Weekly Writ for June 12: Will climate change be a ballot box issue?
Assessing the role the environment could play in the next federal campaign.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.
Climate change and the environment have been important issues for several federal election cycles now, but it hasn’t been a decisive issue in any modern campaign.
Could that change in 2025?
Last evening, I participated as a panelist at an event in Toronto organized by GreenPAC, a non-partisan organization focused on fostering leadership on the environmental file. My fellow panelists included Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid Institute and Andrew Enns of Léger, and it was ably moderated by David McKie of the National Observer. The theme was the role of climate change in the next federal election, and it was a really fascinating discussion and you can watch it here.
As my head was already turning to the issue in preparation for the event, I wanted to delve a little here into the numbers on climate change as a political issue.
The first thing to recognize is that the environment has long been an important issue to voters. It’s even been the most important issue — just not at election time.
For the last 20 years, Nanos Research has been tracking which issue Canadians say is their top issue of national concern. Uniquely among pollsters, Nanos does not prompt respondents with a list of possible options. They can say whatever they like.
In the chart below, I’ve stitched together two charts that are available on Nanos’s website that track the evolution of their issue polling since 2004.
(The data from 2004 to 2015 can be found here, while the data since 2015 can be found in the Nanos weekly reports here.)
A quick glance at the chart shows that the squiggly blue (jobs/economy) and red (healthcare) lines have consistently topped Canadians’ concern. But the lighter green line (environment) has had its moments. Ill-timed moments, though, when it comes to the electoral calendar.
The environment was the top issue in mid-2007, reaching nearly 35%. This was shortly after the release of An Inconvenient Truth, an influential documentary on climate change. Leading the Liberals at the time, Stéphane Dion was pushing his “green shift” plan. Things were lining up for the next election to be about the environment.
It didn’t turn out that way. The financial collapse pushed concern about jobs/economy to the forefront. The environment was knocked down as an issue for about a decade.
Then it rose to become a top issue again in early 2019, to about 25%, and remained a top issue heading into early 2020. But then the pandemic (the ominous gray shading in the chart) overshadowed all other issues. Even the brief moment near the fall of 2021 when the environment pushed itself ahead of the pandemic was scuppered by the Omicron wave. Since the end of the pandemic as an issue of concern, the environment has been vying with healthcare, inflation, jobs/economy and the cost of housing (not included on this tracking chart) as a top issue.
Since 2015, the natural resting place for the environment as a top issue has been just under 10%. Climate change remains of top importance for about 1-in-10 Canadians, but when that rises it can be easily supplanted by whatever else is the issue du jour.
Right now, those issues are the terrible trio of inflation, the economy and housing affordability — the issues that Pierre Poilievre has focused on to the exclusion of almost everything else.
We know that the environment will be a key issue for the Liberals in the next election, particularly as they try to defend the carbon tax. But it doesn’t seem like the Poilievre Conservatives are worrying too much about what their environmental policy will be in the next campaign. What they’ve revealed about it is relatively straightforward: the end of the carbon tax and a reliance on technology and innovation.
In 2019 and 2021, however, the Conservatives worried about having something to offer voters on the environmental file — at least to give the impression that they had a plan of some kind. Their efforts in both cases fell flat. Andrew Scheer’s environmental policy platform in 2019 was short on substance, long on glossy full-page photos. In 2021, Erin O’Toole came forward with a complicated plan that was a carbon pricing scheme in all but name, made all the more complicated by the necessity to pretend it wasn’t a form of carbon pricing.
Conservatives were unenthusiastic about both plans, and swing voters were unconvinced. At the end of the 2021 campaign, Abacus Data found that the Liberals were beating the Conservatives by 10 points on which party voters trusted most to handle climate change. Only on childcare and getting people vaccinated did the Liberals enjoy a wider advantage.
So, it’s an open question whether Poilievre will even bother in 2025. But the data suggests he should — or at least that he could.
Does Poilievre need a plan?
A recent poll by Abacus found a gap between what Canadians expect and want to see from a Poilievre government on the climate file. Only 31% of Canadians said they thought Poilievre would have a “serious plan” to deal with climate change, while 48% thought he wouldn’t. But 80% of Canadians thought he should have a serious plan, meaning a lot of Canadians are expecting to be let down by Poilievre on this issue.
That’s not to say they want to see the carbon tax stay in place — there’s no such gap on that issue. Fully 60% of Canadians think he will eliminate it and 63% think he should.
But a serious plan from Poilievre doesn’t need to be a carbon tax. Earlier this year, the Angus Reid Institute found that 56% of Canadians thought the government was spending too little (29%) or the right amount (27%) on environmental programs, suggesting that a majority of Canadians do not think spending on combating climate change should be reduced. Only 32% of respondents said the government was spending too much on this.
It is possible to sell a serious environmental plan, at least in most parts of the country. A recent survey by the Environics Institute found that a majority of Canadians in Alberta and Saskatchewan feel that climate change politics will have a negative impact on them over the next decade, but a plurality of voters in Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and the Maritimes felt that the net result would be positive.
Those are the arguments for coming forward with something robust. But the electoral arguments against the Conservatives putting much effort into it are pretty robust, too.
A survey by Abacus Data for Clean Energy Canada conducted last fall, when the Conservatives first hit the 40% mark in the polls, asked Canadians whether they’d be more or less likely to vote for the Conservatives depending on their stance on climate change.
Abacus found that committing to do as much or more than Canada’s current policies would make 54% of Conservative supporters more likely to vote for the party. It would make no impact on their support for 35%, while just 11% said it would make them less likely.
Asked what would happen if the Conservatives committed to do less on the environment, again 35% said it would have no impact, 49% said it would make them more likely to vote Conservative, and just 16% said it would make them less likely.
There’s simply not much of the Conservative electorate at stake on the climate change file. Doing more might cost them 11% while doing less might cost them 16% — muddling through it without a solid commitment either way seems unlikely to make much difference to their current voter coalition.
Granted, the poll did suggest that Liberal, NDP and Bloc voters would be far more likely to vote Conservative if the party adopted serious climate change policies, but let’s face it: the Conservatives already have the voters they need, and there might not be much more for the taking left.
That’s because voters have to prioritize. Climate change will undoubtedly be a big issue in the next campaign. But it will be one of several, and voting decisions will be based on how those other issues are viewed.
Back in March, the Angus Reid Institute found that 56% of Canadians said cost of living concerns should come first, even if it damages policies to fight climate change. Only 32% said climate change should come first, even if it increased the cost of living for some households.
It’s always possible that the issue set will change between now and the next election. Natural disasters like wildfires might put climate change back into focus, especially if the economic situation improves. But if it doesn’t, then voters are probably more likely to think about the state of their pocketbook today than they are to worry about the state of the planet tomorrow.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News of a resignation in Alberta, the results of two mayoral byelections in Gatineau and Mississauga and a look at the Ontario PCs’ fundraising advantage.
A quick summary of the provincial polls out of Atlantic Canada, Ontario and Quebec, as well as new national numbers.
The updates give majorities for Pierre Poilievre, Doug Ford, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, Tim Houston and Dennis King, but minority upsets for opposition leaders Susan Holt and Tony Wakeham if the elections were held today.
Assessing B.C. floor-crosser Elenore Sturko’s chances in a riding profile of Surrey-Cloverdale.
British Columbia’s first political re-alignment in the #EveryElectionProject.