With Barry Watson & Andrew Parkin
Will Canada rise to the challenge?
President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs have caused much consternation among Canadians and will cause significant economic turmoil if implemented. But at the same time, Canadians seem to be noticing — and embracing — the opportunities this crisis has surfaced.
First, social media analysis and observation of retail behavior show an upswing in expressions of Canadian unity and pride. From making efforts to buy Canadian to belting out the national anthem at sporting events, Canadians are pulling together in the face of the threat. This surge of patriotic feeling is timely, given that our long-term tracking of Canadian pride showed declining trend in recent years. Following high and steady levels for three decades (from the 1980s through 2010s), the proportion saying they are very proud to be a Canadian fell by 20 percentage points from 2016 to 2024. (Stay tuned: The Environics Institute for Survey Research will publish updated numbers later in 2025.)
A second opportunity for Canada resulting from the Trump tariff crisis is a heightened focus among our federal and provincial/territorial governments on important challenges facing the country: trade, security, economic policy, infrastructure, energy. These are issues the country has needed to address for years. With this renewed focus and a bit of cooperation, perhaps current efforts will produce action and progress. Several observers have noted that Canada might be better off if we disregard the current 30-day tariff reprieve and continue working at these challenges as if our collective future depends on it.
An especially good outcome here would be not just to find solutions to one or two perennial problems, but to strengthen the mechanisms that make cooperation possible. As our colleagues at the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) have argued, the infrastructure that underpins federalism in Canada is weak – meetings are ad hoc, and we aren’t used to truly shared decision making. For a moment during the pandemic, it looked like our federal and provincial leaders were building the necessary muscles: getting into the habit of meeting regularly, sharing information, and coordinating responses. But we walked away from all that as soon as the emergency passed. Let’s not do that a second time.
For those thinking Canada should fold up its tent and join the U.S., remember that Canadians across this vast country are generally more alike than we are different, and that we remain quite distinct from our southern neighbours. If Canadians had had the opportunity to vote in the US election, for example, three times as many would have supported Kamala Harris as Trump.
Canadians are more likely to prefer larger government with more services over smaller government with fewer services. The opposite is true in the United States. Opposition to abortion and gun control remains substantial in the U.S. but more marginal in Canada. And finally, there is the matter of patriarchy, which many observers see as an orientation or cultural appetite that Mr. Trump taps into successfully. 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).
Canada should hardly have needed yet another wake-up call to focus its attention on the crucial social and economic challenges it faces, but nonetheless, President Trump with his tariff threats has provided it. Many Canadians seem inclined to show some national pride in the face of these challenges. One productive way of channeling that feeling would be to keep up the pressure on our governments to keep collaborating and follow through with the important policy actions needed to strengthen our nation and its economy.
What comes next? We’ll find out soon enough.
