OK so here is the thing that kept me up at 2am last Tuesday, which is a very normal and healthy thing that normal healthy people do. I was scrolling through a comment section I absolutely should not have been scrolling through, and I watched two people who I am fairly confident are both decent humans absolutely lose their minds at each other over a federal policy question. Not in a “we disagree and that is interesting” way. In a “you are a monster and I cannot believe you breathe oxygen” way.
And I sat there thinking: I know people on both sides of this. I know the human beings behind those positions. I have had dinner with them. I have watched them be gentle with kids, tip generously, show up when things got hard. They are not monsters. They are not idiots. They are not morally bankrupt or secretly evil or whatever story each side is telling about the other.
So how in the world do good people end up looking at the same country, the same problems, the same headlines, and landing on completely opposite sides of what to do about it?
I went looking for actual answers. Not hot takes. Not partisan talking points. The research. And what I found is both more complicated and more hopeful than the comment section led me to believe.
First: The Uncomfortable Starting Point
We have to agree on something before we go any further. Political difference is not primarily a sorting mechanism between good people and bad people, or smart people and dumb people. I know that is not a popular framing because it feels deeply satisfying to believe that your side is the thoughtful, ethical one and the other side is either malicious or confused. Both sides do this. Constantly. With great passion and absolutely no self-awareness.
The research does not support it.
What the research actually suggests is that political orientation is shaped by a genuinely complex web of factors, most of which a person did not choose and cannot easily change. Upbringing. Geography. Which community you landed in. What your economic reality looks like. What scares you most. What your gut registers as fair. What your faith community taught you about the world. What media ecosystem you learned to navigate first.
These are not small tweaks on a shared foundation. They are different foundational operating systems. And then we expect everyone to arrive at the same political conclusions and call it common sense.
Wild.
Moral Foundations Theory and Why This Is Not Actually New
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, spent years studying why people across cultures disagree about right and wrong. He and Craig Joseph first laid out Moral Foundations Theory in 2004, and Haidt kept developing it with colleague Jesse Graham through the 2000s. Their argument: humans navigate morality using multiple foundations, not just one. The list includes care/harm, fairness/reciprocity, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and (added later) liberty/oppression.
Here is where it gets interesting and uncomfortable in equal measure.
Graham, Haidt, and Nosek ran a proper study in 2009, published in the *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, and found that people who lean progressive tend to weight care and fairness most heavily. People who lean conservative tend to draw on a broader range of foundations simultaneously, including loyalty, authority, and sanctity alongside care and fairness. Neither set of weights is random. Neither is stupid. They are different ethical grammars that developed in response to different lived environments and different threats.
When a progressive person looks at a policy and asks “who does this hurt?” and a conservative person looks at the same policy and asks “does this threaten the structures and communities that protect people?” they are not asking different questions because one of them failed a critical thinking test. They are running different risk assessments based on different moral software.
This does not mean all positions are equally correct. It means that dismissing the other side as morally empty is empirically lazy. And I say that to both sides equally, with genuine affection and zero patience for whining about it.
Geography Does an Enormous Amount of Heavy Lifting Here
Canada is a big country. I know we know this. We say it constantly, usually when explaining to Americans why we are not a monolith. But do we actually think about what it means for political culture that someone who grew up in a small town in rural Saskatchewan has a materially different daily reality than someone who grew up in downtown Vancouver?
Not just aesthetically different. Structurally different. The institutions they interact with. The economic pressures they face. The infrastructure they depend on or don’t have access to. The sense of whether the federal government is a present force in their life or a distant abstraction that mostly tells them what to do with their land.
And this is not a vibe. Political scientists Jack Lucas and Zack Taylor tracked more than 4,000 federal ridings from 1896 to 2019 and found a durable, widening urban-rural split, with population density as the single strongest predictor of the divide. In the 2019 federal election specifically, researchers Speer and Loewen found the median population density of Liberal-held ridings was more than 38 times higher than Conservative-held ridings. Thirty-eight times. Economist Werner Antweiler ran the numbers too: every time population density doubles, Conservative support drops by roughly 1.7 points and Liberal support climbs by roughly 1.8 points.
