Canadian Politics and Your Mental Health

It's true: mental health and left-leaning beliefs really don't get along well together!

The Manhattan Institute’s research into the confluence of mental health trends and political leanings in the U.S. generated buzz a while back. Among other things, they discovered that, as of the 2021-22 school year, liberal students were 13-17 percent more likely to seek mental health treatment than their conservative peers. That’s a frightening gap.

I was curious to know if there’s anything like that going on here in Canada. And it turns out that there’s excellent public-facing data waiting for us to drop by and help ourselves. The most recent published version of the Canadian Election Study (CES) dates back to the period around the 2021 federal election - the full dataset from 2025 isn’t yet available.

There were 20,968 respondents in total in the CES survey data from 2021. Having now spent a couple of happy hours with the results, this looks like an excellent representation of Canadian society. The questions go both deep and wide.¹

I was able to directly address the political angle to all this using responses to one core question. Participants were asked to situate themselves on a political “scale where 0 means the left and 10 means the right”.

I classified anyone who responded with a number higher than 6 as “far right”, and responses less than 4 were tagged “far left”. The far left cohort had 4,927 members, while there were just 3,891 people in the far right. Those numbers are easily large enough to make distinctions potentially statistically meaningful.

Anxiety

I explored both far right and far left cohorts for how accurately the words “anxious” and “easily upset” applied to them. A response of seven indicates a self-assessment of extreme anxiety, while zero would be Big-Lebowski-level calm.

The average for the right-coded group was 3.47, while those on the left rated themselves 3.88.

Overall Mental Health

Respondents were asked to rate their mental health in relation to their peers where “1” indicates excellent mental health and “5” indicates poor mental health. A total of 3,878 from the far right responded and 3,263 from the far left. The average of all responses on the right was 2.02 (standard deviation: 0.876859) and from the left, 2.32 (0.926268).

By any measure, those numbers are highly significant. But there are some caveats:

• The mental health status was self-reported rather than the result of a formal diagnosis.

• There’s no proof that relatively poor mental health causes left-leaning political beliefs (or the other way around): the two could just be the results of confounding variables.

• There are a lot of potential confounding variables in play, including urbanicity, gender, religiosity, employment status, and age.

To improve the value of my results, I controlled for some of the most obvious variables. Those included:

• Those on the right considered religion of greater importance (averaging 2.21 where “1” is very important) than on the left (whose average was 2.6).

• Males made up 52.4 percent of the far right cohort, while males only represented 39.3 percent of the far left respondents.

• The average age among right-leaning respondents was 53.5 against 47.7 on the left.

Given that people who are female (and non-binary), younger, and non-religious are all known to experience poorer mental health, those are likely contributors to the right-left gap we’re seeing. In other words, perhaps the health problems on the left are more the result of their gender, age, and religiosity than their political beliefs.

After applying a regression analysis to control for age, gender, urban/rural, and religious importance, the far-right advantage shrinks to 0.187 points but remains highly statistically significant (t = -7.17, p < 0.000).

The fact that the coefficient on the far right drops from -0.294 to -0.187 shows that some of the raw difference is explained by demographics (especially age: the far-right group is a lot older). But a substantial and significant ideological gap remains.

All of which suggests there’s a very strong association between strong left-leaning political ideology and poor mental health. That’s not to say that the ideology causes illness, but that the two will often appear together.

So it’s safe to conclude that those Canadian numbers do echo what researchers are seeing in the U.S.

Budget Buster Bonus: perhaps the most meaningful policy measure for reducing healthcare expenses would be to guide as many young Canadians and women as possible away from leftism!

I’ll wrap up with a (mild) shocker: the more closely you “follow politics on TV, radio, newspapers, or the Internet”, the less likely you are to report poor mental health. Specifically, the average response to the question: “Compared to other people your age, how would you describe your mental health?” for avid political followers was 2.06 (where, again, 1 indicates excellent mental health, and 5 indicates poor mental health). By contrast, responses from less engaged Canadians averaged 2.39.

Make what you will of that one.

If you’re curious about the way I handled this data (or you’re interested in challenging my conclusions), feel free to check out my code here.

1. In fact, the average survey took two hours and twenty five minutes to complete! I’m definitely glad they didn’t ask me.