Maple grief: Fewer people feel proud to be Canadian, poll suggests
CBC
How you feel about Canada might depend on how you feel about your bank account.
Canadians are feeling less patriotic than usual these days, an Angus Reid Institute poll released in December suggests. And there's a good chance a person worried about the cost of living and other personal finance issues is also questioning the current state of Canada, according to the poll.
When asked how proud they are to be Canadian, just over a third of people surveyed in the poll, which was conducted from Nov. 29 to Dec. 5, said they were "very proud," compared to 52 per cent who said the same in a 2016 poll.
Women and men over age 54 were more likely to be proud of Canada (over two-thirds) than women and men under age 35 (less than half).
For Saskatchewan respondents, the decline was even steeper. In 2016, 87 per cent of people polled in Saskatchewan said they were "very proud" of Canada, but that fell to 59 per cent in 2024 — the largest drop in any province, according to Angus Reid.
But the poll doesn't leave much room for nuance, so the results might appear more extreme than reality, said University of Saskatchewan assistant professor Daniel Westlake.
"The headline from the poll is still that most people are either unconditionally proud to be Canadian or conditionally proud to be Canadian," Westlake said.
"Nobody's talking about the country breaking up. Nobody wants to join the United States.… So I think we have to be careful of over-interpreting this stuff."
About six per cent of people polled said they think Canada should join the United States, mirroring something U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has mused about since his election.
While that's up four percentage points since 2016, Westlake advises against reading too much into it, because the difference is negligible based on the margin of error.
Outside a Saskatoon shopping centre, opinions matched the division suggested by the poll.
"It's tough to get by," said Eddie Moen, who lives in the Colonsay area, just east of Saskatoon. "Everything is harder to do these days. I don't really know what it is. Everything just seems kind of sad around here lately."
But Moen feels some optimism after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation, and with a federal election coming up.
"We're stuck, and it's been that way for a while now," Moen said. "I think an election is probably needed. I think everyone is ready for a change."
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