Environmental issues taking a backseat this election, Vote Compass data shows

CBC

12-04-2025

Environmental issues have slid way down the list of Canadians' concerns in this federal election compared to the last campaign, according to data from Vote Compass.
When asked "What issue is the most important to you in this election?" survey respondents most frequently said Canada-U.S. relations were their top concern.
Environmental issues didn't crack the top five.
"The issue landscape is very different from the 2021 election, when the environment was the leading concern for the largest share of Canadians," according to the Vote Compass analysis.
The findings are based on more than 161,000 people who participated in the Vote Compass survey from March 25 to April 3.
In 2021, 24 per cent named the environment as their most important issue. But in this campaign, the environment is eighth on the list, at about five per cent.
President Donald Trump's tariffs on Canadian goods and threats of annexation have instead dominated much of the 2025 election campaign, with 29 per cent of respondents identifying the Canada-U.S. issue as their primary concern.
Liberal voters are especially concerned about relations with the U.S., with 46 per cent choosing it as their most important issue.
For Conservative voters, the economy is the top concern, with 36 per cent choosing it as their key issue.
Economic issues were next on the list, identified as a top concern by 24 per cent of the general population. The cost of living, social justice and health care round out the top five.
The proportion of Canadians citing immigration as their top concern is up to four per cent in 2025 from one per cent in 2021, according to Vote Compass.
Fewer people said health care was their most important issue (down to six per cent from 12 per cent).
Vote Compass is an initiative of Vox Pop Labs, an independent, non-partisan social enterprise founded and operated by academics. The application surveys users about their political views and then calculates their alignment with the parties and candidates running for election.
On Friday, 128 municipal politicians wrote an open letter to the five main federal party leaders calling for action on climate change "because later is too late."
The group wants the next federal government to build a national electric grid that includes the North, move ahead with a high-speed rail network, make homes and buildings more energy efficient, build two million non-market "green homes," and fund a "national resilience, response and recovery strategy."
Unlike online opinion polls, respondents to Vote Compass are not pre-selected. Similar to many public opinion polls, however, the data is an online non-probability sample that's been weighted to approximate a demographically representative sample. Vote Compass data has been weighted by gender, age, education, region, language spoken in the home, and partisanship (past federal vote) to ensure the sample composition reflects that of the voting-eligible population of Canada according to census data and electoral data. All results are subject to uncertainty (or error). Because Vote Compass data is derived from a non-probability sample, Vox Pop Labs does not have a traditional margin of error. Instead, it reports a modeled error estimate that is intended to approximate a margin of sampling error, in this case of +/- 0.5%.