‘People are feeling shattered’: Ontarians are in a fragile state of mind as the election approaches

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, political strategists puzzled over how voters might react to an election called while a deadly virus continued to upend Canadian life.

Elections in New Brunswick and British Columbia in 2020 returned big victories for incumbents, suggesting a “rally around the flag” effect for political leaders. In 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau battled the perception that he had called an unnecessary election and limped to the finish line with a minority government and a virtually unchanged seat count.

With the Ontario election less than three months away, we could be in for a new kind of pandemic election as anger and fear ebb away to be replaced by exhaustion and weariness.

Darrell Bricker, the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, said that people likely won’t vote specifically on pandemic policies, but that the mood created by the two-year crisis could permeate the election campaign.

“It’s almost like people are feeling shattered. It’s a different kind of a feeling. It’s not like ‘oh, I’m angry and I’m going to do something.’ They’re feeling not confident, and almost shattered and fragile,” said Bricker, in an interview with the Ontario360 project. “People are feeling like there’s a lot of change going on out there. They’re feeling very uncertain about the future.”

Adding to the uncertainty for Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservative Party is that his government’s approval ratings have spiked and plunged erratically during the last two years. Internal polling that gauges whether the government is on the “right track,” have fallen from a high of 82 percent to a recent low of 45 percent during the Omicron wave of COVID-19 in January, according to CBC News. That’s the lowest rating for the government since the beginning of the pandemic.

The government also registered an all-time low for its performance in the economic and government spending metrics. Those are areas that Bricker says are weighing on voters’ minds right now, especially with inflation spiking and gas prices surging.^{1“From rent to clothing to food, the cost of living is rising at the fastest pace in decades and leaving Canadians with reduced purchasing power as wages barely keep up with inflation.” https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/03/15/highest-growth-rates-weve-seen-in-decades-economists-anticipate-surging-consumer-prices-in-coming-months.html}

“What’s really become animated in this discussion is everything related to the cost of living,” said Bricker. “It’s primarily with housing, but also with many other aspects of just getting by from day to day.”

Even before the pandemic, people were losing the sense that they could live a better life than their parents and, now, more Canadians feel like it’s impossible to get ahead, said Bricker.

With housing becoming increasingly unaffordable^{2Canada’s housing market is breaking records at an alarming rate} and people having children later in life^{3What Does Canada’s Low Fertility Rate Mean?}, often due to cost of living issues, many Canadians aren’t reaching key life milestones as soon as they had hoped.

“The one issue that you can really hold out as being an icon of this is housing, and how people feel about their ability to even buy a house in the neighborhoods that they grew up in and the impossibility of doing that these days,” said Bricker. “We can look at it as the middle class striving to progress, but it’s really where I thought I was going to be in my life versus where I am.”

A recent report by the government’s Housing Affordability Task Force called for more density in urban and suburban areas, a time limit on public consultation for building projects, and fewer municipal policies that stymie new developments. The task force argued that Ontario should aim to build 1.5 million new homes in the next decade.^{4Doug Ford’s housing task force calls for more density, less public consultation}

Bricker described these types of policies as technocratic and out of touch with people’s actual aspirations.

“The image that people have in their minds of middle-class success is not living in a swank condo,” said Bricker. “That’s not what they’re imagining their future is going to be. They’re thinking about living a reasonable commuting distance away from downtown Toronto, in a house, a standalone house.”