Much of the history of both Canada & America can be understood by looking at ancestry.
The reason New England has so many "liberals" is because it was settled by Royalists, Congregationalists, and Puritans. There were people with a strong sense of hierarchy. They believed an elite, either credentialed or hereditary, is entitled to rule and that everyone else should simply follow, as a flock would. They were very conformist, statist, and centralized. They viewed any dissent as heresy which needed to be suppressed.
Because of this heritage, New England today is very leftist, very politically correct, etc. It's why Massachusetts judges had no qualms about simply changing the long-standing definition of marriage by decree, without the slightest regard for public opinion.
The South was settled largely by rebellious types, such as the Scots-Irish, who distrust centralized power and elite claims of authority. Largely, people like we saw in Braveheart settled Dixie. So the South has always been conservative. Its people have always viewed tradition and established scripture as having more meaning than some contemporary elite concept of "social justice".
The rest of the country was settled by people closer to southerners in orientation than to New Englanders. It's why the vast heartland has traditionally been conservative (with a few exceptions, such as Scandinavian populated Minnesota & Wisconsin), and in turn why America has always been much more conservative than Europe.
Canada has always been more "liberal" than the U.S. because a greater percentage of its early settlers were sympathetic to Monarchy. They never had a revolution to throw the Monarchy out. Plus, they have a large French province. The western provinces are conservative, but out-voted due to their smaller population.
Immigration from the Third World is moving both America and Canada leftward. Toronto's conservative precincts have been obliterated by immigrant populations. California, once a mostly conservative state which went Republican in most presidential races, is now a leftist Democrat stronghold due to displacement of the state's traditional population by third worlders.
Third world immigrants do not have the same heritage as most Americans do. They come from societies where, traditionally, a few strongmen run things, corruption is taken as a given, peasants are bought off with a few handouts, governmental decisions are arbitrary and have no relation to public opinion, etc. If you came to America from a banana republic dictatorship, which party would remind you most of home and make you feel most comfortable? The Democrats, obviously.
Add to this the fact that the new immigrants are A) not encouraged to assimilate, B) are encouraged instead to retain their language and customs in a "multi-cultural" setting, and C) are taught that America has been an evil "racist" and "imperialist" nation, and it's no wonder that open borders will eventually kill the GOP and conservatism in America (and Canada).
An uneducated immigrant from Latin America would see rich, arrogant, elitist John Kerry as an Anglo carbon copy of the banana republic boss from back home. Kerry, in turn, sees the immigrant as a perfect "flock member", someone who will defer to his authority in return for some welfare handouts and affirmative action preferences. There is no equivalent of a Ronald Reagan in Third World politics, so Reagan type conservatism is something totally alien to most people coming from these nations.
This all explains why the Democrats threw open our borders with the 1965 Immigration Act. Republicans quietly deferred to it. The evil party/stupid party paradigm strikes again!
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