The latest survey results, compiled over the last half of 2005, suggest we've finally found a comfort zone, agreeing to disagree on a whole range of divisive political and social questions. Two-thirds of Canadians accept gay marriage, and six in 10 support the right of gay couples to adopt, including 20 per cent who personally disapprove of both those practices. And in comparison to the United States, we remain more firmly convinced that immigration is a good thing for the country (78 per cent to their 64 per cent), that abortion should be available on demand (43 per cent to 27 per cent) and that pot should be legalized (45 per cent versus 36 per cent). In fact, there is precious little evidence that Canadians are getting sucked into the red state/blue state culture war that has been raging south of the border since the contentious 2000 election. Confidence in newspapers and the press -- while not exactly rocksolid -- is actually on the rise in this country, with 87 per cent now saying they have either "some" or "more" trust in the written media, 30 points higher than the U.S. figure. And almost eight in 10 Canadians still rate television as at least partially trustworthy, versus fewer than six in 10 Americans.
"Canadians may hold similar values to Americans, but we hold them a lot more tentatively," says Gregg Olsen, a political sociologist at the University of Manitoba. Our classic "mid-Atlantic" model, somewhere between the individualistic U.S. and the more statist Europe, still holds, despite the changes in our own country and the wider world.
And having successfully weathered the national unity challenges of two Quebec referendums, and the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, it seems that Canadians have decided that "divided we stand" isn't such a bad way to live after all. As our cities fill with the sounds of more and more languages, we've come to grips with the formerly contentious policy of having two "official" tongues. National support for bilingualism now stands at a high-water mark: 64 per cent. In Quebec, 89 per cent are in favour, and support continues to grow in previously hard-to-sell regions like British Columbia (49 per cent) and the Prairies (47 per cent.) Only 12 per cent of Canadians now rate the state of English-French relations as a very serious problem, and nationally just 33 per cent believe that Quebec will eventually separate. (In Quebec, 48 per cent still believe sovereignty is a possibility, although only 25 per cent rate it a strong likelihood.)
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/polls/article.jsp?content=20060701_130286_130286#
Note: http://www.macleans.ca/...
Maclean's Poll 2006: Divided We Stand
Posted on Saturday, July 08 at 14:00 by jensonjContributed By
Topic
Article Rating
(0 votes)
Options
Stumble It!Comments
view comments in forum
Page 1 2
I almost choke every time someone comes up with that canard. Americans are, in fact, far less individualistic than most people in the Western World. The pressure in that society is to conform. (Who else persecutes their pop stars if they criticize the state?) If you want to see real individualists go to France or Spain. As for the idea that somehow the US is not statist, get serious! Here we have a state that spends half a trillion as a gift to the military industrial complex and hundreds of billions more in corporate subsidies, plus laws which favor corporations etc ad nauseum, and it isn't statist? Oops, I forgot in neoconspeak statism = anything that helps ordinary people like medicare or education. State subsidies that help corporations, why, that's free enterprise...
"Confidence in newspapers and the press -- while not exactly rocksolid -- is actually on the rise in this country, with 87 per cent now saying they have either "some" or "more" trust in the written media, 30 points higher than the U.S. figure. And almost eight in 10 Canadians still rate television as at least partially trustworthy, versus fewer than six in 10 Americans."
How can people, who support the control of elected governments by the corporate mafia, and total reliance on cartels and oligopolies for their survival, be called "individualistic"?
Individualism can only exist under strong, democratic societal protection of lives, livelihoods, health and human rights and not under the phoney theories and concepts of nonsense like so called "communism", or "free enterprise", both fraudulent catchwords for enslavement by predators.
The only solution is strong, elected, democratic local and national governments serving the interests of whole societies and not of special interest sectors in control of their economies.
Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC.
Can't agree more. But will Canada find it's way back to looking after and fighting for all Canadian's and the nation or will Canadian's become just another land of self serving me first people?
---
Perception is two thirds of what we perceive reality to be.
Difficult decisions are a privilege of rank.
As far I can see, today's universitiees are the worst sellers of human rights. Something we couldn't even imagine when I was a student over 50 years ago. Universities are now little more than the fully owned subsidiaries of corporations. I would close down all economics departments tomorrow morning, until they learn to get back on track of teaching economics, not screwball ideologies and fraudulent accounting to please their owners.