When you live densely, you are constantly navigating collective resource problems. Transit. Housing. Shared parks. Noise ordinances. You are brushing up against difference daily. Your political instincts, unsurprisingly, tend to orient around collective management of shared space. When you live in a community where you manage your own land, your own water, your own everything, and the nearest government office is an hour away, your political instincts tend to orient around autonomy and the suspicion that centralized systems do not understand your life.
Neither instinct is wrong. They are both rational responses to genuinely different circumstances.
The problem is we have built a political system that mostly treats them as competing rather than complementary, and then both sides get to feel righteous about the other side’s ignorance. Fun for no one. Productive for no one. Great for political fundraising.
Class, Economic Reality, and the Fact That Not Everyone’s Stakes Are the Same
This is the one I think gets underplayed the most in polite political conversation, possibly because polite political conversation is mostly had by people who have enough economic stability to afford politeness.
Someone whose entire financial security is tied to a resource industry does not have the same relationship to environmental regulation as someone whose livelihood is entirely digital and location-independent. Both of those people can care about the environment. Both can also have wildly different opinions about the pace and cost of transition. One of those people is navigating an existential question about whether their town survives. The other is not.
Similarly, someone who has watched urban housing costs make homeownership unreachable has a very different relationship to property tax and zoning politics than someone who bought a house in the eighties and watched it become their retirement fund. Again, both can be thoughtful and caring people. Their stakes are just not the same.
I want to be honest with you here rather than dress this up with a citation that does not quite exist yet. I went looking for a clean Canadian study proving that economic precarity does not map neatly onto one party, and I did not find one solid enough to hang a claim on. So take this part as my own read of the situation, not settled research: precarious workers, in my experience, do not vote as a unified bloc, because they are not facing a unified threat. That is not inconsistency. That is triage. When political analysts are baffled that “working class voters” don’t all vote the same way, I think they are forgetting that working class voters are doing exactly that: triage, with limited information and limited trust in any of the options in front of them. Honestly? Relatable. I triage my emotional bandwidth every single Tuesday.
Religion, Community, and the Belonging Variable
I am going to say something that some people find uncomfortable. Faith communities are real communities. Not metaphorical ones. Not quaint holdovers from a pre-rational age. They are some of the most functional community infrastructure that exists in this country, and the people in them develop political priorities that are shaped by genuine communal values, not just personal superstition.
Now, do some religious communities develop political priorities I personally find troubling? Yes. Genuinely yes. And I say that as someone whose faith is not a performance or a cultural accessory. It is the actual load-bearing structure of my life. Some pulpits treat “faithful” and “politically obedient to one party” as the same thing, and use belonging itself as leverage: fall out of step with the congregation’s politics and you risk losing the community, not just the argument. That is a real and specific problem, and it deserves to be named as clearly as anything I say about the secular left. God and I talk about this.
I could not find Canadian-specific research measuring this the way I wanted to (most of the good work on religion and political identity is American, and I am not going to dress up a US study as a Canadian finding), so take this section as argument, not data. Here is what I believe the secular left often misses and the religious right often weaponizes: people who are embedded in religious community are responding to a real human need for belonging, meaning, and moral framework. When secular political movements dismiss that as ignorance or bigotry without engaging the actual values underneath, they do not win the argument. They just confirm to religious communities that the political left does not see them as full humans. And then everyone is surprised when rural religious voters do not respond warmly to being talked at like remedial students.
Both failures do the same damage from opposite directions. One treats belonging as disposable if you don’t already agree. The other treats belonging as conditional on agreeing. Neither is respect. Neither is community. Just control wearing a different coat.
Media Ecosystems and the Slow Divergence Problem
OK so this is the part where I am supposed to talk about social media algorithms and echo chambers and everybody nods sagely and then goes back to their extremely curated information diet. I know. I know I do it too.
But here is what I want to add to the standard media literacy lecture: the problem is not just algorithms. The problem is that even before social media, different communities had different media ecosystems. Local newspapers. Regional broadcasters. Radio stations with different slants. Church bulletins. Word of mouth. The information environment a person grows up in shapes what questions they think are worth asking, what sources feel credible, and what framing of an issue seems obvious versus suspicious.
