Ask a Canadian today whether they are “left” or “right,” and you will often get a pause, not because they lack opinions, but because the question no longer fits. Someone can want a stronger public health system and lower taxes, support a carbon price and worry about immigration levels, favour gun control, and oppose what they see as government overreach. On the old map, that person is a contradiction. In reality, they are increasingly the norm.
The familiar left–right spectrum was a useful shorthand for much of the twentieth century. But it is steadily losing its power to describe what Canadians actually believe — and clinging to it distorts both our politics and our conversations with one another.
What the old map gets wrong
The left–right line assumes that political views come in coordinated bundles: that if you know someone’s position on taxes, you can predict their views on social issues, foreign policy, and the role of government. For an increasing number of people, that assumption simply fails.
Research on Canadian public opinion increasingly finds that voters do not sort neatly into ideological camps. Abacus Data’s segmentation of the Canadian electorate identifies a large bloc of voters whose economic and cultural views are mixed rather than aligned—people who borrow from what we would traditionally call both the left and the right, depending on the issue. They are not confused. They are responding to specific problems with specific preferences, rather than buying a pre-packaged worldview.
The appetite for pragmatism
If the ideological map were accurate, we would expect most people to want their “side” to win and the other to lose. But that is not what surveys consistently show.
Polling by Spark Insights, led by veteran pollster Bruce Anderson, has found that Canadians prefer pragmatic problem-solving over ideological purity by a wide margin, on the order of 4-to-1. That preference holds across age groups: it is strongest among older Canadians, with nearly nine in ten of those over sixty favouring pragmatism, but a clear majority of those under thirty also share it. Strikingly, the preference also holds among people who identify as conservative and among Albertans—groups often assumed to be the most ideological. The desire to fix problems rather than win arguments is not a partisan trait. It is a national one.
Why the binary persists anyway
If most people are pragmatic and mixed in their views, why does the left–right frame survive? Partly because it is convenient. It gives journalists a quick story, parties a way to mobilize their base, and social media an engine for outrage. A world sorted into two teams is easier to narrate than a country of people who agree on some things and disagree on others.
But convenience has a cost. When every issue is forced onto a single axis, genuine agreement gets hidden. Two people may both want a more secure retirement system, say, but if they wear different team colours they can be persuaded that they’re enemies. The binary does not just fail to describe us, it actively pits us against each other in ways that run counter to our shared interests.
What a good map looks like
The alternative is not to pretend that disagreement doesn’t exist. It’s about taking people’s real views seriously, issue by issue, rather than assuming them from a label. This means asking someone how they feel about a particular policy and why, rather than working backwards from how they voted. It means that a person can be progressive on one question and conservative on another without being a hypocrite.
For a publication, it means not taking the easy frame. The lazy kind of political writing is all about camps and score-keeping. The harder, more truthful version is to treat readers as the complicated, thoughtful people they actually are.
Conclusion
The left–right spectrum is not useless, but it is no longer enough. Most Canadians have quietly moved past it, holding combinations of views that the old map cannot plot and wanting, above all, for their problems to be solved. The task now is to build a politics and a journalism that can see them clearly. That begins with abandoning a binary that was never as true as it was convenient.