Five public-opinion trends to watch in 2025

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.

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.