SIPP Public Policy Papers 25

Abstract

‘Canada, quite simply, is not a country in search of an identity, contrary to the polemics of poets, pundits and professors,’ Erin Anderssen and Michael Valpy wrote in the Globe and Mail on Canada Day 2003. ‘It’s not a country continually on the verge of something but never quite there,’ they remarked, reporting on a major survey from the Centre for Research and Information (CRIC) on Canada and the Toronto Globe and Mail in what the newspaper called The New Canada Series. ‘Canadians are not a people who have nothing in common except their diversity. They have remarkably similar values.... [and] they have attitudes and an approach to life that markedly distinguish them from young Americans and young Europeans.’ There is considerable evidence to suggest that Canadians consider themselves more Canadian than ever, and Matthew Mendelsohn, one of Canada’s foremost scholars on public opinion surveys, has concluded from his review of dozens of surveys that ‘the Canadian is stronger than the provincial in all provinces except Quebec.’