I often forget how different we are from Americans in some important ways. I was reminded of this recently while perusing a survey by the Pew Research Center. The Pew is one of America’s premier pollsters. (One can get their weekly newsletter with informative reports covering the U.S. and the international community for free.)

In a 25-country survey, Pew asked people a series of questions to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country. The response to one of the questions in particular offered me a few surprises.

The question was whether or not people see their fellow citizens as morally good. My first surprise was that in two countries over 90 percent of people said they did, and my second surprise was that one of those countries was Canada. We Canadians do indeed think highly of our fellow citizens.

The next surprise was that in only one country did fewer than half answer that they saw their fellow citizens as morally good, and that country was—you guessed it—the United States. Americans, it seems, don’t think much of their neighbours’ morals.

We not only differ with the Americans but are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Pew Research has not asked this question before, but say that “previous research has shown that rising numbers of both Republicans and Democrats say people in the other party are immoral.”

Other than parry antipathy, Pew suggests Americans are more moralistic than people in other countries in that they are more inclined to judge various behaviours as immoral or sinful. This may be because they are more Christian, or at least more fundamentally Christian. When, for example, Christians in the two countries were asked if abortion was morally unacceptable, twice as many Americans as Canadians said it was.

Yet another reason why Americans have a low opinion of their neighbours’ morals may be due to the example set by their president, a man apparently bereft of morals, ethics of even simple decency. With a creature such as Trump leading society, one’s expectations can expect to be low. Given that 80 percent of white evangelical Christians vote for him leads one to question their moral values.

Another question on which we differed from our southern brothers and sisters was homosexuality with over twice as many Americans not approving. And we disagreed on divorce, with more Americans finding it morally wrong. The numbers disapproving were, however, low in both countries. Significantly more Americans found married people having affairs objectionable, nonetheless even three-quarters of Canadians found it morally unacceptable

We agreed closely on the sinfulness of a number of pastimes, including gambling, smoking pot, and watching porn, with the numbers disapproving being very low for the first two and about fifty/fifty on porn.

All this would seem to confirm American polarization while suggesting their polarization hasn’t seriously infected Canadians. And over 90 percent of us believe our neighbours are morally good? I am truly surprised … and pleasantly impressed.