Canada's World Survey 2018

Canada is a country with strong international connections. Most of the population is comprised of people with roots in other countries, and today Canada welcomes roughly 300,000 immigrants each year from across the globe, most of whom settle in and become citizens while at the same time maintaining strong connections with the communities from which they came. The country’s prosperity depends in large part on trade with other countries and maintaining a positive trade balance. And Canadians are ever mindful of their much bigger neighbour to the south, with which they share much in common but also see as distinctly different.

So in many ways we are an outwardly-focused people, yet the dominant narrative around our international connections focuses on government policy – foreign aid, military missions and peace keeping, and international trade pacts. How do Canadians as individuals relate to the broader world?

2008 Canada’s World Survey. This question provided the impetus for the inaugural Canada’s World survey, which was conducted in early 2008 as part of a national citizen dialogue sponsored by Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Public Dialogue that focused on the role that Canada and Canadians can and should play in the world outside our borders.

The survey was the first to ever ask Canadians about how they see their place in the world, and that of their country – not simply what they believe their governments should be doing: What do they see as the top global issues, and how do they orient personally to the world outside of the national borders, in terms of their interests, travel and personal connections? How do they view Canada’s current role in world affairs, and what do they think it should be? The results revealed many insights (and some notable surprises), and received widespread coverage through media partnerships with the CBC, The Globe and Mail, and Le Devoir.

Survey Details

The research consisted of a national public opinion survey conducted by telephone with a representative sample of 1,501 Canadians (18 years and older), between October 23 and November 26, 2017. The results from a survey of this size drawn from the population would be expected to provide results accurate to within plus or minus 2.5 percentage points in 95 out of 100 samples (the margin of sampling error will be larger for specific subgroups of the population).

Partners

This research was conducted in partnership with SFU Public Square at Simon Fraser University, the Canadian International Council, and the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History.