The ideological and issue positions of parties are known to shape citizens’ political attitudes and voting behaviour. One important way to obtain estimates of parties’ positions is to ask experts to place parties on salient ideological dimensions. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) has been collecting such estimates for democracies in Europe and elsewhere. CHES Canada adds to this project by providing estimates of party positions and characteristics of Canadian federal parties and provincial parties in Ontario and Quebec. This note introduces this new data source, clarifies how the data were collected and illustrates how the data can be used to (comparatively) study party politics in Canada.

With a decisive Liberal party electoral victory in 2015, observers are now wondering if religious conservatism's role in the Canadian political landscape is waning. Using data from the Canadian Election Study (CES) from the years 2004 to 2015, we find that respondents’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage and women working outside the home have moved left on the spectrum among both the general population and more religious voters. However, this does not go hand in hand with a decline in the effect strength of religiosity on the Conservative vote, which remains significant across the five federal elections examined in this study. Conservative religious voters now make up a smaller share of the adult population, but their issue positions on sexual morals and gender roles, along with the wider conservative value orientation these issues represent, remain important in their vote choice.