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POLL: Have you had enough of fireworks?

Love them or hate them, fireworks are hard to ignore. This past Victoria Day, some neighbourhoods sounded like an hours-long re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg
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Fireworks light up St. Marys’ Grand Trunk Trestle during the 2021 New Year's Eve fireworks show.

Love them or hate them, fireworks are hard to ignore. 

This past Victoria Day, some neighbourhoods sounded like an hours-long re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. What you think of that depends on your perspective: if you enjoy it with happy, excited kids, that's great; if you spend miserable hours trying to calm pets who are having a coping failure, not so much. 

This past week, an online poll that ran across all the Village Media sites asked: If you had the power to do it, would you reduce or eliminate the use of fireworks?

The overall result was almost exactly 50:50, which makes for the most boring graph ever, so I'm not going to bother you with it. 

There was a modest gender difference:

Age, interestingly, was a sharp divider. It would be interesting to know what's behind this - decades ago, access to fireworks was more strictly controlled, and they were rarer, so that may be part of it.

Party differences don't show up strongly - other than for the PCs.

There does seem to be a connection between attitudes to fireworks and some other things that involve a balance between risk and pleasure:

There also seems to be a relationship to attitudes to sports and sports culture, very generally:


Patrick Cain

About the Author: Patrick Cain

Patrick is an online writer and editor in Toronto, focused mostly on data, FOI, maps and visualizations. He has won some awards, been a beat reporter covering digital privacy and cannabis, and started an FOI case that ended in the Supreme Court
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