Canadians preparing to head to the polls in the new year are likely to vote with their wallets.
Cost of living issues continue to dominate Canadians’ priority list, according to the results of a new Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News.
Results of the survey, released Friday, found that one in four respondents ranked inflation and the cost of living as their top priority in Canada today, up five percentage points from a year ago.
While healthcare came in second (17 percent, up three points from last year), other pocketbook issues dominated the rest of the list, according to Ipsos.
Housing availability and affordability (14 percent) rounded out the top three, followed by immigration (seven percent) and the economy, unemployment and employment (also seven percent). Taxes, poverty, social inequality and public debt followed at five percent.
The survey, conducted Dec. 6-10, polled more than 1,000 Canadians aged 18 and older in an online forum.
While inflation appears to have largely performed well in 2024 and the Bank of Canada has rapidly reduced its benchmark interest rate since mid-year, that relief came after years of rapid increases in the cost of living.
“The scars of inflation are still there,” Sean Simpson, senior vice president at Ipsos Global Affairs, tells Global News.
“If people couldn’t pay for their purchases last year, what leads us to believe that they will be able to do better this year? The answer is that they can’t. And that is still the number one problem in Canada.”
Young Canadians are especially feeling the pressure heading into 2025, Simpson notes. Younger generations are the most likely to lack a pension, have difficulty finding a job or not be able to enter the housing market, he notes.
Affordability anxiety is particularly acute in Canada compared to peer countries, Simpson says, and Canadians are in the top five globally for affordability concerns for the second year in a row.
It’s particularly telling that affordability pushes health care into second place, he adds. In more typical years, health care issues tend to rise to the top simply because there is a sense that things can always be better when it comes to emergency room wait times or quality of care.
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“When it drops to number two, it means something else is happening. And clearly that’s another thing: the cost of living,” Simpson says.
Simpson also calls it “remarkable” that immigration has moved to fourth place among Canadians, reflecting concerns about how rapid population growth has exacerbated housing affordability issues in recent years.
Poilievre is considered the top leader to address the cost of living
The latest polls come at the end of a turbulent 2024 for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party. Chrystia Freeland’s departure as finance minister left the Liberals in a bind in the final days of the year, with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh signaling he would vote no confidence in Trudeau’s government, which could topple the minority government.
With a federal election scheduled for next year and questions about whether it could come as soon as this spring, the Ipsos poll also sheds light on who Canadians trust most to handle their cost-of-living concerns.
When asked which political leader would be best equipped to handle inflation and the cost of living, conservative leader Pierre Poilievre stood at the top of the pack. The official opposition leader was also considered best to handle housing, the economy, taxes and immigration policy.
The NDP’s Singh was seen as the ideal steward for health care, as well as concerns about poverty and social inequality, while Green Party leader Elizabeth May led voters’ picks to address change. climatic.
Trudeau and Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet emerged as the top choices to address none of voters’ priority concerns.
“Liberals are obviously less popular, but it’s more than that. Economic sentiment is lower, financial health is lower. The anxiety about the future is greater,” Simpson says.
While the Conservatives could be seen as the number one choice for many Canadians in 2025, Simpson says there is room for the NDP to take second place if the Liberals continue to fall from grace. He notes, however, that federal elections rarely hinge on issues like health care, where the NDP appears to have the most political authority.
Simpson says this poll suggests Canadians feel Trudeau has largely focused on the wrong issues in recent years. Concerns around climate change, which were a central issue in the 2019 federal election, for example, have largely faded from voters’ minds as more immediate issues come to the fore, he says.
“If you’re struggling to put food on the table, if you’re struggling to put a roof over your head and your kids’ heads, climate change is just going to fall down the list,” Simpson says.
Poilievre has called the upcoming election a question about the Liberals’ carbon pricing plan, and Simpson notes that, for the Conservatives, cutting taxes is seen as a direct approach to the issue of affordability.
Recent measures like the two-month GST/HST holiday have yet to stop the Liberals’ bloody support in the polls, he adds, as such measures are seen more as temporary relief than a prolonged, “sustainable” approach to concerns. affordability.
“Canadians are very focused on pocketbook issues going forward. And they will reward the parties who believe they will have solutions to those pocketbook problems in 2025,” says Simpson.
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos survey conducted between December 6 and 10, 2024, commissioned by Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,001 Canadians ages 18 and older were interviewed online. Quotas and weights were used to ensure that the sample composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The accuracy of Ipsos online surveys is measured by a credibility interval. In this case, the survey is accurate to within ±3.8 percentage points, 19 out of 20 times, if all Canadians over the age of 18 had been surveyed. The credibility interval will be wider between subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to, coverage error and measurement error.
—With files from Anne Gaviola of Global News
