Canadian Public Opinion Research Articles

Populism in Canada: Something old, something new

The electoral success of populist movements in recent years has encouraged parties and politicians to incorporate populist themes increasingly into their discourse. While Canada has not been immune to these trends, populism has enjoyed relatively little electoral success in modern Canadian politics. A new People’s Party fielded candidates in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections but failed to win any seats in Parliament. Some populist themes such as nativism or authoritarianism have not rewarded their proponents in Canadian elections. Another dimension, distrust of elites, politicians and the media, is more present in Canadian public opinion today, and was a part of past populist movements such as Social Credit or Reform. In this paper, we examine the structure and correlates of populist attitudes held by Canadians, utilizing data from the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies. In conclusion, we consider the potential for a populist political party or leader to enjoy electoral success in the Canada of today.

Reassessing Provincial Political Cultures: Evidence from Five Decades of Canadian Public Opinion Surveys (1974–2019)

AbstractIn 1974, Richard Simeon and David Elkins published an influential analysis of provincial political cultures. Nearly half a century later, their results still operate as the baseline against which new studies compare their own results. In this article, I re-examine their conclusions, combining five decades of Canadian public opinion survey data (1974–2019). The article replicates their analysis by focusing on three dimensions of political culture examined by Simeon and Elkins: political cynicism, internal political efficacy and external political efficacy. It also expands on their work by accounting for contextual factors that can potentially drive or hinder provincial differences in political culture. The results suggest that Simeon and Elkins’ interpretation of Canadian provincial political cultures needs to be updated, as the patterns they found differ markedly from those identified in this article.

Climate Change Attitudes and Fossil Fuel Extraction and Distribution in Canada

It is widely accepted that the burning of fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change. Our question is: How are the related extraction and distribution activities viewed in Canada? This article analyzes Canadian public opinion data on five supply-side energy policies: expanding the oil sands, drilling for oil in the Arctic, fracking, expanding an oil pipeline, and shipping oil by rail. It applies social psychological models to identify factors associated with support for and opposition to these policies. Climate change attitudes have typically been found to be significant predictors of climate policy support. Instead, this study finds that having an ecological worldview is a strong predictor for each of the policies. This suggests that these policies are seen as having an effect on the environment but less so as affecting climate change. Contextual factors, such as region of residence and political orientation, are relevant predictors, suggesting that framing by political parties, industry, and social movement organizations has had a significant effect on support and opposition.

“Biafrans Are Not Nazis:” The Biafran Humanitarian Disaster and Trudeau’s Analogies

During the Nigeria-Biafra War, the Nigerian government employed shooting and economic blockade as powerful instruments of uniting the country and defending its territorial integrity. Starvation as a potent weapon was of a magnitude that arguably made it the worst catastrophe since the Second World War. The tension was between sovereignty and human rights. Public opinion in Canada strongly favored humanitarian support for Biafra, but the Canadian government argued that humanitarian aid for Biafra might be offensive to the Nigerian government. This article examines the attitude of Pierre Trudeau to the Biafran humanitarian crisis. It argues that Trudeau’s analogical arguments did not represent the true situation of the war. Although Trudeau’s reliance on information from the Commonwealth secretariat affected his understanding of the crisis, his policies were largely influenced by domestic political issues, particularly the Quebec separatist movement. The paper concludes that Canada’s foreign policy reviews that coincided with the Nigeria–Biafra War informed Trudeau’s kneejerk response to the Biafran humanitarian crisis.

Bridging co-operation’s communication gap: The Statement on the Co-operative Identity, the sociology of co-operative education’s shifting terrain, and the problem of public opinion

• Inward and upward educational biases limit public awareness of co-operatives in Canada. • International Co-operative Alliance’s recent educational directives are contradictory. • The Statement on the Co-operative Identity stresses an educational pivot toward the public. • The Statement ’s Guidance Notes focus mostly on internal co-operative education. • Mixed messages distract from media engagement and delay efforts to build public awareness. This article focuses on co-operatives’ faltering position in 21st century Canadian public opinion. I argue co-operative education’s introverted bias toward ‘boardrooms and classrooms’ neglects public opinion; and that shifting international norms and historical conditions have reinforced this retreat from mass media and the public sphere. A co-operative communication gap of international significance is the result. Cultural hegemony theory and qualitative methods are used to develop the argument. Historical analysis first demonstrates that educational conventionalism dangerously discounts the contemporary cultural environment’s threat to mutualism. It is argued that the International Co-operative Alliance’s (ICA) contradictory doctrine has deepened normative confusion about co-operative education’s scope, further delaying media activism and popular education. Textual analysis illustrates this contradiction in key documents. These include the Report of the ICA Commission on Co-operative Principles (1967), the Statement on the Co-operative Identity (1995), and the Guidance Notes to the Co-operative Principles (2016). Finally, conjunctural analysis shows that contradictory tendencies inside and outside international mutualism reshaped an inward-turning pedagogy from 1995 to 2016. Findings thus extend our understanding of the communication gap by accounting for barriers to popular educational innovation, both conceptual and strategic.

