Our elbows may be up, but have Canadians really changed?

The following article by Michael Adams and Andrew Parkin was published in The Globe and Mail on July 1, 2025.

Our elbows may be up, but have Canadians really changed?

Michael Adams is the founder and president of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. Andrew Parkin is the Institute’s executive director.

If ever there was a year when Canadians needed a national day off, it’s 2025. Certainly, politicians and journalists could use a break after months of campaigning, but ordinary citizens are also worn out: from tracking which tariffs are on or off, digesting the U.S. President’s latest threats to our independence, and searching for the “product of Canada” labels at the grocery store while trying to understand what they even mean.

After six months of rapid change, we find ourselves with a very different Prime Minister, facing a scarier Donald Trump, back as U.S. President. Our access to the largest economic market in the world has been seriously constrained. And we can no longer count on the U.S. to protect, rather than plot against, our sovereignty.

Yet, in some cases, this has had less impact on public opinion than might be expected. We are only modestly more satisfied with the direction in which the country is headed postfederal election than we were before. Dissatisfaction still outweighs satisfaction. We are a little more proud to be Canadian now that our elbows are up, but the strength of national pride remains more muted than it was in previous decades (mostly because many Conservative Party supporters remain focused on what it is about the country they feel is broken). We are adamantly opposed to annexation, but that was as true when Joe Biden was president as it is today.

We have, however, grown more self-confident. The proportion of Canadians who say it is very likely that we will remain independent from the United States is twice as high today as it was in the early 1990s, when we were still acclimatizing ourselves to the era of continental free trade. Only 10 per cent of us now expect to be absorbed by the U.S. within the next decade, compared to 32 per cent when the ink on the first free trade agreement was still wet.

This optimism about our sovereignty is nonetheless offset by pessimism about the economy. And it’s not all about the tariffs. Concerns about family finances and job security have been mounting for several years. To put this into stark perspective, the proportion worrying that their financial situation will get worse before it gets better is higher today than it was during the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s.

This and other perennial problems unfortunately can’t be solved by singing the national anthem more loudly or even booing The Star-Spangled Banner. The boost we have seen in national pride has occurred without weakening regional identities or, more importantly, defusing regional grievances.

Alongside these familiar economic and geographic cleavages, we face an emerging generational one. Our research has revealed contrasting priorities between older Canadians and their younger counterparts. Younger voters were more likely to be motivated by economic issues in the April election, while older voters were more focused on the threat posed by Donald Trump. And while older Canadians lead the call for more spending on health care and services for seniors, their younger counterparts haven’t forgotten about the need to invest in education, child care and housing.

Even more concerning, our continuing social values research has picked up a striking mood shift in Canada over the past two years (originating before the start of Mr. Trump’s second term), in the direction of a more hard-nosed survival-of-the-fittest mindset. We’ve become less willing to prioritize progressive ideals – such as openness to immigration, gender equality and environmental sustainability – ahead of material concerns such as financial security. This is true particularly of younger Canadians, and also of first- and second-generation immigrants whose shift of support to the Conservative Party in the Toronto suburbs cost the Liberals their majority in the recent election (and could cost them victory in the next one if the same mood prevails).

We arrive then at Canada Day after months of profound anxiety and significant political change that oddly haven’t changed us that much. We are still the same country facing the same centrifugal challenges with new ones added to the mix. If and when the threat from the U.S. subsides, a long list of other thorny problems will come into clearer view.