Ed Deak.
Individualism can never happen as long there exists the notion of top down governance. Canada (peace, order, good government) is particularly guilty of this.
---
"It's not the people who vote that count; it's the people who count the votes."
- Joseph Stalin
Diverity of lifestyles, sure. Diversity of beliefs - well, only if your religious beliefs aren't allowed to mix with your political views. Diversity of opinions - no way! In Canada, if you don't fall under the left-lib, statist, collectivist norm, you're shunned and persecuted by our vengeful elites and the unthinking mob.
It starts in the school system, which punishes thinking that falls outside of the Trudeau big government utopia of the 60's/70's, and continues with all the abuse and fiscal punishment our elites have hurled upon Alberta and the west for not being "good Canadians" and voting Liberal.
So when members of a fundamentalist Christian church express the opinion that gays should not be allowed to marry, or that abortion is murder, they are merely expressing opinions. As long as they do not use coercive means, they should have the ability to express these views, even if you think they undermine "diversity". What you call "ramming an opinion down someone's throat", others call freedom of speech and open debate.
The government has far more coercive power than any of these groups whose influence you fear. And the left is no stranger to authoritarianism. Anyone who questions immigration policy in any way is automatically labeled racist. Anyone who opposes gay marriage is automatically a homophobe. Anyone who opposes abortion is a misogynist. Anyone who opposes affirmative action quotas is tarred with any one of the above. In fact, anyone who challenges left-wing identity politics in any form is pinned with some label and shouted down.
To make this more clear, let me paraphrase one of your statements. The other aspect of the authoritarian *left* is that so much of what it supports - *hostility to rural Canadians and evangelical Christians, anti-business attitudes* etc, are an attack upon large sectors of the population.
I know that *you* are not an authoritarian. But you are in a minority among the Canadian left. Robin Mathews and Ron Dart would probably label you an American.
I agree that it is wrong to automatically call an anti-abortionist a misogynist etc. The problem here may well lie less with authoritarianism and more with ignorance and lack of experience. For example, some of the most dedicated anti-war and anti-death penalty activists are Catholics who also oppose abortion.
You mention, “hostility to rural Canadians and evangelical Christians, anti-business attitudes etc, are an attack upon large sectors of the population”. First off, hostility to rurals is a new one to me, actually I find the opposite in the left wingers that I am familiar with (Quebec, NB and BC) As for the evangelicals, most of the leaders of the CCF-NDP were evangelicals, not to mention the historical peace churches like the Mennonites, so its a certain TYPE of evangelical that the left does not like. As for business, we are all for small and cooperative business its the big corporations we don't like, for reasons that should be obvious.
“But you are in a minority among the Canadian left” Ron Dart and others like him do not represent the Canadian left. Well, maybe among the old farts of my generation. (b 1945) The best examples of where the left is at today? Try Jaggi Singh, Naomi Kline, Avi Lewis for a start. And guess what, their politics are a lot like mine.
Anyway, I'ts been great debating with you!
Through democratic means. And the leftist will seek to stop the rightist from even being able to speak out openly on the topic. And no, PC isn't dead. It just doesn't get mentioned in magazine articles anymore.
Now I'm as pro-choice as it gets, but in the mind of an anti-abortionist, abortion is murder. He is speaking out of genuine, sincere conviction about what he considers to be state-sanctioned murder, no different than when someone on the left speaks out against capital punishment (which I've recently changed my mind about and now oppose). If the majority of people were for capital punishment and the gallows consequently brought back to Canada, would you not want activists against execution to be able to freely express their views? Apply the categorical imperative here.
Now the issue of gays is certainly different. But once again, there is a difference between people opposing the existence of gays and people opposing the granting of certain legal rights (like that of marriage). But any opposition to any initiative seen as benefitting the gay community is muzzled based on the idea of the slippery slope - that opposing gay marriage is tantamount to gay-bashing.
As a social libertarian, I wish that the social conservative types would just leave people who live different lifestyles alone. But I'm not prepared to put a gag on them, because I think that this is an even steeper and greasier slope.