OTTAWA — A new poll suggests the trade war with the United States is now the biggest source of political anxiety for Canadians, knocking inflation out of the top spot.
Leger's new poll, released Wednesday, says that 28 per cent of Canadians believe dealing with President Donald Trump's tariffs and U.S. aggression is the most important challenge facing Canada today.
The cost of living dropped to second place in the latest polling; 21 per cent of Canadians ranked it at their top concern, followed by health care and housing affordability.
This is the first Leger poll since August 2022 to report that something other than inflation is the top source of political concern for Canadians.
The Leger poll sampled more than 1,500 Canadian adults from Feb. 28 to March 2.
Because the poll was conducted online, it can't be assigned a margin of error.
Sébastien Dallaire, Leger executive vice-president, said Canadians are still worried about the cost of living but the unfolding trade war is adding a new dimension to their fears.
“All this economic uncertainty is piling onto what was already a major issue for Canadians who are concerned about affordability," he said.
On Tuesday, Trump followed through on his repeated threats to impose tariffs on Canadian goods, spurring a wave of retaliatory tariffs from Canada and igniting a trade war.
The Trump administration walked back some of the tariffs on Wednesday by offering a one-month exemption for automakers.
According to Leger, Quebecers and Canadians over 55 years old were most likely to rank tensions with the U.S. as their top source of concern.
The poll said younger Canadians and Albertans continue to rank inflation as their leading source of anxiety.
Voters aligned with the Conservative and Green parties also expressed more concern about inflation than U.S. aggression in the poll.
Those who identified as Liberal and Bloc Québécois voters put a much larger emphasis on the threat posed by the Trump administration; at least 45 per cent of these respondents placed it at the top of their lists.
The Liberals have closed a sizable polling gap with the Conservatives since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he was stepping down and threats of a U.S. trade war started heating up.
A federal election is widely expected this spring after the Liberal party winds up its leadership race on Sunday.
Dallaire said the recent Ontario election — which Premier Doug Ford called early after claiming he needed a strong mandate to deal with Trump — shows politicians can win support by opposing the president.
“We saw how it played out in the Ontario election. Trump is very much top of mind for pretty much all Canadians at this point and he's really sucking the air out of any other important news story," he said.
Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, the perceived front-runner in the Liberal leadership race, has said Canada will "not bow down to a bully" in response to Trump's trade war.
Former finance minister Chrystia Freeland, Carney's chief rival for the Liberal leadership, has leaned throughout her campaign on her experience with negotiating a trade deal with Trump in his first administration.
Angus Reid polling released Wednesday said that 43 per cent of Canadians polled said Carney would be the best person to confront Trump, while 34 per cent picked Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. The pollster said that in a scenario where Freeland wins the leadership race, she narrowly edges Poilievre as the person most trusted to take on Trump — 36 per cent for Freeland to 33 per cent for Poilievre.
In response to Trump's tariffs on Tuesday, Poilievre said Canada must approve new pipelines and cut taxes and red tape on homebuilding to offset the impact of the trade war.
Dallaire said that Poilievre and the Conservatives need to link their campaign promises to kill the carbon price and cut other taxes back to the threat posed by Trump.
Any policy proposals to cut taxes or deliver new spending will have to be offered as tools to "soften the blow of what is coming from the United States," he said.
The polling industry's professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 5, 2025.
Craig Lord, The Canadian Press
