Canadians have lived through a series of unusual events over the past five years that have strained the country’s social fabric. The first of these was the pandemic, which brought our normal routines at home and at work to a crashing halt. This was followed by a sharp rise in the cost-of-living that erased any hopes of a post-COVID economic recovery. Then came the threats to our economy, security and sovereignty unleashed by Donald Trump at the start of his second mandate as U.S. President. These events have occurred against the backdrop of a worsening international situation, including the continued Russo-Ukraine War in Europe and the Middle East. What we all wouldn’t give to revisit the concept of a slow news day.

It seems unlikely that these experiences could unfold without affecting how we see one another, the country and the world. Our social values speak to what we think is important in life – what we aim to achieve or to avoid. While these values are more enduring than opinions about the day’s latest events, they can and do evolve. And our ongoing research on social values in Canada is indeed picking up some important changes.

A Turn Toward Security

The most notable of these is a rise over the past five years, across the entire Canadian population, in values connected with raw survival and security. This entails a shift away from what we call fulfillment values – those that emphasize relatedness, mutual understanding, and harmony – in favour of greater acceptance or admiration of hard power and dominance. It also includes movement towards values associated with sexism and patriarchy, and towards ecological fatalism – the belief that inflicting damage on the environment is an acceptable result of advancing human economic priorities. And there is more attraction to a the so-called “authoritarian impulse” – the tendency to agree that tough times call for tough leaders unafraid of colouring outside the lines.

None of this is to suggest that a majority of Canadians are embracing sexism or authoritarianism. It is rather that the momentum has shifted in those directions. These orientations are not the dominant ones, but they are less marginal than before.

Are Canadians Becoming More American?

The question that this movement provokes is whether it means that Canadians are becoming, in a word, more American. This is a possibility I am particularly attentive to, having hung my hat on the claim more than 20 years ago that the opposite was happening. In Fire and Ice, a book first published in 2003, I argued that contrary to some widely held assumptions at the time (particularly in the wake of free trade), the Canadian and American personalities were in fact diverging. Our social values........

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