Juno News - January 30, 2025


Almost half of young Canadian men would accept U.S. citizenship


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

182.30911

Word count

889

Sentence count

50

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A poll commissioned by True North found that nearly half of young Canadian men would take American citizenship from Donald Trump if offered, and only 15% of men 55 and older said they would. What does this say about Canadian immigration to the United States?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I want to talk about a exclusive that True North has published today, an exclusive poll
00:00:04.820 that we commissioned that found that nearly half of young Canadian men would take American
00:00:11.680 citizenship from Donald Trump if offered. So the poll was conducted by one persuasion.
00:00:18.980 45% of young men aged 18 to 34 would take American citizenship and 46% would reject it. So just
00:00:28.140 right about half. Next, we saw that the willingness shortly decreased as men got older. So only 15%
00:00:37.340 of men 55 and older said that they would. Women were generally less interested in taking US 0.97
00:00:43.260 citizenship. Only 25% of young women aged 18 to 34 said yes, dropped to 18 for women 35 to 55,
00:00:51.040 and then only 7% 55 and older. It kind of makes sense. As you get more established,
00:00:54.820 you're less likely to take a risk and move to another country. One thing that I thought was
00:00:59.180 really interesting was that the education level mattered. It was a strong factor influencing
00:01:03.680 whether they would be willing to take this offer. So only 13% of respondents with a high school
00:01:09.520 education or less said that they would take US citizenship, but it rose steadily with education
00:01:14.280 levels. So 19% of community college or trade educated said that they would take the offer,
00:01:19.500 25% with a bachelor's degree, and up to 35% for those with a postgraduate degree. So kind of
00:01:28.180 interesting that the more educated that you get, the more likely you would be. I think that makes
00:01:32.740 sense because personally, like I know a lot of people who are doctors or who have, you know,
00:01:37.180 postgraduate degrees in medicine, and a lot of them go to the US just so that they can make some
00:01:42.040 money, that there's more opportunities down there. Same thing for law, same thing probably for
00:01:46.340 universities. There's so many more universities down there. So if you have a PhD, you might be
00:01:50.480 more likely to be able to get a job down there. Tom, I want to get your thoughts on this. You
00:01:54.800 worked in a university. What do you think about the fact that the more education you have, the more
00:01:59.420 likely you would be to want to join and become an American? Well, I think it makes sense. You know,
00:02:05.340 it's a country is nine times as big, at least the United States, and there are more opportunities
00:02:10.560 down there. And the many of these jobs are more, more highly paid in the United States.
00:02:18.620 And high income people are more highly taxed in Canada. So there are a lot of economic reasons
00:02:27.200 why somebody might consider, I would just add one footnote as somebody who actually has American
00:02:32.900 citizenship, because I was born and grew up there. If these people realize that if they
00:02:39.360 obtained American citizenship, or even if they went to the United States and, and work there on a green
00:02:44.940 card, they would have to file with the Internal Revenue Service for the rest of their life, even if
00:02:50.840 they came back to Canada later. So there are some downsides that perhaps not everybody realizes.
00:02:58.800 Yeah, that's right. Yeah, my stepmother, who's lived in Canada for 40 years, but she grew up in
00:03:06.760 Boston, she's American. It drives her crazy having to file her taxes every year to the point where 0.99
00:03:11.700 she's even considered renouncing, but then that's so much paperwork and money that she said, forget it. 0.93
00:03:17.880 I was talking to a journalist friend, because one of the things that was interesting was that the
00:03:21.340 number on the prairies isn't very high. According to this study, it was 18% of people on the prairies
00:03:27.520 that said they would take American citizenship, whereas I think BC was the highest with 25%.
00:03:31.560 I was talking to a journalist friend from Ontario, and he was really surprised by that. He was like,
00:03:35.660 you know, I would have imagined that Albertans would be the number one and not British Columbians.
00:03:39.460 But it makes sense to me. I've been talking to a lot of Albertans who, you know, they mistrust Ottawa
00:03:43.620 and the federal government in Canada. But they would mistrust a bigger government in Washington,
00:03:49.480 DC with a lot more power, even more. What's your take on that?
00:03:54.060 Well, I think, again, I think it's mainly economic that Alberta at the present time
00:03:58.280 has more opportunities than any other province. And that's demonstrated by the number of people
00:04:05.760 who are moving here right now. So I think young men are probably less dissatisfied
00:04:11.800 with their situation than they might be in some other provinces. So I can understand that. Now,
00:04:18.800 that could change with the change in the international oil market. And, you know,
00:04:24.080 a lot of things could happen to take away Alberta's prosperity. But right now,
00:04:28.240 it's pretty good. And people are moving in rather than trying to leave.
00:04:33.120 Well, yeah, that's great. I mean, I grew up in British Columbia in the 90s and the 2000s. And
00:04:37.680 I would say that like a large proportion of my graduating class in high school moved to Alberta
00:04:42.540 for the opportunities that the oil field had in the kind of early 2000s. A lot of them moved up to
00:04:47.460 Fort McMurray or Edmonton just to have jobs that didn't exist in British Columbia.