Are our elbows up, down, or the same?

The numbers don't add up well enough to say.

Wishful thinking, magical thinking or both?

This strikes me as more than just a bit of stretch: Patriotism at an all time high ahead of this year’s Canada Day. That’s CTV’s reading of this Angus Reid poll, which shows 67 percent of respondents said they were proud or very proud to be Canadian, up from 58 percent last December.

A wrinkle: In that same poll report, Angus Reid notes that its own surveys over the past decade show a drop in the percentage of respondents who say they are very proud, proud or somewhat proud to be Canadian - except for that bump from this past December. Unfortunately, as Angus Reid’s data also shows, this still leaves us much less proud to be Canadian than we were ten years ago.

Here’s an Environics poll from last month (.pdf) showing a drop from 93 percent of respondents who said they were proud or somewhat proud to be Canadian just after Justin Trudeau’s government was elected in 2015 to 86 percent last month. CP24 takes those results as a cue for this headline: Will this be the most patriotic Canada Day ever? Clearly not.

Here’s an Abacus Data survey from June 30 showing that same bump Angus Reid’s pollsters noticed following Justin Trudeau’s abdication and Donald Trump’s election, but it’s much smaller: it’s up to 68 percent who report feeling “very proud” to be Canadian from 66 percent last year.

As for the CBC, well, please don’t. Please. This isn’t helping.

I don’t mean to be an auld miseryguts. I love my country, and it pleases me that Canadians are fond of Canada and that lately we’re becoming more so, even if by small margins.

Is this what Canada can look forward to unless we cough up $71 billion for President Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’? Probably not. Artist: Steve Skroce.

What the hell. I’m taking a break this week.

That deep background I mentioned in my last newsletter (Pride Parade or Canada Day Parade?), on how Canada was quietly transformed into something of a geopolitical basketcase and a safe haven for terror and extremism - I’m still working on it.

For now, if not pride, at least take some comfort in knowing that Canadians have done great things, and where we’ve succeeded we’ve done so by merely muddling through. It’s what we do best, and there’s certainly no shame in that. At the same time, it’s very true that we don’t have the luxury of carrying on like this anymore.

If majority Canadian opinion is accurately reflected in those polls, we seem to believe we’re going to get through this mostly unscathed. I’m less optimistic about this than most Canadians, but I’m otherwise suprisingly normal. I often discover this, combing through polling data, and for some reason I always find it gratifying.

Two last polls before I sign off.

Although it doesn’t budge the needle all that much, IPSOS (.pdf) finds that nearly half of us say it’s more likely that we’d feel proud of being Canadian than the likelihood of five years ago. That suggests some latent optimism, I guess. Seventeen percent more of us (44 percent!) say we’re more likely to speak positively about Canada to non-Canadians.

A third of us are more likely to fly a Canadian flag and attend a Canada Day event, which is pretty damn encouraging, given that a mere four years ago it was official federal policy to lower Canadian flags to half mast on all government buildings and Canada Day celebrations were being cancelled in several cities and towns across country. We haven’t yet recovered from that national psychotic episode, but we’re coming along.

The fun part of the IPSOS polling: Sixty-one percent of Albertans say they are more likely to feel proud to be Canadian than five years ago. That’s a higher percentage than anywhere else. And almost half of Quebeckers say the same thing. Where did all the separatists go?

Finally, it turns out that Canada just might not be the racist, misogynistic, structurally racist Islamophobic hellhole of a colonial settler state that we’re constantly hectored to declaim. Statistics Canada cobbled together some survey results that defy the fashionable paradigm.

So there we have it.

Happy Canada Day.