By the time someone encounters a news story as an adult, they have already been trained by years of prior information exposure to read it through a particular lens. This is not stupidity. This is how brains work. We process new information through existing frameworks because it would be cognitively impossible to rebuild our worldview from scratch every time we read a headline.
The political left tends to be better at critiquing right-wing media bubbles and worse at noticing their own. The political right tends to be better at critiquing progressive institutional media and worse at noticing when their alternative sources are doing exactly what they accuse mainstream media of doing. Both critiques are partially valid. Both blindspots are real.
I am not both-sidesing bad journalism into equivalence. Some sources are more accurate than others and that is factually documentable. But the shape of the problem, the way information ecosystems create political sorting, that is symmetrical. And pretending it only happens to the other side is a very comfortable lie.
Education Does Not Mean What We Think It Means Here
There is a version of this conversation that goes: educated people vote progressive, less educated people vote conservative, therefore education equals political correctness and we should all draw our own conclusions. I find this version of the conversation exhausting and empirically sloppy in both directions.
But the correlation itself is real and it is documented right down to the numbers. Elections Canada’s own survey data shows turnout climbing steadily with education: 61 percent of electors with a high school diploma or less voted in the 43rd general election, compared with 79 percent of university graduates. An earlier Elections Canada survey found the same pattern by credential type: 69 percent turnout among high school grads, 72 percent among college diploma holders, 80 percent among university degree holders.
Turnout is one thing. Lean is another. A team extending economist Thomas Piketty’s research into the Canadian context, using Canadian Election Study data from 1965 to 2019, found something genuinely interesting: education and income pull in opposite directions here. Voters with university degrees increasingly favour the NDP or Liberals. Voters with higher incomes, regardless of education, increasingly favour the right. So “educated” and “rich” are not the same voter, and they are not voting the same way. That complicates the “education equals correct politics” story quite a bit, and I think that is worth sitting with.
Post-secondary education does not just teach critical thinking. It also immerses people in specific institutional cultures, specific social networks, specific career paths, and specific economic realities. Someone who went to university in a major Canadian city in the last twenty years was exposed to a particular range of ideas and entered a labour market that rewards certain kinds of credentials. That is a lot of variables that are not strictly about intelligence or knowledge.
Meanwhile, someone who did a trade apprenticeship and built a career in skilled labour developed real expertise, real discipline, real community knowledge, and real economic stakes that are not represented in most university curricula. Calling that person less equipped to have political opinions because they have fewer letters after their name is not a critical thinking position. It is credentialism dressed up as concern.
Smart people with different information and different stakes reach different conclusions. This is not a malfunction. This is the whole premise of democracy, which requires we figure out how to govern across those differences rather than waiting for everyone to agree with us.
The Identity Lock-In Problem
Here is where I want to get a little uncomfortable with everyone simultaneously, because this is the part that I think does the most ongoing damage.
At some point, political positions stop being conclusions we reached and start being who we are. And once something is identity rather than opinion, it becomes almost neurologically difficult to update. Yale’s Dan Kahan has spent years studying what he calls identity-protective cognition: the tendency of people to selectively credit or dismiss evidence depending on whether it lines up with the beliefs that dominate in their group. His research goes back to a 2007 study on risk perception and has been refined since, most notably in a 2017 paper that ties it directly to how people process misinformation. The finding that sticks with me most: the people most skilled at spotting scientific misconceptions in general are, on the issues that trigger identity-protective cognition, often the most polarized of all. Being smart does not inoculate you against this. If anything, smart people are better at building sophisticated justifications for what they already believed.
This is not a character flaw. It is a feature of being a social species that needs community to survive. But it means that once political affiliation becomes identity, both sides start doing something that is not actually political reasoning. They are doing identity maintenance. And the “evidence” they encounter gets sorted ruthlessly into “confirms my people are right” and “proves the other side is dishonest.”
I watch this happen on the progressive side with exactly the same structural mechanics as it happens on the conservative side. Different content, same brain process. The person doing it is usually convinced they are the rational one because their reasoning is invisible to them from the inside. This is true of me too. I try to catch it. I do not always succeed.
What This Actually Means, Practically, for How We Talk to Each Other
I am not going to tell you that all political positions deserve equal respect. That is not what I believe. Some positions cause measurable harm to people. That matters and it should not be waved away in the name of dialogue.
