Does that border look artificial to you?

Canadians on their country and the one next door

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Note to readers: I’m working on some longer articles that will appear in the coming weeks. In the meantime, to kick off 2025, here’s a quick recap of recent findings on how Canadians see the similarities and differences between themselves and Americans.

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How similar are the political cultures of Canada the United States? Here’s what NBC News recently concluded, after stumbling across the Environics Institute’s website:

“Public opinion polling of Canada illustrates a distinct political culture that’s far different from the United States’.”

I won’t republish all the proof points behind this assertion today (though if you missed our New Year’s essay on the topic, you can catch up here: Are Canada and the United States now back on a path towards political and cultural convergence?).

For now, let’s just review a few relevant results from surveys on the topic that we’ve conducted over the past few years.

First, here’s the extent of support in Canada for the idea of the country becoming the 51st state of America.

I can’t think of any other policy proposal that so many Canadians would disagree with so strongly.

What’s worth noting here, however, is the shift since 1986. Several decades into the era of North American free trade, Canadians have grown even more strongly opposed to being absorbed by the U.S. Agreement that we should join the U.S. was very low in 1986, but it is even lower in 2022. In the end, closer economic integration did not erode Canadians’ sense of their distinctiveness.

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Read the complete report on public opinion in Canada and the United States

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That brings us to these findings from 2021, on whether we think Canada or the United States performs better across a range of areas. The eye-catching finding here is that only five percent of Canadians think the U.S. offers a better quality of life. The proportion that envies the American standard of living is higher, but reaches only 17 percent.

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Read the complete report on how Canadians view the United States

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What is no less notable, however, is that – in most of these areas – Canadians have become even more likely than they were 30 years ago to say that their country does better than the U.S.

This change is most noticeable in the case of views about government. In 1991, Canadians were divided on which country had the better system. Since then, the proportion saying Canada’s system of government is better has doubled, reaching 66 percent, while the proportion preferring the U.S. system has collapsed to only five percent. In the wake of years of polarized politics in the U.S., the gap between the proportion saying Canada’s system of government is better and the proportion saying government is better in the U.S. has widened from two percentage points to 61 points.

In several other areas, the change is less dramatic, but still significantly in Canada’s favour:

• The proportion of Canadians that say their country has a higher standard of living has increased by eight points since 1991, but the proportion saying it’s better in the U.S. has declined more noticeably, from 34 percent to 17 percent. As a result, the gap between the proportion saying Canada has a higher standard of living and the proportion saying it’s higher in the U.S. has widened considerably, from 17 points to 42 points.

• Canadians were previously much more likely to say that the U.S has more opportunities to get ahead than they were to say it is Canada; in 2021, they are slightly more likely to say it is Canada rather than the U.S.

Finally, in 2019, we asked Canadians if they agreed that they have more in common with Americans living in the States that border their province than they do with Canadians living in other provinces. Most (68%) disagreed; one in four agreed (24%).

This question explores the idea that culture is underpinned by economic geography, which would imply that Canadians and Americans in similar regions (the Prairies, the Great Lakes basin, the Pacific Coast) share a common way of life. In the background is the concern, as old as Confederation itself, that it’s much harder to build and maintain common bonds across the geographic and linguistic barriers that interpose themselves on the east-west continental axis than it is to do the same on a north-south basis.

It’s reassuring, then, that most Canadians reject the notion that they have more in common with Americans living across the border from them than they do with their fellow citizens in other provinces. Also reassuringly, there is very little regional difference in answers. Agreement varies within a narrow range, from 21 percent in Atlantic Canada to 27 percent in the Prairies.

Opinions vary more by age, however, with younger Canadian being more likely to agree. Just over one in three (35%) of 18- to 24-year-olds agree that they have more in common with Americans living in the States that border them than they do with Canadians living in other provinces. It is not clear whether this is a “life cycle” effect (younger people will start to observe more differences as they age) or a “generational” effect (younger people today are different than they used to be, perhaps because they are more connected to global rather than local media).

This nuance notwithstanding, the big picture is still clear: most Canadians feel their country is distinct from the United States, and offers its citizens a better quality of life. Moreover, these sentiments have strengthened over time. The country – like all others – is beset by a range of problems, but an absence of national self-confidence is not one of them.

The data in this post are from the Environics Institute’s Focus Canada and Confederation of Tomorrow surveys; details of the methodology of all our surveys are available on the Projects section of our website. Thanks to our survey projects partners for making these studies possible.

What is the Environics Institute for Survey Research? Find out by clicking here.

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