According to polling by the Environics Institute, 70 per cent of Canadians are either very or somewhat satisfied with “the way democracy works in Canada.”
Is that good?
At the very least, it could certainly be worse. And Environics surveys show that the share of Canadians expressing satisfaction has held relatively steady over the last 15 years — it was 70 per cent in 2010, rose gradually to 79 per cent in 2017, fell to 65 per cent in 2023 and then rebounded back to 70 per cent last year.
Satisfaction has also consistently run higher in Canada than in the United States, where Environics found that 56 per cent of Americans were satisfied with the way their democracy works in 2025.
Across two recent reports from the Canadian analytics firm — the first was published in November, the second was released last week — there are other encouraging, or at least reassuring, data points.
But there are also findings that could be cause for concern — or reminders that, when it comes to maintaining the health of a democracy, it’s leadership that ultimately matters most.
First, the good news.
Despite widespread concern about declining levels of trust, Environics finds that overall levels of trust in many of the pillars of Canadian democracy — elections, the prime minister, Parliament, the Supreme Court — have been relatively stable over the last 10 to 15 years (though there has been a gradual, but small, increase in the share of Canadians with a low level of trust in mass media). On several fronts, levels of trust are also higher in Canada than in the United States.
“Rather than steadily declining, levels of trust tend to oscillate as circumstances change,” the authors of the Environics report write. “Few Canadians typically express a lot of trust in politicians or political parties; however, this is neither new nor necessarily worsening over time.”
Environics classifies 41 per cent of Canadians as having “a lot” of trust in elections (answering six or seven on a seven-point scale), 47 per cent expressing “some” trust (three to five) and just 12 per cent having low trust (one or two). In 2017, those numbers were 41 per cent, 50 per cent and nine per cent.
The share of Canadians expressing a lot of pride or some pride in living under the Canadian political system has also held relatively steady over the last 15 years. In 2025, 40 per cent expressed a lot of pride, 48 per cent said some and just 11 per cent expressed not a lot of pride.
Seventy-four per cent of Canadians agree that “democracy is preferable to any other form of government” and just 11 per cent agree with the statement that “under some circumstances an authoritarian government may be preferable to a democratic one.” Seventy-six per cent either strongly or somewhat agree that “election results should be respected regardless of which candidate or party wins.”
Such findings offer some reassurance about the state of Canadian democracy — at the very least, they don’t seem to show a democracy in deep crisis.
“The fact that we still have a happy middle where people are generally satisfied with the performance of democracy and that they are continuing to blame politicians for their discontent rather than the institutions, that’s a really good sign,” says Stewart Prest, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia. “That’s in some sense what democracy is all about. The ability to get furious at individual leaders but not reject the [system].”
But there are also some potentially concerning findings.
While overall satisfaction with democracy has remained steady, satisfaction among Conservative voters has dropped markedly — from 89 per cent in 2014 to 52 per cent in 2025. The percentage of Conservative voters expressing high trust in elections has also fallen in recent years — from 43 per cent in 2021 to 25 per cent in 2025.
Overall, support for the idea that votes are “always” counted “correctly and fairly” has slipped from 64 per cent in 2021 to 54 per cent in 2025 and the drop is particularly pronounced among Conservative voters — from 61 per cent to 37 per cent. And while overall levels of trust have mostly stayed the same, there are now some sizeable differences between Liberal and Conservative voters when it comes to having a lot of trust in certain institutions.
In 2010, 17 per cent of Liberal voters and 21 per cent of Conservative voters had a lot of trust in Parliament — those numbers are now 42 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively. In 2010, 44 per cent of Liberal voters and 37 per cent of Conservative voters had a lot of trust in the Supreme Court — now, 57 per cent of Liberal voters have a lot of trust, while only 24 per cent of Conservative voters say the same.
As Environics notes, some of the decline in satisfaction and trust might simply be attributable to the fact that Conservative voters haven’t seen their preferred party in power over the last decade. In theory, there might be a bounce back whenever the Conservative Party next forms government.
“A long-running finding is that parties that lose elections become less satisfied with democracy. There’s kind of always this winner-loser gap,” says Eric Merkley, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. “Maybe the magnitude of that is intensifying as the stakes of political conflict increase. But it’s kind of just a normal function of democratic transitions.”
But it also might be important to mind any gaps.
“I am really worried whenever we see trust in anything to do with the institutions of democracy start to polarize along partisan lines,” Prest says. “That’s a clear warning sign to me.”
The foreign interference controversy that roiled Canadian politics for much of 2023 and 2024 could have undermined trust in elections, particularly among Conservative voters. But contested election results in Canada — like the dispute over last year’s result in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne — have been few and far between. And federal parties have largely refrained from casting doubt on the electoral process.
For that reason, it’s tempting to wonder whether the findings from Environics around elections show the influence of American political discourse — whether the doubts promulgated by major American political figures about American elections are drifting across the border.
But if Environics is detecting certain cracks in public trust — however normal or remarkable they may be — it might underline just how much leadership matters.
Leaders can, of course, choose whether or not to promote mistrust or doubt in democratic institutions. And where mistrust exists, they can choose whether or not to encourage or exploit it. That might be the biggest difference between Canada and the United States at present.
Merkley says that other opinion research, including some of his own, also shows that, while voters can be supportive of broad democratic norms, they can also be more forgiving of undemocratic actions by political leaders they support.
“I think the bigger point, as we’re seeing [in the United States], is that elites can often engage in anti-democratic actions and be supported by their party in doing so,” he says. “Because people aren’t able to draw the connections between those actions and democratic ideals and democratic norms.”
In assessing the health of Canada’s democracy, it’s absolutely important to look at how Canadian voters think and what they’re feeling. But it’s equally important to look at what their leaders are doing.
