Before the late 1950s, Midwestern Ontario had not leaned towards either the Progressive Conservatives (Tories) or the Liberals (Grits) on a regular basis as there was wide variation in each party's results from election to election. Since the late 1950s, however, it has been a primarily conservative-voting area. Even when the Liberals won every federal election except one from 1963 to 1980 inclusive, the Progressive Conservatives usually won the majority of seats in this region, and in the 1979 Progressive Conservative election plurality, the only seat the Tories did not win was won by the New Democrats (NDP). The NDP usually claimed one seat from the mid-1960s until the 1993 election, usually in the riding of Brant.
Vote splitting allowed the Liberals to win all of the seats in Midwestern Ontario from 1993 to 2000 in their province-wide sweeps, although the seat of Perth—Wellington was lost to the Progressive Conservatives in a 2003 by-election following the resignation of the outgoing Liberal MP. The Conservatives picked up four more seats in the 2004 election, another in the 2006 election, and four more in 2008, leaving Guelph as the only non-Conservative seat in the region from 2008 to 2015. In the 2015 Liberal majority government win, the Conservatives still took one more seat in the area than the Liberals as they swept the rural areas.
The Conservatives are weaker in the larger cities of Kitchener-Waterloo and Guelph, partly because they have prominent universities (University of Waterloo, University of Guelph, Wilfrid Laurier University) with large student populations. The Liberals retained three of the four ridings in those cities by significant margins in 2006 despite the Conservatives forming the government, and won four of the five seats available there in the 2015 election, the exceptions in both elections being the partially rural Kitchener-Conestoga riding, although both wins in the riding were only narrow victories for the Conservatives. Even in the 2008 election victory by the Conservatives, the ridings of Kitchener Centre and Kitchener-Waterloo were only won by the Conservatives by less than 300 votes. The riding of the more suburban city of Cambridge has generally leaned Conservative dating back decades whereas the riding of Brant-Brantford has switched from being strongly NDP to Liberal to Conservative in the last three decades.
In 2019 the Greens were able to gain over 25 percent of the vote in two urban ridings, Guelph and Kitchener Centre. However, the Liberals held both seats by over a 10% margin.
Election | / | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1979 | 124,330 31.8% | 80,974 20.7% | 183,363 46.9% | 1,384 0.4% | |||||||||||
1980 | 140,929 36.9% | 83,939 22.0% | 153,740 40.3% | 1,433 0.4% | |||||||||||
1984 | 100,631 24.3% | 87,464 21.1% | 222,827 53.8% | 2,393 0.6% | |||||||||||
1988 | 153,232 33.0% | 96,563 20.8% | 839 0.2% | 194,374 41.9% | 18,461 4.0% | ||||||||||
1993 | 212,043 43.8% | 21,955 4.5% | 800 0.2% | 104,310 21.6% | 124,870 25.8% | 19,938 4.1% | |||||||||
1997 | 216,187 45.5% | 45,643 9.6% | 1,026 0.2% | 101,694 21.4% | 105,637 22.2% | 5,312 1.1% | |||||||||
2000 | 217,501 47.2% | 32,066 7.0% | 3,380 0.7% | 81,032 17.6% | 122,708 26.6% | 4,061 0.9% | |||||||||
2004 | 222,984 40.9% | 192,981 35.4% | 90,876 16.7% | 28,297 5.2% | 8,608 1.6% | ||||||||||
2006 | 219,204 36.2% | 239,962 39.6% | 104,509 17.3% | 32,716 5.4% | 7,699 1.3% | ||||||||||
2008 | 160,760 29.1% | 241,777 43.7% | 86,336 15.6% | 53,694 9.7% | 10,120 1.8% | ||||||||||
2011 | 139,022 23.4% | 297,147 50.1% | 127,208 21.4% | 25,586 4.3% | 4,020 0.7% | ||||||||||
2015 | 277,292 40.7% | 269,868 39.6% | 98,857 14.5% | 26,758 3.9% | 7,634 1.1% | ||||||||||
2019 | 248,116 34.0% | 270,733 37.1% | 105,214 14.4% | 85,144 11.7% | 14,732 2.0% | 3,646 0.5% | |||||||||
2021 | 220,914 31.1% | 280,729 39.5% | 116,624 16.4% | 36,620 5.1% | 53,288 7.5% | 2,029 0.3% |
See main article: 2015 Canadian federal election.
See main article: 2011 Canadian federal election.
See main article: 2008 Canadian federal election.
See main article: 2006 Canadian federal election.
See main article: 2004 Canadian federal election.
See main article: 2000 Canadian federal election.
See main article: 1997 Canadian federal election.