Canadian and US political attitudes

     Fire and Ice (2003) Michael Adams, founder of Environics, summarises the results of three Canadian and American surveys, which suggest that Canadian and American values are diverging. At the time (and still to some extent today), it was taken for granted that Canadians were becoming more American. This book makes a persuasive case for the contrary. In particular it shows that, measured with American scales of values, Canadians are more post-modern, more liberal, more community minded, more inner-directed, etc, than Americans. In general, Canadians lie outside the range of American attitudes and values, and are off some scales entirely.
     Two things struck me about Adams’s results:
     a) The drift into what we now call Trumpism was already well-established by the early 1990s. The main difference between then and now is that the disaffected Americans who occupy the “Exclusion and Intensity” quadrant of Adams’s “maps” have begun to vote. They’ve also, I think, become more numerous and more intense.
     b) The divisiveness that has characterised America from about Ronald Reagan onwards has become more prevalent in Canada.
     Fifteen years is a long time in cultural change these days. The Millennials, who tend towards liberal values in Canada and to libertarian values in the USA, will I think become more politically active and influential. Check the Environics website for updates in Adams’s project to track cultural change. ***