But I am going to tell you that if you cannot construct an honest, charitable explanation of why a good person might hold the position you disagree with, you are not ready to have the argument. You are just ready to perform it.
I want to be straight with you about one thing before I close: I went looking for a tidy Canadian study proving that hostility fails and being genuinely heard is what changes minds, and I could not find one specific enough to cite properly. What I can tell you is where Canada actually stands right now, because that part is solid. Researchers at UBC (Emily Huddart and Tony Silva) found that Canadians show moderate levels of affective polarization, meaning we feel a real gap between how we regard our own side and the other side, but we have not slid into viewing the other side as immoral the way some corners of American politics have. Their read is caution, not crisis. A separate 2025 survey from Digital Public Square found 55 percent of Canadians think polarization is getting worse and only 16 percent think it is getting better, with the average Canadian rating the country a 6.5 out of 10 on a polarization scale. And two thirds of us still self-identify as centrist, which does not exactly match the tone of Question Period. The Public Policy Forum’s 2023 report “Far and Widening” makes the case that our institutions and media are, in places, actively making the divide worse rather than mediating it.
So the caution is real, the fragility is real, and so is the fact that we are not there yet. That gap, the space between where we are and where the doom-scrolling makes it feel like we are, is worth protecting on purpose.
Faith communities have known something like this forever, by the way. You want to change someone’s heart? You start by being a safe person to be honest with. Then you earn the right to challenge. Then maybe, over years, something shifts. Most political activists have neither the patience nor the theology for this, and I say that with love and a very tired sigh.
The Canadian Specifics
Canada has its own version of this that does not map cleanly onto American political frameworks, which we sometimes forget because American content floods our information ecosystem.
We have real regional alienation with structural roots, not just vibes, and the urban-rural voting data above backs that up with actual numbers going back over a century. We have a French-English linguistic and cultural divide that shapes political priorities in ways that genuinely have no clean American parallel. We have Indigenous political realities that are neither left nor right in the partisan sense and do not fit neatly into the binary at all. We have immigration patterns and settlement geography that create genuinely different community compositions across the country.
When Western Canadian voters express frustration with federal policy, that frustration has historical and economic legs whether or not you agree with the conclusions they reach. When Quebec voters prioritize provincial autonomy in ways that confound English Canadian progressives, that is not irrationality. That is the product of a genuine historical experience of cultural threat. When new Canadians hold values that do not map onto either party’s assumptions about what immigrant communities believe, that is not a political anomaly. That is people being complex.
Our version of this problem is specifically ours and deserves more specific engagement than just importing American culture war frameworks and slapping Canadian flags on them. We keep doing that. We should stop.
The Actual Bottom Line
Good people end up on opposite sides of politics because they are running different software, built by different environments, shaped by different threats, weighted by different values, and filtered through different information ecosystems. Not because one side is good and the other is broken.
This does not make all positions equally correct. It does not mean policy doesn’t have real winners and losers. It does not mean we smile politely at harm and call it dialogue.
It means the story we keep telling ourselves, the one where our side is the thoughtful, caring, rational humans and their side is the confused or malicious obstacle, is doing enormous damage to our ability to actually govern a country together. And governing a country together, imperfectly, messily, with ongoing conflict and negotiation and compromise, is the only version of this that has ever worked for anyone anywhere.
The comment section is not going to save us. The devastating ratio is not going to save us. The Facebook argument that ends with someone calling their cousin a fascist and spending Christmas separately is definitely not going to save us.
Understanding why someone who is not your enemy ended up somewhere you didn’t is not capitulation. It is the beginning of any conversation worth having.
Geography matters. Class matters. Community matters. Faith matters. Fear matters. Belonging matters. History matters.
And so does the hard, unglamorous work of staying in the room with people you disagree with long enough to remember they are people.
God help us…
God help us all…
Genuinely. We need it.
A note on sources: the research on Moral Foundations Theory, the urban-rural voting divide, education and turnout, and identity-protective cognition is drawn directly from peer-reviewed studies and Elections Canada’s own data. Where I could not find research specific enough to back a claim, I have said so plainly in the text rather than dressing up a guess as a citation.
