Canadian Democracy at Risk? A Wakeup Call From the Perspective of English-Speaking Citizens

Abstract

At first glance, Canada is a resilient democracy. It has so far resisted international trends of democratic decline, it has not had any major populist upheavals aside from the Freedom Convoy in 2022, and no extremist parties are in parliament. However, if we look at public opinion data, we find widespread democratic disillusionment. An online representative survey of English-speaking Canadians shows that more than 30% of the respondents indicate that they have no trust in democracy, more than 40% claim that the government controls what they can say, nearly 50% do not feel represented by government, and two thirds of the sample feel some sort of moral decay. These numbers illustrate a concerning gap between the preoccupations of large parts of English-speaking Canadians and the institutions of representative democracy—especially since disillusionment can weaken democratic safeguards and increase the likeliness of a surge of populist politicians.

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