The Canadian Arab: The First Arab Political Organ in Canada

In the early 1940s, Arab lobbying activities started to be noticeable in Canada. In 1944, Muhammad Said Massoud, a Druze emigrant from Lebanon, founded the Canadian Arab Friendship League in Montreal. The League soon became the spearhead of Arab lobbying activity in Canada with a declared goal of improving Canada’s relations with the Arab world. The Canadian Arab, published by Massoud between May 1945 and December 1947, was the most significant enterprise of the League. Being the first of its kind in Canada, the journal was intended to refute Zionist arguments regarding Palestine and prevent Canadian public opinion from being sympathetic to the establishment of a Jewish state. The journal, in English but with the editorial also translated into Arabic, was distributed gratis to statesmen, religious leaders, university lecturers, teachers, lawyers, businessmen, and libraries. Besides Massoud’s editorial, it included news, political essays, protests, correspondence, and historical reviews.

Canadian Public Opinion on Official Bilingualism: Ambivalent Consensus and its Limits

With the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Official Languages Act celebrated in 2019, the question of its degree of acceptance by the Canadian public is in order for review. When the national policy on official bilingualism was first advocated by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, it frankly acknowledged that it was highly controversial and opposed by substantial portions of the Anglophone public. Nevertheless, they insisted that the policy was necessary for the survival of the country and maintained that the firm resolve of united political elites at federal and provincial levels eventually would generate political success for the policy. While elite unity was elusive and only partially realized, the essential elements of official bilingualism were adopted, expanded and have survived to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The evolving pattern of public opinion over the past three decades demonstrates that official bilingualism is accepted as an essential component of Canadian political life, but that acceptance is hedged by some important qualifications, and indications that any further expansion would not enjoy public support. Nevertheless, it is firmly established as a core operating principle of Canadian public policy.

Highs and downs: A scoping review of public opinion about cannabis, alcohol and tobacco in Canada.

Since the legalisation of cannabis in October 2018, Canada has emerged as a privileged place for research on the properties of this substance, its health effects, but also on its relation with public opinion. However, this scoping review points out the complexity of tracing the evolution of Canadian public opinion on cannabis based on available scientific data. This review follows the guidelines of the Joanna Briggs Institute and summarises more than 60 years of research on Canadians' public opinion, perception and knowledge of cannabis. The study also includes alcohol and tobacco in order to provide a meaningful comparison between substances. One hundred and sixty-one references selected from over 30 000 studies, with the oldest dating back to 1956, show that public opinion on cannabis is under-studied in Canada compared to alcohol and tobacco. Young people and students are among the most studied populations, unlike Aboriginal communities, immigrants and elderly people. The study reveals the absence of experts in public opinion and political communication, and calls for an imperative need for theoretical frameworks rooted in the work of social scientists. These findings do not suggest slowing the rate of publication on alcohol, tobacco, youth or students. Rather, they encourage increasing the rate of publication on other substances used and on other groups also targeted as being particularly at risk of misuse. New studies need to measure and contribute to the understanding of Canadian public opinion on cannabis in comparison with public policies currently in place.

Eurosphere or Anglosphere? Canadian Public Opinion on Brexit and the Future of Transatlantic Relations

AbstractClose relations with Europe, especially but not only with the United Kingdom, have long been a consensual tenet of Canadian foreign policy, which has supported European integration since the 1970s. The UK's withdrawal from the European Union threatens to upset this consensus. While Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has consistently cast Brexit in a negative light, Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O'Toole have commented positively on the UK's leaving the EU. Did their polarized views resonate in the population? To answer this question, this article analyzes the results of an original survey of voting-age Canadians. Findings show a strong degree of correspondence between positions expressed in party discourse and preferences in the Canadian population. This raises the possibility that the difference between two models of transatlantic relations, which we call Eurosphere and Anglosphere, could emerge as a new fault line in Canadian foreign policy.

