TIME Magazine poll finds that majority of Canadians have “A strong dislike for U.S. President George W. Bush”
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Poll Respondents Prefer Kerry to Bush in Every Category Surveyed; Poll Also Shows Majority of Canadians Oppose American-Led Missile-Defense Program.
“A new TIME-EKOS poll shows that…Canadians are expressing a strong dislike of President George W. Bush and dread at the possibility he may win again,” writes TIME’s Canadian Bureau Chief Steven Frank in the November 1st issue of TIME Magazine (on newsstands this Monday, October 25th). “The election, the poll suggests, is making Canadians feel at once fearful and powerless. Remarkably, the poll also finds that Canadians believe the U.S. election will have a greater impact on Canada than the Canadian federal election last June. ‘Canadians are outright scared stiff- perhaps beyond any rational response-that a Bush election is a path to wrack and ruin,’ concludes EKOS president Frank Graves. ‘I think they’re near apoplectic at the prospect.’”
“This is not to say that U.S.-Canada relations are set to slide if Bush prevails,” acknowledges Frank. “A vast majority of the 1,237 Canadians questioned (67%) in the TIME poll conducted Oct. 13-17 identified the U.S. as ‘Canada’s closest friend’…Most said 9/11 and its aftermath have not stopped them from visiting the U.S. Forty percent said they thought Canada-U.S. relations were good vs. 27% who thought they were poor.”
“Maybe so. But Canadians are still concerned about what they view as a crossroads election of global significance. The TIME poll shows that Canadians believe a John Kerry victory would be far better for Canada than a Bush re- election. Pollster Graves says Canadians view the two candidates in stark, black-and-white terms-in essence, ‘Bush, bad; Kerry, good.’ Says Graves: ‘You can almost say that Canada has become a nation of Michael Moores,’ the hefty leftie activist behind the documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11. ‘President Bush has emerged as sort of the dark side of America, perhaps leading the nation on a fundamentally wrong trajectory,’ Graves observes.”
The poll found that “in general, conservatives, males, and Albertans (and other residents of the Prairies) were much more apt in the poll to favor Bush and support America,” and that “both wealthier and younger Canadians, as well as Bloc Quebecois and New Democratic Party supporters, tended to be more worried about a possible Bush re-election. Many women also expressed similar concerns (about a Bush re-election),” writes Frank.
OTHER KEY FINDINGS
ON THE WAR IN IRAQ: “Certainly, the war in Iraq has deeply affected Canadian views of the U.S. A majority of Canadians say they believe Ottawa’s decision not to overtly join the war has somehow hurt its U.S. relationship. There is resentment too with the way the U.S. led the Iraq invasion without a mandate from the U.N. Security Council or NATO. As (former Canadian Ambassador to Washington Allan) Gotlieb says, Canadians have a ‘multilateral chromosome,’ and believe that the U.N., despite its flaws, remains ‘the cornerstone, the sacred foundation of our foreign policy.’ The Iraq invasion has demonstrated to Canadians just how important to them those institutions are.”
QUEBEC RESPONDENTS: “When asked, for instance, to compare Kerry and Bush, 47% of Quebec respondents said they have a lot of trust in Kerry, compared with the Canadian average of 39%. Only 9% reported having a lot of trust in Bush, compared with a national average of 16%. This would not be so surprising-the province is generally considered one of the most liberal places in the world-if not for the fact that Quebec was until recently considered one of the most pro-U.S. jurisdictions in Canada. ‘This shift in Quebec is an almost breathtaking reversal of some of the things we would have seen 10 years ago,’ says pollster Graves.”
REGARDING MISSILE-DEFENSE & MILITARY POLICY: “In a surprising finding, the poll determined that a majority of Canadians-for the first time, according to EKOS-are opposed to Canada’s participation in the American-led missile- defense program. And they believe overwhelmingly that, if Canada walks away from the program, ‘the U.S. would punish Canada in some way.’ The declining support for this initiative, says Graves, ‘may be linked to a strengthening conviction that if the Iraq invasion was a profound error, why believe that missile defense is right?’ More broadly, the TIME poll found that a majority of Canadians feel that Canada ‘relies too much’ on the U.S. military for its own defense,” states Frank.
ABOUT THE STUDY
This study was based on the results of a telephone survey of 1,237 interviews with a national random sample of Canadians 18 years of age and older. Interviews were conducted between October 13 to 17, 2004. A sample of this size provides a statistical error margin of +/- 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
@ October 24, 2004