Examining the diversity of first-time candidates in last year’s federal election is a revealing exercise on many levels and serves as a sharper measure of distinct party efforts to recruit visible minority candidates.

By taking this analysis a step further and breaking down first-time visible minority candidates by gender, we find further evidence of a persistent gap in female candidates, whether visible minority or not.

Recent analyses have focused on women being nominated as sacrificial lamb candidates in unwinnable or swing ridings. Some exceptions have focused on visible minorities, either in the form of experimental polling or actual results.

The question we explored was whether visible minority women less likely to be nominated in competitive ridings. The data we found suggests that visible minority women confront compounded biases and discrimination in the political process thatmay work against them in favour of a more traditional view of the ideal politician.

Overview of new candidates in the 2025 election

We defined competitive ridings as those in which the candidate’s party won or lost by 10 per cent or less. We used publicly available information such as online biographies, self-identification the media, photographs and other sources to determine the visible minority status of candidates.  

Overall, diversity among new candidates decreased compared to the 2021 election, with the exception of Conservative visible minority new candidates as shown in table 1.

Sixty-seven first-time Liberal candidates were elected, 41.8 per cent of whom were women and 20.9 per cent visible minorities. The Conservatives had 37 new candidates elected, only 8.1 per cent of whom were women but 27.0 per cent visible minorities. No NDP new candidates were elected and the Bloc had just two new male candidates elected.

In 2021, 24 new Liberal candidates were elected, 54.2 per cent of whom were women and 50.0 per cent visible minorities. The Conservatives saw 15 of their new candidates elected in 2021, with women and visible minorities comprising 40.0 and 54.2 per cent, respectively. Both the NDP and Bloc had three first-time candidates elected in 2021. For the NDP, two were women. For the Bloc, it was one. Neither the NDP nor Bloc had a new visible minority candidate elected.

Analysis of all new visible minority candidates, alongside riding competitiveness (ridings in which the candidates’ party won or lost by 10 percentage points or less) indicates the Liberals ran fewer new visible minority candidates than the Conservatives in 2025 but nominated almost twice as many in competitive ridings.

New visible minority women candidates in competitive ridings

Table 2 indicates that first-time female candidates in 2025 were slightly less likely than men to receive their party’s nomination in competitive ridings: 20.3 per cent vs. 24.2 per cent.

Table 3 shows that visible minority candidates were also less likely than their non-visible-minority counterparts to get their party’s nomination in competitive ridings, 18.2 per cent vs. 24.1 per cent.

Table 4 shows that new visible minority women candidates were less likely to run in competitive ridings in 2025 relative to their male counterparts: 16.7 compared to 19.1 per cent (all four parties combined).

But table 4 also shows that this is almost entirely due to the Conservatives and is not true of the Liberals nor, to a lesser extent, the NDP. Only 5.9 per cent of Conservative visible minority women candidates ran in competitive ridings, compared to 38.9 per cent for the Liberals and 7.4 per cent for the NDP and 25 per cent for the Bloc. The low share of competitive visible minority women candidates for the Conservatives reflects the overall gender gap among their new candidates.

Although the NDP has a smaller number of competitive ridings, it is notable that the proportion of women who are visible minority candidates in these ridings is higher than that of their male visible minority counterparts: 7.4 per cent versus 2.9 per cent. By contrast, the Bloc had no visible minority male candidates but 25 per cent of its visible minority women nominees were in competitive ridings.

Other intraparty comparisons might also be informative: e.g. for the Conservatives, the 5.9 per cent figure for visible minority women is much less than that of visible minority males (25.0 per cent) or to their non-minority female counterparts (16.1 per cent).

Visible minority candidates, whether first-time or incumbent, are generally nominated in ridings with a large number of visible minorities.

However, Conservative first-time visible minority candidates are more heavily represented in ridings with more than 70 per cent visible minorities (92.6 per cent) or in ridings with between 50 and 70 per cent visible minorities (54.2 per cent) relative to the Liberals (22.2 and 12.5 per cent, respectively) or NDP candidates (63.0 and 50.0 per cent, respectively).

This reflects the larger number of Liberal incumbents in these ridings and the extensive recruitment efforts on the part of the Conservatives.

More than 80 per cent of the candidates in ridings with 70 per cent or more visible minorities are visible minorities themselves, while that number is more than 40 per cent in ridings with between 50 and 70 per cent visible minorities.

Affinity effects baked in at nomination stage

In other words, party candidate selection incorporates affinity effects that give preference to visible minority candidates for all major parties in these ridings. Given this, it is less surprising that studies of election outcomes indicate that affinity effects are less important than “candidate competitiveness, Canada’s first past the post electoral system, and local context,” Elections Canada says, because those effects are effectively baked in at the candidate nomination stage.

This indicates positive discrimination for visible minority candidates in these ridings and the possible converse in ridings with lower numbers of visible minorities, largely rural ridings.

While one can make the crude case that nominating more visible minority women candidates would allow federal political parties to tick off two diversity boxes at once, the evidence indicates that this is not the case: women visible minority candidates do indeed have a higher percentage chance of being sacrificial lambs. This suggests they do experience biases in the political process across two fronts, as both women and visible minorities.

To encourage improved representation, the political parties should adopt a transparency approach similar to Senate Bill S-283 would require each party to provide annual information on the policies and programs they have enacted to increase the representation of designated groups (women, visible minorities, Indigenous Peoples and persons with disabilities).

This could be accomplished by the chief electoral officer administering a voluntary self-identification questionnaire to nominated candidates, thus allowing for post-election reporting on candidate and MP diversity.

Canada’s federal political parties may resist this transparency-based approach, but its use in federally regulated industries and the public service for close to 30 years has proven effective.