A slight majority of the public now opposes Canadian collaboration with the United States in anti-missile defence, nominally up from four years ago. But the federal government can take limited comfort from these findings because

• The issue divides Quebec from the rest of the country as military issues have for more than a century,
  
• an overwhelming majority of the public condemns Ottawa for providing too little discussion of the topic,
  
• most Canadians support the military and economic principles underlying collaboration in missile defence even while opposing such collaboration, and
  
• the co-existence of opposition to missile defence with support for its principles is inherently unstable, resting on the continuing greater confidence of the public in the Martin Liberals than the Harper Conservatives.
  

“It looks like catch-22,” says COMPAS President Conrad Winn. “Given the underlying beliefs of English-Canadians shown in the survey, without much effort the Conservatives could almost certainly mobilize majority support for missile defence and make the party system a lot more competitive if they put their mind to it, but at the risk of inflaming the sovereignty movement in Quebec.”

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