‘Canada is broken’ — and people are angry about it: national poll

A majority of Canadians looking at the country they see around them say everything seems to be broken. Concerned about rising costs, the state of health care, affordable housing, jobs and more, half of us are also angry about the way Canada is being run, a national opinion poll says.

But before settling on the easy image of old, malcontent men skewing the survey, consider this: a higher percentage of women agreed Canada is broken than did men, and more in the youngest age brackets than among the oldest.

Nor is it just Albertans, famous for their distrust of Ottawa, or Quebecers, where public opinion often deviates from the rest of Canada.

Yes, the sentiment is higher in Western Canada than in the East, but a solid majority of respondents in every measured region agreed that everything feels broken right now, according to the Postmedia-leger national poll.

Two-thirds of those asked (67 per cent) agreed everything feels broken — almost half of those even strongly agreed — while 25 per cent disagreed, only seven per cent strongly.

“I didn’t think it would be that high. I thought maybe it was more a noisy minority as opposed to a prevailing majority opinion,” said Andrew Enns, an executive vice-president at the market research company Leger, and lead researcher for this data.

The numbers are a warning, he said. “If you’re in government, regardless of what level — federal, provincial, or municipal — these are your customers, the general population. They all interact with you in some form or fashion, and these are their opinions. And they’re basically saying we don’t like how business is running right now.”

Enns said his team heard talk for months about systems seeming to be falling apart or broken. He saw examples of it, too, with enormous waits for passports, frustrating airport delays, fast-rising grocery prices.

Pollsters at Leger had kicked around the idea of polling the sentiment for a while.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party must have picked up on the same discontent.

“It feels like everything is broken in this country right now,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said in November. It grabbed a lot of headlines and he’s repeated it since. Last week in a speech to his caucus, he said it again — “everything feels broken,” this time in French.

If it was bait to create a wedge issue, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau grabbed it.

“When he says Canada is broken,” Trudeau said of Poilievre in a speech, “that’s where we draw the line. This is Canada. And in Canada, better is always possible, but I don’t accept Canadians and politicians that talk down our country.

“Canada is not broken,” Trudeau added with emphasis.

With the concept becoming a hot-button issue, it seemed time to see what Canadians think about it, Enns said. Leger gauged attitudes of adult Canadian residents on their satisfaction with how the country is running.

They found Canadians aren’t in a happy place.

Asked to describe how they’re feeling when they think of how Canada is being managed, half of all respondents said they felt “angry.” That includes 30 per cent who said they’re “somewhat angry,” but also 20 per cent who specified they were “very angry.”

If the poll captures the mood of the nation, then it translates into a lot of anger in a lot of places from a lot of people.

There are some people content with things, but it’s a minority — 41 per cent of respondents said they were “happy,” but precious few said “very happy,” only four per cent. The remaining nine per cent said they didn’t know.

If these were Google or Yelp reviews, business owners would be calling rebranding or reputation consultants.

“Half the people are angry — that’s a large number of your customers out there that are not in a gentle or open frame of mind,” said Enns.

He said those who expressed a feeling of being very angry are likely to be the most vocal about their feelings, which offers a challenge to civil discourse. “It is not going to be a lot of positive noise out there. It is going to be more negative noise,” he said.

While the opinion poll didn’t distinguish levels of government, anger at the federal level was on display during Trudeau’s recent visit to Hamilton , Ont., where he needed a phalanx of police for a tense, short walk on the street through a seething, shouting crowd. That’s negative noise; zero-star reviews, thumbs down.

A demographic breakdown of poll respondents who felt angry and that things are broken shows the sentiment isn’t just a variation of “old man yells at cloud.”

Asked to describe how they’re feeling when they think of how Canada is being managed, half of all respondents said they felt “angry.”