Freedom vs. equality: Canada vs. the United States

Part four of the series on political values

Are Americans more likely than Canadians to consider personal freedom more important than equality? This is the question I will address in the fourth and final part of this series.

---

This is the fourth part of a series exploring answers to the following survey question:

Which of these two statements comes closest to your own opinion?

• Both freedom and equality are important. But I consider personal freedom to be more important, that is, everyone can live in freedom and develop without hindrance.

• Both freedom and equality are important. But I consider equality to be more important, that is, nobody is underprivileged and social class differences are not so strong.

Part One of the series introduced the question and presented results for Canadians overall, and by age and gender. Part Two covered differences between Quebecers and other Canadians. Part Three covered differences based on political ideology and party preference.

---

As we saw in Part One, Canadians are fairly evenly divided between those who consider personal freedom to be more important (54%) and those who consider equality more important (46%). Canadians do lean a little more toward freedom, but by a fairly slim margin (8 percentage points). Americans, as we would expect, lean toward freedom more decisively: 64 percent say freedom is more important; 35 percent say equality is more important – a difference of 29 points.

I don’t think we should exaggerate the extent of the difference between Canadians and Americans, however. The difference between the proportions in each country choosing freedom over equality is significant (10 points), but not monumental. And the U.S. is hardly monolithically pro-freedom, with about one in three considering equality more important.

There are a few other interesting wrinkles. The gender gap in the U.S. is a bit smaller (4 points, compared to 10 points in Canada, among those who consider freedom more important). In both Canada and the U.S., a majority of men consider freedom more important. But, while a majority of women in the U.S. also hold this view, this is not the case for women in Canada, who are evenly divided between the two values (jump back to Part Two in this series to see how this result is driven in particular by women in Quebec).

There are differences in opinion by age in both countries: in both Canada and the United States, the likelihood of considering freedom more important than equality increases with age – although the slope is a bit steeper in the U.S.

Not surprisingly, in both countries, opinions are strongly related to political ideology, with those on the left being more likely to favour equality, and those on the right being more likely to favour personal freedom.¹ But this similarity is somewhat deceptive, because more Americans than Canadians place themselves on the political right.

• Among those on the right, majorities in both Canada (68%) and the U.S. (74%) say they consider personal freedom to be more important.

• But people who are on the right and who favour freedom make up a larger share of the total population in the U.S. (21%) compared to Canada (12%).

• In Canada, this proportion is equal to the proportion that places themselves on the left and that favours equality (also 12% when measured as a proportion of the total population). But in the U.S., the proportion that places themselves on the right and that favours freedom (21%) is roughly twice the proportion that places themselves on the left and that favours equality (11%).

Finally, in both countries, there are significant differences in opinion among the supporters of the different political parties. As expected, Canadian Conservative Party and U.S. Republican Party supporters lean heavily toward personal freedom, while Canadian Liberal Party and U.S. Democratic Party supporters are more evenly divided between the two values.

Again, there is a surface similarity between the two countries, with each having a right-leaning party whose supporters mostly favour freedom over equality, and a centrist party whose supporters include a more even mix of those who favour freedom and those who favour equality. Yet, there remains a glaring difference, in that Canada has two other important federal political parties whose supporters lean more toward equality than freedom, namely the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.

The difference between Canada and the U.S. is best captured by looking, not at the right of the political spectrum, but at the left. Canadians who consider equality more important than freedom can find a home in political parties whose policies reflect those values. In the absence of a serious third party on the left in the U.S., Americans who consider equality more important than freedom must find space within the Democratic Party, a majority of whose supporters hold the opposing point of view.

This post features data from the AmericasBarometer 2025 Canadian and American surveys. Additional results from this survey are posted on our website.

The AmericasBarometer is a regular comparative survey of democratic values and behaviours that covers countries in North, Central and South America, as well as a significant number of countries in the Caribbean (the 2025-26 study will cover 20 countries). The project is led by the LAPOP Lab at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Global Democracy (CGD). The Canadian and American surveys were conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research, in partnership with CGD’s LAPOP Lab at Vanderbilt University and with the support of the Max Bell Foundation. The author is solely responsible for any errors in presentation or interpretation.

The Canadian survey was conducted online with a sample of 3,550 Canadians (aged 18 and over) between July 30 and August 7, 2025. The results are weighted by region, age, gender, education and language so as to be fully representative of the Canadian population. The U.S. survey was conducted online with 1,600 Americans (18 years of age and older) between October 3 and 16, 2025. The results are weighted by region, age, gender, education and ethnicity so as to be fully representative of the American population.

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

Follow us on other platforms:

• Bluesky: @parkinac.bsky.social

• Twitter: @Environics_Inst or @parkinac

• Instagram and Threads: environics.institute

• LinkedIn

Photo credit: Matthis Volquardsen

1. In the U.S., the terms used to mark the two ends of the scale are “liberal” and “conservative,” rather than “left” and “right”.