The loyalty deficit: Most Canadians workers feel they give more than they get and the deal is broken
Resource Details
Author(s): Scott Schieman, Paul Glavin, Alexander Wilson
Date: November 7, 2025
“These days, employers expect loyalty from workers but do not show loyalty to workers in return.”
If that resonates, then you’re not alone.
With increasing fears about artificial intelligence-related displacement of workers, we think it’s time to initiate a conversation about loyalty. So, from September 8 to 18, we partnered with Angus Reid Global to field a nationally representative survey of 2,519 working Canadians – our seventh annual survey in our ongoing Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Study (C-QWELS).
We’ve been tracking worker attitudes for years, but few findings have been as uniformly negative: 67 per cent of respondents personally believe that employers expect loyalty from workers but don’t show it in return. And when we asked those same respondents to speculate about what most Canadian workers believe, a whopping 86 percent said that most others would report a loyalty imbalance.
If that resonates, then you’re not alone.
With increasing fears about artificial intelligence-related displacement of workers, we think it’s time to initiate a conversation about loyalty. So, from September 8 to 18, we partnered with Angus Reid Global to field a nationally representative survey of 2,519 working Canadians – our seventh annual survey in our ongoing Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Study (C-QWELS).
We’ve been tracking worker attitudes for years, but few findings have been as uniformly negative: 67 per cent of respondents personally believe that employers expect loyalty from workers but don’t show it in return. And when we asked those same respondents to speculate about what most Canadian workers believe, a whopping 86 percent said that most others would report a loyalty imbalance.