What Canadians think when Canadians think together.
In spring 2026, a representative sample of Canadians took part in a national deliberation on Canada’s place in the world — trade, security, immigration, and global cooperation — convened by Global Canada with the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab.
Foreign Policy by Canadians
August 2026
Figures are from the combined Stanford–Global Canada report, weighted to the Canadian population.
What is a Deliberative Poll?
A Deliberative Poll® starts with a representative sample of the public, surveys them, then invites them to spend time learning about an issue, weighing trade-offs, and discussing it in moderated small groups with access to balanced briefing materials and experts. Everyone is surveyed again at the end. Because the same people answer the same questions before and after, the change measures what the public thinks once it has had the time, information, and space to think together.
The method was developed by Professor James Fishkin and is run here by the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, which has conducted Deliberative Polls in dozens of countries.
The 2026 Report
Read the full report right on this page — no download required — or save a copy. The report is a joint publication of Global Canada and the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab.
What changed after Canadians deliberated
Participants answered the same questions before and after a weekend of moderated small-group discussion. Every shift below is statistically significant (0–10 support scales; means among deliberators, weighted).
Democracy works better than they thought
The study’s headline result: the share rating Canadian democracy 6 or higher rose from 64% to 78% — one of the largest shifts in the deliberation.
Support for meeting NATO commitments
Support for spending 3.5% of GDP on the military to meet Canada’s NATO commitments rose after participants weighed the trade-offs.
More caution on trade diversification
Enthusiasm for reducing US trade in favour of China and India moderated once details were discussed — even as warmth toward closer US economic ties grew.
Deliberators didn’t just change their minds — they learned
Knowledge questions were scored before and after. The share who correctly knew Canada has no foreign human-intelligence service climbed from 49% to 73%, and knowledge of Canada’s development-assistance budget rose from 23% to 36%. Correct answers rose on nearly every factual question — the mark of an informed opinion shift, not a random one.
How we know deliberation caused the shifts
Alongside the 408 deliberators, a control group of 425 Canadians drawn from the same national baseline answered the same questions again without deliberating. At the outset the two groups were statistically indistinguishable — on the headline democracy question they scored 6.2 and 6.0, a gap well within chance. After the weekend, the deliberators’ views moved while the control group’s held steady — so the changes are attributable to the deliberation itself, not to world events in between.
In their own words
Verbatim, anonymized quotes from the small-group discussions across both deliberation weekends. These are a taste — all 8,000+ statements, clustered by discussion topic, are browsable in the Participant Voices explorer.
“They have been our largest partner, particularly since the early 90s. I mean, we are cousins. How are we going to break our family? That's, to me, it's very painful, very painful to see all these people that are affected, all these industries that are affected”
“If we don't do it ourselves, we have to rely on what others say—and what they say serves their own interests, not ours.”
“For the last 50 years, we've really kind of under-invested in defense because of sort of the peace dividend, we didn't need to. We clearly need to now, the world has changed, so spending 3.5 overall on defense seems like a good investment.”
“there's also evidence that supporting women and girls in low-income countries has positive effects on not just their futures but their families and communities and you can tie that back to security and economics and other benefits for Canada but morally as well in terms of where Canada stands is something that I would support.”
Explore all participant voices
Dig into the numbers yourself
An interactive explorer for the survey results, in two parts: the national baseline — where 7,491 Canadians stood before anyone deliberated — and the shift, how considered opinion moved after the deliberation, with control-group and subgroup comparisons. Built for journalists, policymakers, and the curious.
Researchers: access to the underlying data
The full dataset is held by the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab and is not publicly downloadable. Researchers with aligned questions may request access — contact us and we will connect you with the Stanford team. Data use is governed by Stanford’s research ethics framework.
The 2021 Initiative
Foreign Policy by Canadians 2026 builds on Canada’s first national deliberative poll, held in 2021. Global Canada is now the home for both initiatives’ materials. See the full 2021 archive →
What’s next
Op-eds
Commentary from initiative leaders in national publications, collected here as they run.
Panel discussions
Public panels on the findings with policymakers and participants. Details and photos to follow.
Data access program
A framework for researcher access to the deliberation data, developed with Stanford.