I’m asking because on a vacation trip last week I got into a conversation with a fellow vacationer who was from Ontario. We were having a perfectly pleasant chat until he asked me how my state government was doing.
I said my state government was doing fine, it’s our national government that’s the problem, thinking that since he was Canadian he would heartily agree.
But he said he was pro-trump, and claimed ‘a lot’ of other Canadians are also pro-trump. He said Canada was ‘turning Communist’ with all the taxation, and immigration was completely out of hand. He said his Aunt and Uncle were visiting Los Angeles and while driving out of LAX in a rental car, illegal immigrants in a stolen vehicle rammed them, then robbed, shot and killed them both. I figured that was not the right place to say that undocumented immigrants are far more law-abiding in general than the general population, so I just said I was very sorry to hear about his Aunt and Uncle.
Then he goes on to say that it’s illegal to declaw your cat in Ontario, but the school system can ‘castrate your child’ without the parents’ knowledge or consent. I said, “come on now, that’s not true in the states, and that can’t be true in Canada”. He said it’s true, look it up. Then he goes on to say that all trans people are mentally ill criminals, which is when I said “welp, gotta go…”
So, can it be true that there are, probably not ‘a lot’, but more Canadian pro-trumpers than I would ever have suspected? Say it ain’t so! My wife does have some Canadian relatives on her side of the family who are conservative in their views, having said things like “the American health care system is much better than the Canadian one”, and we have a family friend originally from Canada who is surprisingly conservative in their beliefs, though I don’t know for sure if any of them are actually pro-trump.
Among the loud minority in Alberta who think Trump is just ducky, this separatist groupis looking for support to become a separate nation allied to the United States.
There’s at least one Facebook group devoted to Maple Leaf MAGA sentiment.
According to polling, two-thirds of Albertans want to stay with Canada.
The Canada convoy protest brought a lot of right-wingers out of the closet. When we visited a small city in Ontario in 2024, I remember seeing a bunch of convoy protestors holding signs and screaming things while standing in front of a store.
Some have gone full cuckoo, and think this woman is the Queen of Canada.
Canadian approval for the current administration is somewhere between 10 and 20%. That’s very very low, but not so low that you won’t run into Canadian Trump supporters every once in a while.
Trump supporters in Canada are a vocal minority. Quite a large minority. It would appear that, the greater the ignorance of world affairs, the louder the voice. Seems a pretty common trait world over. Unfortunately, the impressionable among us can be easily led.
I can’t speak to Canada but thats definitely true in the UK. It’s not not a huge percentage, but it’s not an insignificant number either. Some British people look at the poo filled wheelie bin fire in the US right now and rather than going “bloody hell! What a fucking omnishambles” say “finally the real Americans are taking their country back, we should do that!”. E.g. most of the Reform party and a good chunk of conservatives
I can see why a Canadian might support Trumpism, in the sense of being anti-immigrant, anti-”woke,” being down with a crude insult-comic style of politics, etc. I have a much harder time understanding why they would support Trump personally. Do they not have a problem with all of the “51st state” talk? And if not, why not – do they just think he doesn’t mean it, or are they actively rooting for the US to take away their sovereignty, or what?
We have two other threads where we have at least one poster who has clearly stated they aren’t pro-Trump, but are willing to work with him in pursuit of what they feel are viable economic goals. Again, you don’t have to agree, but if you want to know more, here are the threads.
Both threads have gotten rather heated at times, so I’ll just offer a pre-emptive mod-nudge and remind any here or there to avoid personal attacks and keep things appropriate for P&E.
Every US election for many years, there is a poll taken amongst Canadians as to whom they would vote for (if they could) in the American presidential election. Consistently it’s in the neighbourhood of 2-1 or thereabouts for the democratic candidate. So while there’s a strong majority that do not favour Trump, there’s the “Maple MAGAs” commonly western supporters of Pierre Poliveres federal conservative party and/ or of the Saskatchewan and Alberta’s conservative leadership who would support Trump. As another poster mentioned above, there’s a move afoot to have a vote in Alberta (and possibly Saskatchewan) to leave Canada and likely join the US. Many years ago there was a “unionist” party led by former Saskatchewan conservative party leader Dick Colver. Fortunately, it was DOA back then and I’m hoping this separation garbage is just that. It is cause for concern as it’s less than subtilty supported by the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith.
This kind of anti-trans nonsense is being pushed globally, using all the same propaganda, so it’s not a surprise that some people in Canada are falling for it, just like people all over the world are falling for it. I’ve run into this myself at times, and also other nonsense stories, like the one about kitty litter in schools for kids who identify as furries. BS, but annoyingly common BS.
We were on vacation in St. John, NB in 2024 a couple of months before the election, and had some guy loitering in a park ask us if we were going to vote for Trump. We said no, and he said he fully supported Trump. An N of 1 doesn’t tell me much about St. John, because up the hill from the wharf area was an active Anglican church that had turned its sanctuary into a permanent day shelter.
I’m sorry, but I would have had to have called bullshit on this. This story hits multiple right-wing talking points - illegal immigration, gang violence, crime-invested liberal California hellhole. If something like this had actually happened to a pair of innocent, unsuspecting tourists, every conservative media personality in the country would have popped a yuge boner and Fox News would be railing about it non-stop.
This guy either wove the story out of whole cloth, or he maybe heard that something similar happened to his cousin’s best friend’s brother-in-law’s aunt and uncle, and in typical Trumpian fashion wasn’t too concerned about the veracity of the tale (while also trying to make it seem like he had a personal connection to the alleged incident).
If I had heard this story, I would have been really tempted to say something like, “Wow, I actually remember hearing about that. What were your aunt and uncle’s names, again?”
It did ping my BS meter, but he had just started on the right-wing nonsense at that point. If he had claimed it happened to his friend’s or coworker’s Aunt and Uncle or something, I might have called bullshit, but he claimed his own were killed. I didn’t feel like telling him I didn’t believe that his own relatives were killed.
I googled it later-- there are some incidents of people getting robbed and carjacked driving out of LAX airport, and there is one LAX shooting incident in 2013 where a TSA agent was killed and several others were injured, but no incidents I could find where a couple driving out of LAX were rammed by another vehicle, robbed and klilled like the guy described.
I did call him out on the “school system castrates kids without the parents’ knowledge or approval” part. But when he got to the “all trans people are mentally ill criminals” part I had no interest in engaging him further; I just said “gotta go”. There’s no reasoning with that, and I was on vacation. Wasn’t going to spend another minute on his nuttery.
There are plenty of Canadians who see the chaos in the US and loudly and proudly want that here. It defies all logic, but MAGA isn’t about logic. Its about pure conspiracy, lies, and fervent fervent unshackling of all societal behavioural norms and rule of law.
For a part of the population this is a breath of fresh air. Canadian politics and history is so thoroughly and unrelentingly liberal (which is an accurate reflection of the base social and economic norms of our population), that embracing Trump’s MAGA is a release.
