In previous years, Greg Lyle from Innovative Research Group has conducted a national poll on issues relevant to the conference topic and released the results during the conference. This year questions relating to the conference will be asked throughout the year and the results will be released periodically along with an op-ed by a CDFAI Fellow. Greg Lyle will present an overview of the results at this year’s meeting.

We did a survey for CDFAI and in doing so performed two surveys. One had six or seven questions on continental security and Obama and then more on NATO and Afghanistan. The only issue with online polls is that people may be slightly more competent than your average bear. People were more familiar with NATO and NORAD than we expected and there was strong support for both NATO and NORAD. There was also a shift between willingness to send troops into areas where this is no direct assault on Canadian interests. The new president has made a fundamental difference in how people perceive the U.S.. People are a little less aware of NORAD than NATO as NATO is in the news more. I thought that it would be less visible. I did a poll among soccer parents and people seem to remember NORAD for Santa Clause.

Things are marginally worse now then in 2008 when we did our study of the American election and we gave people three different views on working with the U.S. with regards to continental defence. Overall we have to be practical and if it makes practical sense then we should do it. When issues do make the media questions like this determine our options for dealing with things. It looks like there may be room for expansion among Canadians. People who were consistently least aware were Quebec residents. There is also a large gender gap between males and females who say that they would be more able to explain what NORAD is.

It’s easy to give soft support to something that you’re not paying attention to but the idea of NATO does seem to have a lot of support within Canadians. In the past the Atlantic has been the most supportive of these sorts of issues but the Atlantic had an above average response to not sending troops. There has been a decline in Canadian participation in collective security and this shows ambiguity among Canadians as the opposition percentages have not risen as much as the decline.

When we look at how the number of casualties affect the perception of Afghanistan, Quebec comes out on top for being the group that thinks that we are not making a difference.

Presentation Slides