Canadians feeling better about how Ottawa and the provinces work together, survey suggests

Hamilton Spectator

3 days ago

OTTAWA — Ahead of a meeting between the prime minister and premiers this week, a survey has found 'significant improvements' in the way Canadians feel about how well Ottawa and the provinces work together.
According to
a report
on the state of Canada's federation from the Environics Institute and five other organizations, 52 per cent of Canadians feel like their governments work very well or somewhat well together, compared to 39 per cent who felt that way when the same survey was conducted in 2024.
Conversely, 41 per cent of Canadians now feel like their governments are not working well together — either not very well or not well at all — compared to 54 per cent who felt that way one year ago.
'What's changed since last year? You have a new (federal) leader, but you also have this new sense of urgency, where I think the public's patience for government finger-pointing at each other has probably gone way down because the stakes have gone way up,' said Andrew Parkin, executive director of the Environics Institute, on the ever-escalating Canada-U.S. trade dispute.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney and the country's premiers will convene in Huntsville following U.S. President Donald Trump's threat to slap 35 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports by Aug. 1 if a trade agreement between the nations is not reached by then.
The survey found that Canadians' feelings about intergovernmental relations improved in most parts of the country outside of the North, where opinions were already more positive than in other regions.
Compared to 2024 figures, Saskatchewan boasted the largest increase, where the proportion of those who felt satisfied by federal-provincial collaboration more than doubled.
In Alberta and Quebec, however, the number of Canadians who felt the federal Liberals and their provincial governments did not work well together still outweighed those who felt the opposite.
The survey was conducted between May 1 and June 16 with 5,391 Canadians, with 90 per cent of responses collected online and the remainder by telephone. Because the majority of the survey was conducted online, the Environics Institute did not calculate a margin of error because online polls, despite being representative, cannot be considered truly random.
For the first time in the annual survey's seven-year-history, the Environics Institute also asked respondents whether they trust the federal government or their provincial government more when it comes to handling international trade relations.
The report notes that 42 per cent of Canadians are more likely to trust the federal government on that file, which is triple the 14 per cent of those who trust their provincial government more.
Levels of trust were highest in Quebec at 46 per cent, and lowest in the Prairie provinces at 38 per cent.
Ottawa does not enjoy that same level of trust when it comes to other portfolios.
'After three consecutive years of increases, there has been a drop in the proportions trusting neither the federal nor their provincial government to deal with other key issues such as health care, climate change, immigration or the economy,' the report states.
The proportion of Canadians who did not trust either Ottawa or their provincial government to address climate change, for example, dropped by seven percentage points from last year.
'This change follows the removal of the federal consumer carbon tax after the change of prime minister earlier this year,' the report noted.
The survey also looked at supporters of provincial conservative parties in the prairies compared to those in Ontario, and found that of those who backed Alberta's United Conservative Party, the Saskatchewan Party and Manitoba's Progressive Conservatives, 68 per cent had a negative view of intergovernmental relations, while 27 per cent had a positive assessment.
Meanwhile, 40 per cent of supporters of Premier Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives had a negative view of those relations, with 56 per cent considering the relationship between provinces and the federal Liberals to be positive.
Ford, a key ally to Carney, opted not to aid Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives, with whom he has a frosty relationship, in the recent federal election campaign.