Canadians view Islam most negatively, but opinion of Judaism fell furthest: poll

Islam remains the most negatively viewed faith in Canada, but opinion of Judaism fell furthest over 15 months, according to a new national survey.

Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies, which commissioned the Leger survey, said in an email that “the biggest change is in views toward Judaism.”

Twenty-six per cent of Canadians said their opinion of Islam was positive and 50 per cent said it was negative, the only faith tested where more people were negative than positive. In March 2025, when Leger last asked the same questions, the split was 30 per cent positive and 49 per cent negative for Islam.

Judaism shifted on every measure. Forty per cent said their opinion was positive (down from 49) and 32 per cent said it was negative (up from 25).

The strength of those opinions changed as well. Nine per cent called their opinion of Judaism very positive, down from 16, while 12 per cent called it very negative, up from eight. For Islam, 28 per cent called their opinion very negative, up from 24 in March 2025.

Statistics Canada recorded 788 hate crimes targeting Jewish people in 2025, down 16 per cent from 943 a year earlier, but still 71 per cent of all religion-motivated incidents. Religion-motivated hate crime fell 18 per cent overall, to 1,115 incidents, and Muslims were targeted in 204 of them, down 11 per cent.

Incidents targeting Jewish people peaked at 959 in 2023, and last year’s 788 remained 60 per cent above the 492 incidents recorded in 2021.

The crime data runs to the end of 2025, while the most recent polling was completed in June of this year. The two measures capture different phenomena, Jedwab wrote. Hate crime counts show how “an intensely hostile minority can generate a disproportionate number of incidents against a particular community even when attitudes toward that community are less negative.”

Half of Canadians express a negative opinion of Islam, Jedwab wrote, “but more than half of that group place themselves in the most negative category.” That suggests attitudes are “not merely characterized by uncertainty or discomfort but are fairly entrenched for more than one in four,” he wrote.

The survey asked separately about Jews and Arabs as groups. Sixty per cent were positive on Jews, 20 points higher than for Judaism, and 44 per cent said the same of Arabs against 26 per cent for Islam. The categories are not equivalent, since most Muslims are not Arab and not every Arab is Muslim. Negative views of Arabs rose to 33 per cent from 26 in March 2025, while negative views of Jews rose two percentage points to 16 per cent.

Christianity held its lead. Fifty-seven per cent were positive, down from 58, though the share calling it very positive fell six points to 20 per cent.

Atheism was added to the survey for the first time in June. Fifty per cent were positive about atheism and 29 per cent had no opinion, the largest share of no-opinions in the survey.

Christianity “is more familiar and elicits a response from a larger share of Canadians,” Jedwab wrote. It “consequently has the higher positive rating across the complete sample, but not among respondents who actually express a view.”

The youngest Canadians broke from the rest. Among those aged 18 to 24, 41 per cent were positive on Islam, against 22 to 26 per cent in every other age group. That figure rests on 130 respondents.

The cohort “appears to combine greater secularism with greater openness toward religious diversity,” Jedwab wrote, though he cautioned against drawing conclusions “without more surveys given the sizeable difference.”

Quebec and francophone Canada sat apart. Among francophone respondents, 16 per cent were positive on Islam and 25 per cent on Judaism, the lowest on both of any language group, and they were the only group to rate atheism above Christianity. In Quebec, Judaism sat at 27 per cent positive, 13 percentage points below the national figure.

Antisemitism is producing “an exceptionally high and disproportionate share of religion-motivated criminal incidents,” Jedwab wrote, but that “shouldn’t diminish the importance of addressing hostility towards all faith communities.”

Leger conducted the online survey for the Association for Canadian Studies, reaching 1,528 people from June 19 to 21 through a non-probability online panel, so the poll carries no margin of error. Leger says a random sample that size would be accurate to within 2.5 percentage points, 19 times in 20. The earlier survey reached 1,539 people on March 1 and 2, 2025. Sikhism, Hinduism and Buddhism were not among the categories tested.