In a time of widespread disagreement and ever-increasing polarization, there remains a bitter solidarity among Canadians in the belief that the government doesn’t know what it’s doing.

In the wake of regional discontent from the western provinces and blockades jamming up the country’s rail network, a towering majority of Canadians agree with the statement, “Right now, Canada is broken.”

Sixty-nine per cent of Canadians agree with the statement, rising to 83% in Alberta, found a DART & Maru/Blue poll conducted for the National Post.

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“This is one of the few polls that I just looked at — and I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I did polling around the Oka Crisis — I was astonished when I saw some of these numbers, but I’m not surprised,” said long-time pollster John Wright, a partner with DART.

The poll spells bad news for Justin Trudeau with a majority of people believing that the country is not headed in the right direction and that the prime minister is not governing well. The Liberals also get most of the blame for the rail blockades.

And on Trudeau’s signature promise to help Indigenous people, two-thirds of Canadians don’t believe he has delivered on that pledge.

“A lot of the blame has been centred on the prime minister and the Liberal government,” said Daniel Béland, the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

Béland said the trouble started for Trudeau early on, because the blockades began while he was out of the country, campaigning for a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

“There was some form of void. The government left the impression — at least many people came to the conclusion — that there was no one really in charge of the situation,” said Béland.

On the topic of the rail blockades, only 27 per cent of Canadians think Trudeau has handled the situation well, while the premiers get a 45 per cent approval rating on the issue.

And while Canadians are comprehensively scathing about Trudeau’s government they are conflicted about the demonstrators and the concerns of Indigenous people in Canada.

The poll suggests this may be partly because Canadians think governments constantly lie to Indigenous people. Fifty-seven per cent of Canadians agree that “governments lie to Indigenous people about making things better for them.”

A majority of Canadians, 62%, also believe Trudeau has not delivered on his promises to Indigenous people.

Roughly half the country disagree with the methods used to protest, but they would “stand with Indigenous people in solidarity” to help solve these issues. Half of Canadians also think “we’ve done enough for Indigenous people in Canada.”

Still, two-thirds of Canadians say they would support a one-time payment issued immediately to Indigenous people for things like “food, clean water and housing,” to cover the “necessities of life,” even if it cost $1 billion.

With the blockades coinciding with economic unrest and alienation in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the poll respondents and people interviewed by the Post worry that the bleak mood in the country isn’t just a temporary problem.

“Canada is not broken. Canada’s institutions are broken,” said Donald Savoie, the Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at the University of Moncton, who has written extensively about democracy in Canada.

Savoie said from the beginning of confederation, the governance structures were designed to balance Quebec and Ontario, without much regard for western Canada.

“In 1867, the concern was to protect Canada against democracy, not to protect regional interests,” said Savoie. “Until we have an institution that can speak on behalf of the regions, we are going to have a problem.”

That worry was recently echoed in a manifesto released by a handful of Alberta MPs last week. Among other concerns, the “Buffalo Declaration” noted that Alberta has a little more than half the senators of either New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, despite a much larger population.

Savoie said that most countries have some kind of regional counterweight, like the United States Senate which allocates two Senators for every state, but Canada has never had any institution that effectively performs that role.

Asked to rank how various people have handled the Wet’suwet’en protests, 67 per cent of people think the rail companies have handled it well. The provincial police get a 57 per cent approval rating and the RCMP get 55 per cent approval.

Politicians, though, get much worse reviews. Provincial premiers get a 45 per cent approval rating, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer gets 36 per cent approval, and only 27 per cent of Canadians think Trudeau has handled the situation well.

More than 80 per cent of Canadians believe their politicians care more about their own partisan interests than working on behalf of all Canadians. The highest level of agreement on this came from Alberta, at 90 per cent, and Atlantic Canada, at 86 per cent.

Wright said the issue of increasing partisanship and polarization is one that worries him.

“People are truly frustrated with the inability of their leadership to come together and recognize that human beings are being affected by their decisions and that they’re not simply voters,” said Wright.

The DART & Maru/Blue poll was conducted among 1,511 randomly selected Canadian adult members of Maru/Blue’s online panel on Feb. 24 and is considered accurate within plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

• Email: sxthomson@postmedia.com | Twitter: stuartxthomson

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