For better or worse, Donald Trump has become a central figure in Canadian politics.
Between actual tariffs, threatened tariffs, and promises to make Canada the 51st state, he has upended Canada's political ecosystem in a very short time.
For better or worse, it seems that Canada's main preoccupation for the foreseeable future will be a thankless exercise in dealing with the chaos monster next door.
By a modest margin, readers surveyed last month said newly-minted Liberal leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney was more up to this than Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
There is a clear gender difference:
And, inevitably, a clear partisan spread. The Conservative and Liberal ends of the graph are perhaps baked in, but the Green and NDP responses are worth filing away: they may signal a shift, or openness, to a Liberal party led by Mark Carney, which we may also have seen in a poll a few weeks ago.
There is perhaps a mild connection to income, at least in the higher brackets:
And there is a better-defined connection to age:
We also looked at questions that connected broadly to patriotism, or a traditional sense of Canada's identity as a nation. Some of these are stronger than others, but the direction is consistent:
Readers who are hawkish on Ukraine are much more likely to back Carney:
One thing that sometimes happens with our online polls is that results are so one-sided that they aren't all that interesting to write about. Regular readers will know that most of what gives our poll stories depth is cross-referencing them with each other, and if the main result is in the mid-90s for or against, as happened a while back with a poll asking whether Ontario needed a new flag, there's not much to work with.
I'm making a semi-exception of our other poll this week, which asked if you personally expected Canada to become part of the U.S. — as the 51st state, as states 51 through 59, or otherwise — in your own lifetime.
Only 8 per cent did:
Younger readers were more likely to see this as possible, which makes a kind of sense:
And readers who would like it to happen were far more likely to say that it actually would happen: