a reference to a meme.

Several commenters accused him of racism, an accusation Beattie rejects. 

“Being woke requires you to lie about naked truths to avoid offending people,” he told CBC News. “Pointing out that not all cultures share our values around things like women’s rights isn’t racist — it’s necessary.”

Backlash politics 

A form of backlash politics has taken root in a number of the world’s democracies, where young men are backing conservative parties as young women opt for more progressive options.

In 2022, for example, a large majority of young men backed the self-described “anti-feminist” presidential candidate Yoon Suk Yeol in South Korea. 

Last November, Donald Trump won a large majority of young men in the U.S., flipping a demographic that had largely voted Democrat in 2020.

In Germany, young men helped propel the far-right Alternative for Germany party to a second-place finish in the February elections. Young German women were more likely to back the far-left party.

“I think there is a risk that progressive activism has made some men feel alienated,” said Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King’s College London who is currently writing a book on the global gender gap.

That said, Evans noted that “in many of the countries where I’ve seen data, the biggest shift is actually women, young women becoming much more progressive, whereas men [are] more stable.”

The CBC News analysis of data from the Canadian Election Study revealed evidence that a similar gap is opening up among younger Canadians.

Between 2004 and 2011, young people gave similar answers to the question: “How much should be done for women?” 

By the 2015 election, however, the number of women 30-and-under answering more (either “much more” or “somewhat more”) had increased, while the number of men answering the same had flatlined. 

The same trend appears for those answering “much more” to the question: “How much should be done for racial minorities?”

Online tribes

The most frequent explanation experts have offered for the emerging gender gap, both in Canada and abroad, is the widespread use of social media whose algorithms are designed to direct specific content at specific audiences. 

“Men and women [are] spending less time together, socializing less, not necessarily empathizing with each other…. Instead, they’re immersing themselves in these kinds of distorted online tribes,” said Evans.

And backlash politics — the sense that society has swung too far toward progressive causes — is a recurring theme in the corners of the internet that cater to young men.

The so-called manosphere, with podcasts by Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson as prime examples, was credited by Trump supporters for boosting the candidate’s reputation among young men. 

For young conservatives, online spaces offer a respite from the liberal orthodoxy they feel dominates other spheres of society.

“It’s nice being in an environment where you can just say what you want and be who you are, and people aren’t going to police you,” said Beattie, who lists George Orwell’s 1984 as among his favourite books.

Poilievre has shown he is familiar with these online worlds. His social media posts can sometimes resemble manosphere-style podcasts, and he has twice appeared on Peterson’s show. 

“When Pierre Poilievre goes on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, it’s a strategy, I think, designed entirely to speak to that cohort, which is not a normal conservative audience,” said Coletto.

This cohort, however, is not always aligned with mainstream public opinion. 

An Abacus poll from earlier this year found that even after Trump slapped punishing tariffs on Canada, 38 per cent of men under 30 still had a positive view of the president. And whereas only 22 per cent of Canadians have a positive impression of Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk, that number rises to 42 per cent for young men. 

“Young men are kind of moving in one direction in this country, and everybody else is moving in the other,” said Coletto. 

For Gen-Z conservatives, though, worrying about Trump and tariffs appears to be a distraction from the deeper cultural crisis being wrought by progressive values. 

“The idea that people, specifically of an older generation, might be willing to give a mandate to Mark Carney because essentially Donald Trump bruised their ego, while their kids are struggling to pay rent and to buy a house and to afford the basics, is frustrating, to say the least,” said Beattie.