Black Lives Matter has more support among Canadians than Americans: poll

America’s streets are again pulsing with anger and frustration, this time over the deadly police shooting of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor — and the racial reckoning appears more popular in Canada than in the United States.

Protesters returned en masse to city centres across the U.S. in the latest display of racial outrage in 2020 after a grand jury in Kentucky opted Wednesday to not indict the officers who fired the fatal shots.

Taylor was killed in her own Louisville apartment in March when a botched drug raid aimed primarily at an ex-boyfriend erupted in a hail of bullets, precipitated when Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker opened fire on what he said he thought was an intruder.

The indictments delivered Wednesday involved only a single officer: Brett Hankison, who faces three counts of wanton endangerment for blindly firing his weapon into the apartments of Taylor’s neighbours.

Neither Hankison nor fellow officers Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly, all three of whom were responsible for discharging more than 20 shots, are facing any charges related directly to the death of Taylor, who was hit multiple times.

2:38 Breonna Taylor timeline: Officer charged in case, but not with her death

The 2020 tumult over police treatment of Black Americans has been raging since May, when the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, his neck under the knee of an arresting officer, touched off a worldwide uproar.

That upheaval appears to have more support among Canadians than it does in the U.S., a new online poll from Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies suggests.

The poll, conducted last weekend, found 67 per cent of 1,500 Canadian respondents reported a positive view of the Black Lives Matter movement, compared with just 55 per cent of 1,000 U.S. respondents who felt the same way.

Only 33 per cent of Canadians polled reported feeling negatively about the movement, compared to 45 per cent of Americans.

Where Americans and Canadians do appear to agree is on the question of whether the protests are likely to lead to lasting change.

In Canada, 45 per cent of respondents said no, compared to 33 per cent who said yes and 21 per cent who said they didn’t know. U.S. respondents felt similarly, 46 per cent to 33 per cent, with 20 per cent undecided.

Online polls do not carry a valid margin of error and are not considered representative of the population at large because they are not based on a random sample.