The five Torontos

Rooted in the twin hearts of Toronto's West End and East End, this is the city's clearest concentration of progressive voting. These neighbourhoods have given the NDP much higher shares than Toronto overall, even in historically difficult elections for the party, while giving considerably less support to Conservatives across levels of government. Olivia Chow – a former city councillor and NDP MP – also performed particularly strongly here in the non-partisan 2023 mayoral by-election. Voter turnout is above the city average across all three elections.

This is Toronto's densest cluster, with the highest renter share, the lowest reliance on cars for commuting, and relatively high university attainment. Much of it is made up of older, established central-city neighbourhoods. It has fewer newer high-rise districts that appear more prominently in the Soft-Left Belt cluster. This combination of educated, renter-heavy urban neighbourhoods and progressive voting is consistent with a broader shift documented across many Western democracies, including in research on Canada, in which the electoral base of the left has increasingly moved toward highly educated and economically downward urban voters.

If the Progressive Core is Toronto's most concentrated geography of progressive voting, the Soft-Left Belt is what that politics looks like once it spreads into a more varied urban landscape. It stretches through newer condo districts and rental-heavy parts of the central city, established neighbourhoods farther west and east, and pockets of southwest Scarborough. These places do not share one built form or one history. What they share is electoral: higher voter turnout, broadly progressive voting, and a greater willingness to support Liberal or moderate alternatives than in the Progressive Core.

That difference is visible across elections. Chow and the provincial NDP both outperform their Toronto-wide results here, but by much smaller margins than in the Progressive Core. Josh Matlow also performs best in this cluster. At the same time, the Soft-Left Belt has the highest university attainment and income of the five clusters, while also having the highest prevalence of households spending 30% more on housing costs and the largest recent-migrant share. That combination fits parts of Toronto's changing central-city geography, where growth has increasingly taken the form of mid- and high-rise apartments and a large rented-condominium market; in 2021, more than half of downtown condominiums were rented.

The result is a political belt rather than a single neighbourhood type. They converge because they have similar political characteristics: above average voter turnout, left of Toronto overall, but less consistently aligned with the progressive left than central neighbourhoods.

Civic Liberal neighbourhoods are even harder to pin to one part of Toronto. They appear in parts of Midtown and Leaside, stretches of the Yonge corridor through Willowdale, pieces of The Beaches, Etobicoke-Lakeshore, and Scarborough along the lake.

This cluster has the highest turnout in the provincial and federal elections, and among the highest in the mayoral by-election. Liberal support is strong, and there is much less warmth toward the NDP and progressive mayoral candidates. This pattern is clearest provincially, where the Liberals receive just over half the vote and the NDP falls to only 8 per cent. Ana Bailão also leads Olivia Chow in the mayoral race, while federally the Liberals remain ahead but Conservatives perform considerably better than in either of the first two more progressive clusters.

There is some historical precedent for that kind of Toronto politics. The city's changing geography of wealth runs through parts of this cluster, especially along the Yonge corridor, where incomes have risen sharply over time. Toronto has long contained prosperous, high voter turnout districts that sit outside both the city's strongest progressive neighbourhoods and its most conservative suburbs. The Civic Liberals are a modern version of that middle ground: scattered across the map, but tied together by a politics that is engaged, higher income and higher education, Liberal-leaning, and notably less progressive than the clusters to their left.

Spanning much of Toronto's inner suburbs, the Suburban Conservatives overlap strongly with neighbourhoods built during the region's postwar suburban expansion: lower-density housing, high rates of homeownership, and greater automobile use. Today, they are the oldest of the five clusters as well. Their electoral pattern is just as clear: these neighbourhoods give the highest shares to the Ontario PCs and federal Conservatives, the lowest or near-lowest shares to the NDP, and favoured Ana Bailão over Olivia Chow in 2023. The federal Liberals narrowly led the Conservatives here in 2025, but this is where conservative parties and candidates perform most strongly overall.

That pattern echoes a much older divide between Toronto's core and its postwar suburbs. Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough all grew rapidly through the postwar period before amalgamation in 1998, much of it around private homes and automobile travel. Zack Taylor has documented an enduring city-suburb divide in Toronto voting that predates Rob Ford's conservatism; in 2010, for example, the former Metropolitan Toronto suburbs voted heavily for Ford while the old City of Toronto went strongly for George Smitherman, as we described in a previous entry in this series.

But today's suburban politics no longer follow that older divide neatly. Much of Scarborough, despite sharing the same postwar and car-oriented built form, falls instead into the Low-turnout Suburbanites.