Are Canada and the United States now back on a path towards political and cultural convergence?

Are Canada and the United States now back on a path towards political and cultural convergence?

This essay by Michael Adams and Andrew Parkin appeared in The Globe and Mail on December 27, 2024. It is the fifth in a series of annual reflections from the Environics Institute to appear in the Globe and Mail at New Year's.

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

Holiday dinners are sometimes about making the best of an awkward situation, forcing smiles and exchanging pleasantries with people you’d rather not be sitting next to for very long. That’s just what Justin Trudeau did at the end of November, when he flew to Florida to dine with the incoming president of the United States. There is no bromance between Mr. Trudeau and Donald Trump, but their neighbouring countries are still better off when they can find a way to fake it, at least long enough to get from the appetizer to dessert.

Few things symbolized the cultural divergence of Canada and the United States better than the election, in close succession, of Mr. Trudeau in 2015, and Mr. Trump the year after. Mr. Trudeau embraced gender equity in his cabinet, flew to Paris to sign on to a global agreement to fight climate change, raised taxes on the wealthiest to redistribute to those less fortunate, broadcast a welcoming message to immigrants and acknowledged past and current harms done to Indigenous peoples and minorities. Mr. Trump effused patriarchy, pulled his country out of the Paris agreement, gave tax breaks to the rich, tried to build a border wall and saw good people on both sides of the struggle for racial justice. Presumably, leaders with so little in common could only emerge from two societies travelling fundamentally different paths.

But if this was true then, what are we to conclude today? Mr. Trump is back, no less popular than before. While Mr. Trudeau’s all-but-inevitable replacement as prime minister, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, has yet to be seen wearing a red MAGA cap, he’s promising to ditch Mr. Trudeau’s signature policy on climate change, to rein in immigration, to fix the “broken border” and to stop the “woke nonsense.”

With this agenda, Mr. Poilievre presumably will be more at ease at dinners with his U.S. counterpart than Mr. Trudeau was. But if two countries end up backing leaders with shared priorities, does it signal that they are less different than we thought? After appearing to diverge when we chose Mr. Trudeau and they chose Mr. Trump in the late 2010s, are Canada and the United States now back on a path toward political and cultural convergence?

There is one trend, beyond electoral politics, that does suggest Canada and the U.S. are on similar trajectories, namely an increasingly pessimistic outlook on the future, particularly among younger adults. The U.S. election unfolded at a time when one in two adults age 18 to 29 were feeling that the American Dream is a thing of the past. Similarly, in Canada, our recent survey found steep increases in the proportion of adults in that same age group who feel the social mobility escalator is moving them down, not up. The proportion of 18- to 29-year-olds in Canada who feel they are worse off today than their parents were at their age has more than doubled over the past decade, while a majority of young adults now expect the next generation will be even worse off than they are.

Another emerging similarity is that in Canada, as in the U.S., those dissatisfied with the way things are going in their country now outnumber those who are satisfied, and by a significant margin. And while Canadians remain less dissatisfied overall than Americans, as dissatisfaction in Canada grows, that gap is narrowing. The proportion of younger Canadians specifically who are dissatisfied with the way things are going has more than doubled over the past five years.

This underlying discontent sets up a situation where younger voters increasingly turn their backs on progressive parties, such as Kamala Harris’s Democrats in the U.S., or Justin Trudeau’s Liberals here in Canada. Mr. Trump’s victory in November was fuelled in part by the gains he made among younger voters. Similarly, in our survey of Canadians conducted this fall, the proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds that favoured Mr. Trump over his Democratic Party rival in the U.S. presidential election had grown since 2020, and was now twice as high as it was among those 55 and older.

Even more worryingly, Environics’ continuing studies of social values have picked up a slight rise (albeit from a reassuringly low level) in Canada in the value we call “Authoritarian Impulse,” which measures support for having a strong leader who can restore law and order and silence troublemakers. While this change has occurred across the whole population, it is a little more pronounced among younger adults, and particularly younger men.

These findings notwithstanding, the two countries overall remain far apart in their political orientations. Yes, in the context of growing discontent, preference for Mr. Trump over his Democratic Party opponent among Canadians edged upward between 2020 and 2024. But this modest increase of six percentage points boosted Mr. Trump’s support in Canada to only 21 per cent. By contrast, three times as many Canadians (60 per cent) would have preferred that Kamala Harris win the contest. No American state was remotely as pro-Harris as Canada.

Unlike in the U.S., Canadian men – and white men most notably – overwhelmingly preferred Ms. Harris to Mr. Trump. And Ms. Harris was favoured over Mr. Trump by a wide margin, even by Canadians who are dissatisfied with the direction of their country, and by those who currently feel worse off than their parents.

Other differences are not hard to find. Canadians in general are more likely than Americans to agree with the proposition that “the government should do much more to make sure racial minorities are treated fairly.” But what’s most eye-catching is that, in Canada, most Conservatives agree – in contrast to the U.S. where the majority of Republicans disagree. Canadians are more likely to prefer larger government with more services over smaller government with fewer services. The opposite is the case in the United States. Opposition to abortion and gun control remains substantial in the U.S. but more marginal in Canada, compelling Pierre Poilievre to tread carefully (if at all) on the issue.

And finally, there is the notion of patriarchy, which many observers see as being a rich vein embedded in American society that Mr. Trump has been particularly successful in tapping. Our surveys find that Americans remain much more likely than Canadians to agree with the historical truism that “the father of the family must be master in his own house” (In 2024, 48 per cent of Americans agreed, compared with 28 per cent of Canadians.) American women are actually more likely than Canadian men to agree with this classic articulation of male dominance in the family. Among Republican voters, six in 10 (59 per cent) agree that father must be master, as compared with four in 10 Democrats (38 per cent). Agreement among Canadian Conservatives only reaches 31 per cent – well below the level of U.S. “progressives.” And, in each country, this orientation to patriarchy correlates with views on host of issues related to LGBTQ rights and gender identity.

It is indisputable that Canadians are greeting the New Year in a bleaker mood than usual. Not only is a majority now dissatisfied; a growing proportion is concerned about the state of the economy while more are losing trust in the ability of both the federal government and their provincial governments to deal with key issues such as the economy, health care, climate change, immigration and housing. And it is no stretch of the imagination to expect that there is worse to come. The economic damage that U.S. tariffs might inflict on the Canadian economy, or the difficulty of managing the influx of people expected to seek refuge in Canada after having been expelled from the United States, can only accentuate the extent of our anxiety.

But it would be a mistake to jump from these observations to conclude that many Canadians now see what Mr. Trump is promising to the U.S. as the economic, environmental and social solutions we need here as well.

At some point, and probably sooner rather than later, the swings in the political cycle will bring a new government to power in Canada, with its own worldview and priorities. That government will have to work within the parameters of our own political system, which imposes a number of constraints that Mr. Trump doesn’t face – notably the need to retain the confidence of Parliament, a much less politicized court system, a distinct society in Quebec with its own language and “liberal” culture, and the need to reach agreement with 10 provinces and three territories. But it will also need to work within the parameters of Canadian political and social values, which remain quite distinct from those that are currently shaping politics in the U.S.

2025 will hold surprises, undoubtedly many of them unpleasant. But the convergence of the Canadian and American political cultures will likely not be among them.