If given the chance, 43 percent of young Canadians would vote to be Americans, with some guarantees.
“A group of people that we’re seeing in Canada these days who are having a pretty difficult time with the leadership of the country are young men,” Darrell Bricker of Ipsos told Global News.
“And in particular, they would be particularly interested in the opportunity that the United States offers if they had the opportunity to vote for Canada and join the United States, if their Canadian dollars could be converted into American dollars and if their citizenship could be converted into US dollars. confirmed… It’s quite shocking.
United States President-elect Donald Trump has referred to Canada as the “51st state” in numerous social media posts, something that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the country’s politicians have opposed.
In a new Ipsos poll, when asked if they would like to be part of America, four in ten Canadians aged 18 to 34 would vote to be Americans if citizenship and the conversion of their assets to U.S. dollars were guaranteed .
This number drops to three in ten in every age group surveyed.
“Canadians are pretty patriotic,” Bricker added. “Eighty percent of them say if they were given the option to vote to join the United States or to stay in Canada, they would definitely stay in Canada.”
Forty-eight percent of Canadians think Trump’s comments pose a serious risk to Canada’s independence, while 43 percent think his comments should not be considered serious.
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“Younger Canadians are more likely to think the country is under threat,” Bricker said. “The stability of the country in the future is therefore no longer as determined as it was. They seem to believe that Donald Trump is more serious, particularly in the threats he makes.”
Most respondents agree that Canada should remain independent from the United States.
Two in ten Canadians would vote for their province to become American, but only if Alberta and Quebec became independent states.
For some, the disintegration of Canada is inevitable. One in five respondents, or 20 percent, said it was only a matter of time before Canada and the United States merged, although 80 percent disagreed.
About 27 percent of respondents think Alberta, Quebec or both will secede from Canada in the next 10 years.
“So when you ask people if they would vote for Canada to be part of the United States, 80 percent of us say we never would,” Bricker said.
“But if you offer them the opportunity to obtain full U.S. citizenship and the ability to fully convert their assets and currency to U.S. dollars without penalty, that number actually increases to 30.
“Thirty as a starting point. We have to worry about it.
These are some of the results of an Ipsos survey carried out between January 9 and 13, 2025 on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians aged 18 and over was surveyed online. Quotas and weighting were used to ensure that the composition of the sample reflected that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The accuracy of Ipsos online surveys is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ±3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, if all Canadians aged 18 and over had been surveyed. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to, coverage error and measurement error.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.