Compas Poll / Survey

Canada’s business leaders and CEOs want a common North American perimeter with Canada’s adopting U.S. rules for immigrants and imports. They also give Prime Minister Chretien very poor—clearly failing—grades for combating terrorism (43%). Those are the hawkish findings from the weekly COMPAS web-survey among business leaders conducted under the sponsorship of CIBC and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

Alongside these hawkish thoughts are some strongly sanguine and dovish views. The proportions of business leaders predicting serious terrorist assaults on the United States or on Canada have fallen substantially since last November. Declining concern may explain why few major Canadian corporations have apparently put into place anti-terrorist plans for protecting their executives against terrorist assaults or their operations against disruption. In a similar spirit, a clear majority feel that U.S. border issues have been largely resolved since 9/11 even if a minority does not take this view. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister earns moderately satisfactory grades for keeping open the Canada-U.S. border (60%).

During a period when Anglo-American military forces are launching ever more serious raids on Iraqi military installations, Canadian business leaders are concerned about the potential for serious disruption of the world oil market in the event of a land invasion. By an almost 3:1 margin, business leaders are inclined to believe that “such a war will harm the global economy because it will cause serious turmoil in oil markets and provoke a terrorist backlash” rather than that “such a war will rally the global economy because it will free up Iraqi oil for world markets and thoroughly demoralize Islamist terrorists and the regimes that assist them.”