Is Canada broken? Most agree that the country has some big problems

More than half of Canadians believe that their country is broken more than one year after Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre claimed that Canada was broken under Justin Trudeau's leadership. Here's what new polling has revealed.

Leger is Canada's largest market research and analysis company and the firm just discovered in cooperation with Postmedia that 70% of Canadians across the political spectrum believe that their country is broken.

“Forty-three percent of Liberal voters agreed the country feels broken these days. Obviously, that’s less than half of the percentage of Conservative voters, but that was slightly higher than I would have expected,” Vice President of Leger Andrew Enns, explained to the National Post.

“It probably taps into a bit of frustration amongst even those strong Liberal voters who are still feeling a little frustrated and disappointed things aren’t going better for the country and, I guess, maybe even politically for their party," Enns added.

Nearly a quarter of Canadians (21%) noted that they believed the country is broken due to the high cost of living and because of Canada's current leadership and 70% said they agreed with the statement: “It feels like everything is broken in this country right now.”

Leger's results are remarkably similar to findings from a similar survey conducted by the company and Postmedia in February 2023 that discovered 67% of people surveyed at that time agreed the country felt broken. But what was the context behind the survey?

Since becoming the head of the Conservative Party of Canada in September 2022, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has pushed one major message—everything in Canada is broken—and it seems a majority of Canadians have agreed with him since. 

In November 2022, Poilievre held a press conference in which he stated: “It feels like everything is broken in this country right now.” While it grabbed headlines at the time, the sentiment that Canada is broken seems to have sunk in with the country's citizens. 

According to the February 2023 survey from Leger—run on behalf of the National Post, a center-right news organization in Canada—well over half of Canadians at that time believed the statements about Canada's brokenness made by Poilievre were true.

“67% of Canadians agree with the statement made by a Canadian politician who stated that ‘it feels like everything is broken in this country right now’,” Leger Marketing wrote on February 4th in a website post examining its findings. 

“50% of Canadians are angry with the way Canada is being managed today,” the post continued, adding that it is the real-world issues like inflation and housing that have Canadians down. That number was reexamined in the 2024 survey and was upped by 9 points to 59%.

Inflation in Canada had been a major problem since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic and the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine back in February 2022, and inflation was an issue still bothering Canadians in 2024 according to Leger's latest results showing 72% had anxieties over the issue. 

Canadians were feeling the country’s cost pains in 2023 and Leger picked up on that in their survey at the time, finding that nearly three-quarters of those surveyed felt that the country’s rising costs were affecting them and their families. That number rose to 62% in 2024.

“68% of Canadians report that rising costs and inflation/interest rates are most important when it comes to the issues impacting them and their families,” the Leger survey noted in 2023. So Canadians have remained consistently worried since last year.

National Post reporter Adrian Humphreys dug into Leger's results from 2023 and found that 59 percent of respondents said they were most affected by health care in Canada; 43 percent by the affordability of housing; and 35 percent by the climate and environment. 

"A majority of Canadians looking at the country they see around them say everything seems to be broken," Humphrey wrote at the time, poignantly adding, "half of us are also angry about the way Canada is being run."

Humprey also noted that a higher percentage of women agreed that Canada was broken while Canadians in the East and West were the most likely to agree that things in Canada felt broken—a bad omen for Trudeau. 

So how did things stack up in 2024? National Post's Ari Blaff wrote that Canadians were worried about "the state of health care (62 percent), housing affordability (49 percent), crime (36 percent), and homelessness (35 percent)," all of which is bad news for Trudeau as he approaches an election year