November 7, 2024 – Today, Pollara is releasing selected findings from the first wave of the General Population Tracker module of Degrees of Protest – our syndicated study solution that provides research-based guidance to post-secondary institutions and other subscribing organizations in order to help them understand and respond to campus protests in Canada. The findings discussed below focus on Canadian general views on these protests, but subscribers received a full report that also included the public’s stance on the Israel-Hamas War and public preferences for how post-secondary institutions should respond to a wide range of specific protester demands.
Although there is a moderate drop in familiarity, most (80%) Canadians remain aware of the protests that have occurred on Canadian college and university campuses over the past year concerning the Israel-Hamas conflict and related issues. Amongst Canadians aware of these campus protests:
- Although six-in-ten (60%) are conceptually supportive of such protests, a similarly-sized majority (56%) oppose protests that are on campuses.
- About seven-in-ten support colleges/universities ejecting protesters and refusing to negotiate with them
- There is high support (78-84%) for placing a range of restrictions on protesters, as have been imposed by many educational institutions since the start of the current school year.
- About half support allowing protests if there are no incidents of racism, property damage, class/event disruption, and threats to student safety. However, 60-67% believe such incidents have occurred. Moreover, 32% believe that a majority of those protesting Israel’s military actions have expressed antisemitic sentiment, and 17% believe pro-Israel protesters have expressed anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslim sentiment.
In order to capture these insights, Pollara surveyed a randomly-selected, reliable sample of N=1,002 adult (18+) Canadians from September 30 to October 4, 2024. Online research panel surveys cannot be officially assigned a margin of error, but – for comparison purposes – a probability sample of this size carries a margin of error of + 3.1%, 19 times out of 20. The dataset has been weighted according to the gender, age, and geographic distribution of Canada’s adult population per the most recent Census. Pollara Strategic Insights is a member of the Canadian Research Insights Council (CRIC), and this research was conducted in compliance with CRIC standards.
These are just some of the findings from the first wave of the General Population Tracker module of Degrees of Protest – Pollara’s modular syndicated study that allows subscribers to choose the research option(s) that best meet their needs, whether that be regular tracking surveys of the general population and relevant parents, or custom surveys of key stakeholders (i.e. current students, prospective students/applicants, administration/staff, faculty, donors, alumni, or members of membership organizations), or all of the above.
For more details, please see our excerpt from the Wave 1 Report of the Degrees of Protest General Population Tracker. The report references an earlier wave of research conducted in June 2024.
