Academic Freedom, Speech and Collective Responsibility in Canada

September 18, 2026

This survey examines Canadians’ views on the limits of academic freedom and acceptable expression, with particular attention to political advocacy in the classroom, religious and ethnic prejudice, historical denial and collective responsibility. The findings come from a Leger survey of 1,538 Canadians conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies from September 4 to 6, 2026. Six in ten Canadians believe academic freedom should not protect professors who use class time to advocate political views unrelated to the subject being taught. Younger adults are less certain about where to draw this boundary. Respondents who support such protection are also considerably more likely to regard the justification of terrorism, the denial of documented atrocities and the minimization of their victims as acceptable. Most Canadians reject statements that portray religious or ethnic communities as inherently untrustworthy, attribute harmful beliefs to an entire religion or hold members of a religious group collectively responsible for the actions of a foreign government. Nevertheless, younger respondents are consistently more likely to consider such statements acceptable, including one-third of those under 25 who say it is acceptable to question whether a well-documented historical atrocity occurred. The findings also examine whether Muslims should be expected to denounce terrorism committed in the name of Islam, Jewish Canadians to condemn actions of the Israeli government and Russian Canadians to denounce actions of the Russian government. These expectations are not symmetrical: criticism of an elected government’s policies or military actions is not comparable to condemning terrorism. The comparison nevertheless reveals a common tendency to require members of religious or national-origin communities to answer publicly for conduct over which they have no individual control or responsibility.