Overall, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in our country today?
I have written about this survey question before. It’s time for another update.
Some background: this is a question we first asked 20 years ago. We adapted it from a question originally asked by Gallup (more on their latest U.S. results coming up). These days, we ask this question in almost every survey we conduct.
Previously, I have reported the results from only one survey series at a time, which keeps things a bit more manageable. But for today’s update, I decided to put all the results for Canada together.1 Here’s what that looks like.
To make sense of these results, it helps to break things down into several different periods.
From 2006 to 2018, satisfaction outweighed dissatisfaction – the proportions were roughly 60 / 40.
Satisfaction nosedived (dropping 11 points) between 2018 and 2019. This was pre-COVID. We sometimes forget that the bloom had fallen off of the Justin Trudeau rose as early as 2019. His government’s re-election in 2019 and 2021 is explained not by a resurgence in popularity, but by two successive calamities – the first being the leader of the opposition, and the second being the pandemic.
Satisfaction jumped up significantly in mid-2020 and again noticeably in mid-2021. No one wants to me to re-tell the pandemic story month-by-month, but in short, there were moments of optimism in the summer of 2020 (before anyone had heard of “variants” like Delta or Omicron) and in the summer of 2021 (vaccines!). But with exceptions like these aside, throughout much of the pandemic the proportions of Canadians either satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things were going in the country were roughly equal.
Satisfaction then eroded steadily as we came out of the pandemic, dropping 15 points between late 2022 and early 2025. If you take the longer view, the level of satisfaction fell from a high of 61 percent when this series starts in 2006, to half that level (31%) in early 2025.
The change in prime minister in the spring of 2025 was enough to reverse that trend: satisfaction rebounded immediately by 13 points. Despite this, over the past year, dissatisfaction has continued to outweigh satisfaction. There are also signs that the level of satisfaction has been slipping again this spring.
This most recent trend may surprise you, given the federal government’s (and particularly, the prime minister’s) apparent popularity. But the precise wording of the question matters a lot. This question does not refer to how the country is being governed. It refers to what’s going on around us. Canadians are dealing with the fallout of the U.S. government’s trade policies and military adventurism (including the persistence spike in gas prices), as well as challenges to national unity at home. It is possible to express dissatisfaction with these events (in terms of “the way things are going”), and satisfaction with the party or leader that has been chosen to respond to them, at the same time.
These results therefore serve as a timely check on Liberal Party hubris. Their leader’s current popularity should not be read as an indication that the public believes that any of the crises he was elected to deal with have so far been resolved.
Meanwhile, the fact that this question originated with Gallup, and that they generously publish their detailed results, means that we can compare levels of satisfaction in Canada and the U.S.2 The exact wording of their question is:
“In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?”
A couple of observations. First, remarkably, dissatisfaction has outweighed satisfaction in the United States in every survey conducted over the past two decades.3 Second, the level of satisfaction with “the way things are going” has been higher in Canada than in the U.S. at every point in time over this period, with one exception: early April 2025, right after the last 2024 U.S. election that returned Trump to power, and right before the spring 2025 Canadian election that returned the Liberals to power with Mark Carney at the helm. Since then, Canada has pulled ahead again, as satisfaction has fallen significantly in the U.S. (by 17 points).
We’ll keep asking the question; check back here from time to time to see what happens next (if you’re new here, please click the subscribe button below). I do wonder when (if?) satisfaction will overtake dissatisfaction again, in Canada at least.
The Canadian data in this post are from various the Environics Institute surveys; details of the methodology of all our surveys are available on the reports section of our website. Thanks to our survey project partners for making these studies possible. The U.S. data are from Gallup.
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Cover photo credit: Gustavo Fring
This chart combines results from surveys conducted both on telephone and online. As far as I can tell, in this case, the choice of survey method has no impact on results.
Gallup conducts their surveys monthly. I selected results from months that matched, as closely as possible, those in which we asked the question in Canada.
This includes those surveys not included in the chart. The last time satisfaction outweighed dissatisfaction in the U.S. was in early 2004.
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