With the federal budget set to be released today, the Angus Reid Institute has released a poll detailing the country’s current attitudes towards the economic future — and there is definite anxiety from across Canada about the state of the economy.
According to the poll, four in ten Canadians are expecting the economy to only get worse over the next year, and the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan are leading the pack with a grim view.
Nearly half of Saskatchewan residents say they experienced a worsened standard of living in 2019, and 35% expect it to only worsen in the future; a worsening standard of living has been experienced by all provinces but is most acutely noted in the prairies.
The majority of Canadians say they expect the next 12 months to be a bad time to make any large purchases — buying or renovating homes, purchasing new vehicles, or planning a vacation, for example — but Saskatchewan residents are the most adamant about this opinion, at 68%.
Saskatchewan is also the province with the most anxiety over potential job losses in the next year, despite unemployment having been on a steady decline in Canada since 2015. As a province, we are also highly concerned with finding jobs, a concern shared across the board with the rest of the country.
In 2015, Canadians reported the economy as being among their top concerns for the coming budget, and while it appears that concern still lingers, other topics have surpassed it for this 2019 budget: healthcare, environment, income equality, and ethics and corruption, to name a few.
The federal government’s election campaign in 2015 made supporting the middle class a large part of its goal, and while poverty is lower than it’s been in a while, the middle-class growth is reported to be stagnant — income tax reports little to no increase in the income of middle-class households.
More figures about the topic can be found in the Angus Reid Poll, available on their website.
