Vote Compass: What are Canada's most passionate ridings?

Throughout this protracted election campaign, candidates across Canada have tried to motivate voters on a range of issues, from the wisdom of balancing budgets to the future of the Senate to how best to fight terrorism.

While politicians are sometimes criticized for tailoring their messages tofocus onthe part of the country wherethey happen to be campaigning, it's also clear that different regions often have divergentviews on many of thekey issues of the day.

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To illustrate this difference of opinion, CBC has identified Canada's most passionate ridings that is, the constituencies with the strongestfeelingson the bigsocial, environmental and economic concerns in this campaign.

The data is based on responses to 30 questions and statements posed in Vote Compass, CBC's voter-engagement tool. They include, as well as direct questions, asking respondents whether they agree with such statementsas "No new pipelines should be built in Canada" and "Possession of marijuana should be a criminal offence."

The Vote Compass findings are based on 632,005 respondents who participated between Aug. 28 and Oct. 11.

Strong feelings

For every question or statement, CBC has identified the five ridings that most strongly agree with the statement and the five that most strongly disagree.

The data suggests that on the majority of these issues, Canada's most passionate ridings are in Quebec.

That's not just the case on the issues that would seemthemost obviously pertinentto Quebecers, such as the rules governing a path to sovereignty.

The responses show that there are certain Quebec ridings that are consistently vehement on a number of identifiable issues. For example, that the federal government should do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; that unions should have less power than they currently do; that there should be less religious accommodation in public institutions; that longer prison sentences are the best way to prevent crime; and that the private sector should play a greater role in the health-care system.

That's not to say that other parts of country don't have strong feelings, one way or the other,on these issues as well.

For example, the Vote Compass responses show that on issues related to the oil and gas sector such as whether Canada should build more pipelines ridings in Alberta and Saskatchewan are the most supportive.

Meanwhile, there are a number ofridings in Ontario that are, for example, least in favour of longer prison sentences as a deterrent of crime and most supportive of maintaining the beleaguered Senate as is.

Developed by a team of social and statistical scientists from Vox Pop Labs, VoteCompass is a civic engagement application offered in Canada exclusively by CBC News.The findings above are based on 632,005 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from Aug. 29 to Oct. 11.

Unlike online opinion polls,respondents to VoteCompass are not pre-selected. Unlike opinion polls,respondents to Vote Compass are not randomly selected.Similar to opinion polls,however, the data havebeen weighted in order to approximate a representativesample. Vote Compassdata have been weighted by geography, gender, age, educational attainment,occupation, religion, religiosity and civic engagement to ensure the sample'scomposition reflects that of the actual population of Canada according to censusdata and other population estimates.