~10% support overall. However, that's 21% of Conservative voters and 1-3% everyone else. So it's beyond fringe for everyone else, but maybe not as much for Conservatives.
Note that despite the headline, The Ipsos poll also says 80% polled would never vote for Canada to become part of the United States, while the Leger poll says 82% would not like Canada to become the 51st state. These are 3 of the standard pollsters that regularly get commissioned by TV and newspaper to do polls for them, and I have no reason to suspect that the polls are "cooked". 338 rates Angus Reid as B+, Ipsos as A, and Leger as A+.
There are lots of Canadians who have felt under attack from within their own country. The ruling regimes of Canada have over time implemented certain policies and ideological values that are a deviation from what was in place before. Not everyone shares those new values, and they feel like the real principles and political culture of Canada has been broken. They’re rather have change, and they see that in America’s rejection of progressive politics. What I’m saying is, to them, it’s not an invasion but a return to normal from a different kind of invasion. I don’t know if it is fringe or not - just explaining the perspective.
Culturally "left" wing and especially socially liberal policies are incredibly popular in Canada, enough so that there's enough of a block of an electorate that holds those opinions that two whole political parties can exist along the continuum and still one manages to hold majority power.
And our Conservatives have suffered electorally drastically when they've strayed too far into culture wars and socially conservative territory. If they're sick of being out of power, they should properly learn that lesson.
TLDR the "new values" you speak about are actually incredibly mainstream and not any kind of imposition from some radical regime.
Likewise with environmental issues. The Albertan oil industry is very vocal, and very powerful, but still the majority has strong concern about climate change enough that the plurality of voters are very much in favour of regulation of that sector -- even in Alberta -- much to the chagrin of the ruling political "regime" there.
> Culturally "left" wing and especially socially liberal policies are incredibly popular in Canada
I can see that being true for certain policies and topics. But what about at a more basic level? What do you think of Canada’s shift towards restricting or punishing speech on controversial topics, and giving agencies that regulatory power? Or the tactic of using the financial system to punish protesters? Or significantly reducing firearm rights? To me these seem like not just everyday policy changes but a rethink of basic Canadian law, and it does seem radical relative to what Canada was like not too long ago. I can see why many Canadians who support a more freedom oriented Canada would want to reject the new Canadian regimes or support being part of America, because it would give them back rights or culture or whatever they thought they had.
PS: it sounds like you live in Canada but are more progressive in your politics. I would be curious to have your opinion from that perspective but also hear what you think the strongest argument for the other side might be.
Frankly it feels to me like you and I aren't going to have many reference points in common. We're unlikely to share ideological / philosophical presuppositions and I gave up arguing with right-libertarians years ago. Ok but here comes my rant.
FWIW, I'm not in my mind a "progressive", I don't believe in progress. I'm not a "liberal" of any kind. I'm a socialist. And so I don't speak for liberals or what they might do.
And so re: guns I'm personally not in favour of firearms regulation the way the liberals have gone about it. I also grew up and live rural. So my perspective, again, isn't urban-liberal-gun-control.
Also the left-wing social democratic party here, the NDP, historically always had a much more moderate gun control policy than the Liberals, and I've supported that. Though this has shifted in the last decade.
But I also see the gun debate in the US as preposterous. Frankly the 2nd amendment as interpreted by the right in the US looks like idiocy to me and likely has its origins in the need/desire to suppress slave revolts, and reflects the US's explicitly slave-holding racist history.
In any case, you also sound like you're repeating things as facts you've found in right-libertarian forums. You're declaring things as trends or policies or tendencies which are at best situational related to things that happened during COVID. Or you have a thing about the way people talk about trans stuff, I dunno. And you're presenting this stuff from a certain rights-fundamentalist POV which I wouldn't agree with.
For one, I haven't seen any shift in Canada on "punishing speech" on "controversial" topics. I am aware that people like Jordan Peterson have spread misinformation on this topic, claiming persecution when there usually isn't any. It's also not worth my time to get down into the weeds with people like that to try to disprove every single of their claims.
But western democracies outside of the US have tended to interpret the concept of freedom of speech in a different manner than the US, and I think it's naive to expect a country with a British parliamentarian tradition to frame things like the US has.
"Freedom-oriented" is pretty coded, frankly. I don't recognize libertarians as "freedom oriented" -- I see them as market fundamentalists who will take the hard boot of corporate authority as legitimate while gutting shared governance. And they're also ridiculously naive -- I don't see a hard line between state and private ... they're one in the same authoritarian structure and the capitalist "free" market creates the repressive state to support itself, so imagining one without the other is incoherent and irrational. It's not "freedom oriented" at all.
We live in a commonwealth. In a shared society. And in that society if people park on my street for three weeks hitting their horn day and night, threatening people with assault, blocking ambulances and firetrucks... I want governance to intervene to fix this.
What do you expect to happen?
If people arrive in your capital city trying to overthrow a democratically elected government? That being their stated aim, and they refuse to leave til said government is "gone"... And then you see that they are receiving funding from foreign governments, corporations, and extremist organizations. You're still going to call them protesters? You still think freezing accounts is an unreasonable move? Did you object to the freezing of accounts of ISIS sympathisers and the like during the "war on terror"?
Nevermind that these people, what they experienced, is a fraction of the repression that left wing protesters got after a single evening of protest during the G20 in Toronto years ago. Because in Ottawa, the "convoy" protesters -- led by far right radicals -- had the sympathy of the police.
Look, as someone who comes from the radical left I can tell you now... the US government is far more draconian in suppression of protest and dissent than the Canadian state ever has been. It has a history of repression far more drastic going back since before the cold war.
It's just that so-called "freedom oriented" people aren't used to feeling the blunt edge of that. Because their politics fundamentally conforms to the authoritarian structure of actually-existing capitalism.
I will end this by pointing out that it's a cliche about Canada, for 150 years, that our motto is "Peace, Order, and Good Government" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace%2C_order%2C_and_good_gov...). Which differs starkly from how US has framed rights, historically around e.g. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness", etc. This is just the commonwealth tradition.
There's nothing new about this outlook, which conservatives and liberals in Canada shared for decades. In fact, it has historically been Liberals who chipped away at the stricter and more uptight interpretations of this motto. So, no I don't actually see a degradation in the rights structure of Canadian democracy. Just more of the same.
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Canadians certainly have differing opinions on politics however it's definitely a tiny minority that share your opinion on being happy if Canada became part of the USA.
It's all quite preposterous because many Canadians would probably have been fine in the past with some kind of currency union and trade and enhanced labour mobility if such a thing had been proposed during e.g. the Obama years.
At that point our currencies were often at par, the two governments were generally very friendly, and trade was going rather well. Canadians would probably welcome increased competition and services domestically.
Since then the US has become successively more dysfunctional. And while we have had our own issues and things have become problematic here in many ways (cough cough housing prices cough cough), the kind of insane disgusting culture war going on in the US is not something the majority has an appetite for.
In any case a full political union where Canada is absorbed makes no sense, it's so radically out there... the two political cultures are so far apart... and especially a "proposal" that reduces an entire continent spanning country with 3 oceans, 41 million people, two official languages... to a single US state. It's preposterous and inflammatory. "51st state" is not a serious idea, but it's become an idiotic battering ram destroying all civil discourse.