From Stability to Polarization: The Transformation of Canadian Public Opinion on Immigration, 1975-2019

ABSTRACT Canadians hold favorable views about immigration, at least compared to many countries. Was it always so? Two survey series, using Environics and Gallup/Canadian Election Studies (CES) data, respectively, show that opinion on immigration was historically rather negative, became more positive from 1995 to 2005, and then stabilized. Native-born Canadians are now almost as positive toward immigration as immigrants themselves. However, recent aggregate stability masks a sharp polarization post-2005. Panel data from 2004 to 2011 shows that respondents who want less immigration are more likely to shift their partisanship to the right. Conversely, there is no evidence that immigration opinion systematically changed to match partisanship. This suggests that the predominant mechanism is sorting, rather than opinion change, at least in the period examined. Finally, is immigration likely to become an increasing source of political conflict in Canada? It depends on how competition at both ends of the political spectrum structures the interests of the major parties.

“Under your inspired leadership”: Dwight Eisenhower, Canadians, and the Canada–United States consensus, 1945–1961

Drawing on newspaper and archival sources, this article examines post-war Canadian attitudes towards Dwight D. Eisenhower, particularly during his time in office as the United States President from 1953 to 1961. Eisenhower emerged from the Second World War as a trusted figure for many Canadians due to his inspiring leadership of the Allied cause. Once in the White House, however, his reputation began to suffer, and public opinion in Canada increasingly questioned core elements of the traditional Canada–United States relationship and America's ability to lead the Western alliance during a period of heightening Cold War tensions.

Is There a Tradeoff between Ethnic Diversity and Redistribution? The Case of Income Assistance in Canada

Numerous studies conclude that ethnic/cultural/racial diversity has negative impacts on interpersonal trust and support for redistributive social programs. Although some Canadian public opinion data is consistent with this view, whether these impacts on public opinion are important enough to influence policy is unclear. Many scholars argue that Canada is an exception to experience elsewhere. This paper examines this question for the case of Canadian social assistance (welfare) policies - a central component of the social safety net. We exploit two salient features of recent Canadian experience. One is dramatic growth in the ethnic and cultural diversity of Canada's immigrant inflows in recent decades, but the extent of this growth has varied substantially across regions. The second is that welfare policies vary across provinces, and the ability of the provinces to employ different approaches to welfare programs has increased since the mid-1990s. We thus examine whether provinces that became more diverse reduced the generosity of their welfare programs, relative to provinces that experienced little change in the heterogeneity of their populations. We examine impacts of immigration on welfare benefit rates of four family types: single employables, single disabled, lone parents and couples with children. Our main finding is that there is limited evidence of increased immigration on any of these types other than families with children. Even in this case the estimated effects are small. Our study thus supports the view that Canada's experience stands as an example in which greater diversity has not reduced support for redistributive social programs.

Discursive battlefields: Support(ing) the troops in Canada

Winning hearts and minds in counterinsurgency missions is not only a strategy to be used on foreign populations, but also one that is necessary on the “home front.” This article is focused on the home battlefield; it is an analysis of the efforts by Canadian political elites to justify the use of military resources during the 2001–2011 interventions in Afghanistan. To fully understand Canadian public opinion of the Afghanistan war requires assessing domestic discursive “battlefields.” This article examines domestic debates as a key “battleground” in the war to win public consent for Afghanistan. I argue that the absence of active resistance to military involvement in the Afghan mission can best be explained by examining discourse about Support(ing) the Troops, the effect of which was to censure anti-war voices. In short, despite public discontent about the war, Support the Troops discourse was manoeuvred in a way that stigmatized anti-war narratives. This article considers how the rhetoric of Support the Troops movements in Canada played a role in normalizing militarization, and how this discourse was manoeuvred to legitimize military activities in Afghanistan.

Partisanship, local context, group threat, and Canadian attitudes towards immigration and refugee policy

The 2015 Canadian federal election campaign brought to the fore partisan cleavages in approaches to immigration policy, refugee policy, and multiculturalism. At the level of mass public opinion, research on attitudes toward immigration in Canada and other immigrant-receiving countries has pointed to a variety of explanatory factors. These include partisanship, economic interests, and feelings of cultural threat. There is also a growing literature on the effects of local demographic (specifically ethnic or immigrant) context in shaping attitudes toward immigration. Such a contextually-oriented approach, however, has been pursued by relatively few analysts of Canadian public opinion. This article endeavours to fill this gap. It brings together recent survey data and local-level demographic data to answer the question of what leads Canadians to hold open or restrictionist attitudes toward immigrants and refugees, focusing on the roles of partisanship, contextual measures of local immigrant populations, and perceptions of economic and cultural threat.

Telephone versus Online Survey Modes for Election Studies: Comparing Canadian Public Opinion and Vote Choice in the 2015 Federal Election

AbstractElection studies must optimize on sample size, cost and data quality. The 2015 Canadian Election Study was the first CES to employ a full mixed-mode design, aiming to take advantage of the opportunities of each mode while preserving enough commonality to compare them. This paper examines the phone interviews conducted by ISR-York and the online questionnaires from panellists purchased from a sample provider. We compare data quality and representativeness. We conduct a comprehensive comparison of the distributions of responses across modes and a comparative analysis of inferences about voting. We find that the cost/power advantages of the online mode will likely make it the mode of choice for subsequent election studies.

The Validity of Self-Report Measures in Assessing Historical Knowledge: The Case of Canada’s Residential Schools

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) strives to increase public education regarding residential schools. A baseline measure of the public’s residential school knowledge could be useful to evaluate the progress of the TRC. The National Benchmark Survey, Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study, and Canadian Public Opinion on Aboriginal Peoples Report are three existing surveys that provide such a baseline, though each use only self-report measures. We measured residential school knowledge of 2,250 non-Indigenous Canadian undergraduate students through self-report (subjective) and multiple-choice (objective) measures. Analyses revealed a statistically significant correlation between self-reported and objective knowledge of residential schools.

Public Opinion on Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security

Previous research on Canadian Arctic sovereignty and security has focused on governmental actions and policy recommendations. While these studies have produced some fine scholarship on those matters, Canadian public opinion on Arctic issues has been mostly assumed or analyzed on an anecdotal basis. This paper aims to correct this shortcoming by drawing the contours of public preferences on Arctic issues and assessing the impact of government activism on those preferences. An examination of 18 opinion polls conducted between 2006 and 2015 that questioned respondents directly or indirectly on circumpolar affairs concluded that Canadians do not prioritize the Arctic among other national priorities, although they rank it high as a foreign policy and defense priority. Additionally, even though increasing military presence in the Arctic seems at first glance to receive an exceptionally high level of support, a more careful examination of the data suggests that a majority of Canadians supports an approach to Arctic sovereignty that is rooted in compromises and negotiations.

Religious Symbols, Multiculturalism and Policy Attitudes

AbstractMulticultural policy is an increasingly salient, and contested, topic in both academic and public debate about how to manage increasing ethnic diversity. In spite of the longstanding commitment to multiculturalism policy in Canada, however, we have only a partial understanding of public attitudes on this issue. Current research tends to look at general attitudes regarding diversity and accommodation–rarely at attitudes towards specific multicultural policies. We seek to (partly) fill this gap. In particular, we focus on how support for multiculturalism policy varies across benefit types (for example, financial and other) and the ethnicity/religiosity of recipient groups. Using a unique survey experiment conducted within the 2011 Canadian Election Study (CES), we examine how ethnic origin (Portuguese vs. Turkish) and religious symbols (absence and presence of the hijab) influence support for funding of ethno-religious group activities and their access to public spaces. We also explore whether citizens’ general attitudes toward cultural diversity moderate this effect. Results provide important information about the state of Canadian public opinion on multiculturalism, and more general evidence about the nature, authenticity and limits of public support for this policy.

Does voting end at the water’s edge? Canadian public opinion and voter intentions, 2006–2015

Public attitudes on Canadian foreign policy matters have received growing attention in recent years, both to understand the nature of public opinion and the effects of public preferences on decision makers. This article offers a contribution on both fronts, focusing on the study of specific events (policies and political messaging) rather than grand principles. By doing so, we offer a novel approach to assess the level of public support enjoyed by the Harper’s government international policy. Also, we compare public attitudes toward the events with voter intention data to evaluate whether the level of popular support for governmental decisions on international issues correlates with electoral gains or losses for the ruling party. This article concludes that public opinion was highly supportive of the Conservative government foreign policy, but that this did not translate into a systematic increase in voter intention. In this sense, foreign policy decisions did not produce electoral payoffs for the ruling party.

The Distribution of Climate Change Public Opinion in Canada

Historic Canadian elections in 2015, both federally and provincially, created an opportunity for action on climate policy. While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of Canadian climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach, we estimate opinion in federal electoral districts and provinces. We demonstrate that a majority of the Canadian public consistently believes that climate change is happening. Belief in climate change's causes varies geographically, with more attributing it to human activity in urban as opposed to rural areas. Most prominently, we find majority support for carbon cap and trade policy in every province and district. By contrast, support for carbon taxation is more heterogeneous. Compared to the distribution of US climate opinions, Canadians believe climate change is happening at higher levels. This new opinion data set will support climate policy analysis and climate policy decision making at national, provincial and local levels.