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Add as preferred source Right-leaning Canadians' trust in the bodies that manage Canadian elections has declined significantly since 2019, a McGill-led research team has found.
Their research draws on data collected between 2008 and 2021 by the Canadian Election Study (with about 72,000 respondents), as well as information gathered by the Media Ecosystem Observatory after the 2021 Canadian federal election (with nearly 3,000 respondents) and the 2022 Quebec election (with approximately 1,500 respondents).
"While a majority of Canadians still trust the election administration process, we found that trust is increasingly divided along partisan and ideological lines," said Mathieu Lavigne, the first author of the study, which was published in Public Opinion Quarterly . "More specifically, we find a notable drop in trust in elections among right-leaning Canadians and supporters of the Conservative and People's parties since 2019." Lavigne is analytical lead at the Media Ecosystem Observatory at McGill.
The authors also noted that false allegations of election fraud in the United States have circulated extensively online and that individuals who receive political information from social media or alternative right-wing media tend to have lower trust in election integrity than those who rely more on legacy media.
The researchers said they believe the study provides the most systematic examination to date of how and why perceptions of election integrity are evolving in Canada, a country where election administration is among the most favorably rated by experts, who do not perceive any decline in election integrity.
In a second recently published study, Lavigne found that attitudes toward misinformation in Canada are increasingly polarized along ideological lines.
Based on two surveys conducted during the 2021 federal election and the 2022 Quebec provincial election, the research indicates that while Canadians across the political spectrum generally reject misinformation, right-leaning Canadians are more likely to question the existence of impartial truth, view anti-misinformation efforts as biased, tolerate politicians spreading misinformation and oppose government and platform interventions to address it.
The findings suggest that efforts to combat misinformation have themselves become politically charged, particularly among those who perceive such measures as targeting conservatives.
The study also challenges the idea that people excuse misinformation when it advances causes they support and posits that combating misinformation will require approaches perceived as fair, nonpartisan and capable of earning support across political divides.
Mathieu Lavigne et al, (Mis)information, Polarization, and Trust in Elections: Longitudinal Evidence from Canada, Public Opinion Quarterly (2026). DOI: 10.1093/poq/nfag035
Journal information: Public Opinion Quarterly
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