Nearly half of people in Canada say the pride they feel in being Canadian has changed in the past five years and those who reported either a pride drop or increase are evenly split, according to a new poll.
The poll, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs exclusively for Global News, spoke with 1,000 people aged 18 and older about their feelings regarding Canada as July 1 approaches.
According to Ipsos, while 58 per cent of respondents reported no change in pride levels, 42 per cent of those surveyed said their pride in Canada has changed. Of those, 21 per cent said they felt more proud while another 21 per cent said they felt less proud compared to five years ago.
Younger Canadians were more likely to feel less proud than older Canadians, with about one-quarter of millennials, in particular, being more likely to feel less proud compared to roughly one-sixth of the baby boomer generation.
“If you’ve been in Canada, living in Canada for a longer period of time, your attitudes and beliefs are likely to be more baked in, meaning that the contextual situation is less likely to have an impact on your beliefs and your pride,” said Sean Simpson, vice-president of Ipsos, in an interview.
“Millennials and gen Z (are) much more likely to be reexamining their Canadian identity and their relationship to Canada. Boomers (are) much more likely to be maintaining the status quo.”
Simpson said while the number of people feeling more or less pride in being Canadian was split, it “clouds the real story” because generations are reacting in different ways.
Beyond the question of pride in their country, respondents were also asked how they plan to commemorate Canada Day compared to five years ago.
About half of Canadians reported no change of plans, saying they still plan to attend a festival, party or other event, and 57 per cent said they’d display a flag while another 45 per cent had mixed opinions. Respondents could pick multiple ways they planned to celebrate.
In terms of attending a party or event, or waving the flag, about a quarter said they were more likely to do so compared to five years ago, while about the same number said were less likely to do so.
Some of the polling could be seen as contradictory, with one in three gen Z or millennials more likely to attend a Canada Day celebration, but Simpson said this could be a result of younger people wanting to go out and be social — but the activities they engage in just may not be fireworks. He said it could involve attending an Indigenous talk or learning more about Canada’s history.
“Even if they’re more likely to attend these things, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are engaging in them in the same ways,” he said. “Given some of the data we’re seeing here, the nature of those activities is changing as well.”
Gaps in terms of education on Indigenous history are present when it comes to age groups, gender and educational background.
Four in 10 Canadians said they were more likely to say they will learn about Indigenous history in the country compared to five years ago. Women and university graduates had a higher desire to do so than men and high school graduates.
Millennials and gen-Zers were notably more likely to want to learn, with close to half saying they would do so, while about 32 per cent of baby boomers showed the same interest. About half of generation X and boomers said they had not changed how likely they were to learn about Indigenous people’s history compared to five years ago.
“I think the residential school crisis brought to bear in the mainstream general population that most Canadians have a huge blind spot when it comes to Indigenous history and the impact that settlers to Canada had on Indigenous Canadians,” Simpson said. “And in that desire, in that journey towards reconciliation, I think the first step is understanding.”
Still, a large proportion said they would speak positively to people not from Canada, with just over one in three saying they were even more likely than five years ago to do so. Only 14 per cent said they were less likely to communicate the same.
“I think that some of that is a defensive mechanism because, yes, Canada has all kinds of issues and we’re becoming more in tune with those issues,” Simpson suggested. “Yet we are still a very excellent country. There are many, many, many good things that are happening here. We’re a welcoming country. We’re an inclusive country, and I think increasingly we’re a country trying to better itself.”
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between June 19 and 20, 2023, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians aged 18+ was interviewed. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18+ been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.