Survey research asks about what just happened. Unfortunately, what everyone really wants to know is: what’s going to happen next?
I don’t pretend to have the answer. But I do have some ideas about what to watch for. Several public-opinion indicators measure the strains that the country experienced in 2024. Tracking them over the course of 2025 will signal whether our wounds have deepened or are starting to heal.
Here’s a list of five trends to watch.
Immigration: Border chaos?
From the early 2000s until 2022, Canadians became increasingly comfortable with the number immigrants arriving in the country. The proportion agreeing that “overall, there is too much immigration to Canada” steadily declined from 45 per cent in 2000 to 27 per cent in 2022. That 18-percentage-point drop was reversed in one year, as agreement rose to 44 per cent in 2023. It rose a further 14 points to 58 per cent in 2024.
A majority of Canadians now agree that there is too much immigration, something that hadn’t been the case since 1998. This change was driven mainly by a sense that our ambition to grow our population was no longer aligned with our ability to expand our infrastructure – particularly the supply of affordable housing.
What happens next will say a lot about how 2025 unfolds for Canada. The government has already scaled back immigration targets. Every politician with an interest in being re-elected has a plan to accelerate housing construction. If these policies succeed, attitudes toward immigration may rebound. And a federal election, should it unfold as expected, may be enough to help restore public confidence in how the immigration system is managed.
Better co-ordination and governance needed to steer Canada’s migration policies
The familiar rise of anti-Indian racism in Canada
Changes to mortgage policy can make owning a home more affordable
That is unless events in the United States sow chaos at the border. Canada has not had to contend with very large numbers of displaced people arriving uninvited (at its peak, arrivals at Roxham Road were still a fraction of the numbers of refugees crossing borders at key points elsewhere in the world). If Donald Trump’s administration carries out mass deportations of migrants, no one knows how many will flee north. Nothing will put the Canadian welcome to the test more than a European-style migrant crisis.
The economy: Reversing the escalator
Economists like to track GDP, interest rates, unemployment numbers and the consumer price index. But it also matters what people think about how the ups and downs of these indicators are affecting their lives. Here’s one snapshot of how Canada’s younger adults feel about how things have been working out for them.
Younger adults used to be twice as likely to say they are better off financially than their parents were at their age than to say they are worse off. This has reversed: They are now twice as likely to feel worse off than better off.
I wouldn’t recommend trying to explain the concept of a “vibe-cession” to anyone under the age of 30. But Canada’s outlook for 2025 will depend in large part on whether people start to feel that the intergenerational economic mobility escalator is moving in the right direction again.
Climate change: Searching for answers
The year 2025 will likely see the awkward combination of more climate-related natural disasters and an end to the federal government’s signature climate-change policy.
The trend worth noting is not opposition to the carbon tax but rather growing doubts that anyone has answers. Since 2021, the proportion of Canadians who trust the federal government to make the right decisions on climate change has dropped by nine percentage points. Many of the country’s premiers have been among the policy’s most vocal critics. They haven’t gained any ground, either. There has been a nine-point increase in the proportion trusting neither level of government.
There is room for someone to follow Chris Turner’s advice, namely to propose ways to build a world that is more efficient, more affordable, and more enjoyable to live in – while also lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Right now, the public doesn’t see that on offer from any party or government.
Quebec: Shush
Here’s something that hasn’t changed. A little over 20 years ago, in the aftermath of the 1995 referendum and at a time when the Parti Québécois still held power in the province, one out of two francophone Quebecers agreed that sovereignty was an idea whose time had passed. The proportion remains the same today (though somewhat fewer disagree and more say they’re not sure). From a national-unity perspective, this is good news (it’s not going down!) and bad (why hasn’t it gone up?).
Rising support for the Parti Québécois in the polls is not the same as rising support for Quebec sovereignty. But we can gauge how well the country is doing at responding to developments in Quebec by checking whether the needle starts to move on this question.
Younger Quebecers are less likely than their older counterparts to disagree that the time for sovereignty is passed, but that’s only because they are the most uncertain. Quebecers under 30 have lived their whole lives in the period following the 1995 referendum, when, in the absence of “winning conditions,” their politicians were more reluctant to make the case for sovereignty. This is starting to change. And as other commentators have pointed out, it is changing when leaders outside Quebec seem to have misplaced their manuals on how to make a case for the country.
Why the carbon tax often costs more in Atlantic Canada
The United States: There goes the neighbourhood
Canadians preferred Kamala Harris to Donald Trump by a margin of three to one. But the challenge is not simply that our neighbour, our largest trading partner and closest ally will again be led by a person most Canadians find distasteful. It’s the way in which the rise and return of Trump might affect how we see the U.S. By the end of his first term in office, the proportion of Canadians who had a favourable opinion of the U.S. had fallen to a historic low of 29 per cent. Was that the floor?
Does it matter? It will, simply as a signal of how rocky things have gotten – either between the two countries or within the U.S. itself. But it will also matter because it will be a constraint on how the Canadian government will have to work. There will be public pressure to find a way to get along with Trump; there will also be pressure to oppose and condemn him. The Canadian government in 2025 and beyond will spend most of its time trying to thread this needle.
Happy New Year
I offer no predictions for how things will go in 2025. But the recipe for a happy new year is simple. Build the homes, forestall the chaos, reverse the escalator, cool the climate, unify the country, and manage the neighbour. If we tick those boxes, we should be fine.
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