Trump's popularity has risen among Canada's Conservatives. When should we start to worry?

In 2016, Donald Trump was unpopular almost everywhere in Canada. A Mainstreet poll showed a 15 per cent approval rating overall; showed him losing 80-20 to Hillary Clinton and 82-18 to Bernie Sanders. Predictably, the strongest support for Trump came among Conservative party voters: 39 per cent.

Which was high, but we were all younger then. If you were only half-paying attention, Trump was still a novelty figure: clearly racist, sexist, shallow, narcissistic and all that, but entertaining if you had a certain world view. He wasn’t someone you’d trust with your luggage, much less nukes.



But back then some could perhaps argue, how bad could it be? It was, of course, tremendously bad. Only the semi-serious people around Trump kept it from being worse: he kept Trump from ordering the military to fire on Black Lives Matter protesters, and Homeland Security officials pushed off to keep them from forming. For example.

Then there was , when Trump encouraged a violent mob to and tried to overturn the election. Trump’s list of mismanagement, racism and maliciousness is too long to catalogue here, but it became a daily drumbeat in the world. By 2020, preferred Trump to Joe Biden.

And now Trump is veering further into truly frightening illiberalism, with the election looming. And what do Canadian conservatives think of that? Well, according to a , 44 per cent of Conservative voters would vote for Trump over Kamala Harris, including 48 per cent of Conservative men, and 36 per cent of Canadian men between 18 and 36. Trump’s popularity among Conservatives has risen 11 per cent since 2020.

Maybe those Canadians aren’t paying close attention. Maybe they miss it when Trump repeats that he to prosecute his enemies, and on what he calls “ ” — including critics and . Maybe they miss it when Trump says , that he intends to or that he falsely said that immigrants bring “bad genes” to the country, which echoes the of autocrats throughout history.

(If you thought a place like Roxham Road was a problem before, wait until mass deportation is official policy.) Maybe they missed Trump’s former chief of staff and retired Marine general John Kelly when he and admired Hitler; retired general Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023, , “I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. (Trump) is now the most dangerous person to this country.

A fascist to the core.” Maybe they missed how Trump says he intends to pursue economic policies that are designed to — that is not a typo — and which economists say could produce of the 2008 financial crisis. It’s hard to keep up with the news, and Trump is so relentless that it’s easy for eyes to glaze over.

Besides, he didn’t do enough of that stuff at scale when he was president, that maybe the false nostalgia of the last four years has resulted in more Conservative support in Canada. We should give Canadians some benefit of the doubt: they aren’t in America, and can experience it the way Canadians have traditionally experienced the United States: like our favourite TV show. But you can see the parallels here, too.

Our federal Conservatives and . Even before the federal Liberals lost control of immigration following the emergency phase of the pandemic — and boy, did they — opposition from Conservative supporters to the number of visible immigrants from 47 per cent in 2013 to 69 per cent in 2019. Polling has shown Conservatives in Canada have — and sometimes markedly lower — than Liberal, NDP or Bloc voters in the media, the United Nations, the Bank of Canada, the Supreme Court, municipal government, the federal public service, and Elections Canada, and if ever there was a wrecking ball towards institutions, it’s Donald Trump.

And hey, maybe the Hitler stuff just doesn’t land. Maybe COVID and its after-effects trashed the hospitals and pushed a ton of people into the streets and kicked inflation to the moon and now guacamole is $10 and you have to contemplate homelessness while waiting all day in the ER. Maybe young men feel especially directionless, while under a of cultural assault.

Maybe, like some Trump voters, Canadian conservatives . But maybe if you swim in enough of the same water as a strongman, someone who hates the same people you do can be appealing. Canada’s conservatives might not know enough about Trump, which would be fair.

The bigger worry would be that they know enough..