The percentage of Canadians who see addressing climate change as a top priority spiked this summer after years of it taking a back seat to other issues, recent polling has found.
Data published by the Angus Reid Institute shows a surge in Canadians indicating climate change is one of their top concerns. In the survey where respondents were asked to choose up to three issues they care about most, 21 per cent chose the environment and climate change in July, a 50 per cent increase from March.
Angus Reid found 25 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 34, 23 per cent aged 35 to 55 and 16 per cent older than 55 put the issue as a top concern.
Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, said a higher interest in climate change among younger Canadians is “along the lines of what we’ve seen in the past.”
Kurl said the bigger takeaway from the newest results is the consistent increase in concern across all age groups.
Angus Reid surveyed a random sample of 1,770 Canadian adults from July 25 to July 27. It said a margin of error from a probability sample of the same size would be two percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Recent polling from Abacus Data found similar results, with 18 per cent of their sample selecting environment and climate change as a top concern, an increase of three points over two weeks. Abacus asked respondents to choose three top issues from a longer list of other issues.
Abacus Data CEO David Coletto said the increase is a “notable move up” for the climate change issue.
“This is competing with issues like [U.S. President Donald] Trump and cost of living and health care,” Coletto said. “It’s signalling that the salience of this issue, the attention people are paying to it, is rising.”
Abacus surveyed a random sample of 1,910 Canadian adults from July 23 to July 29 and said a margin of error for a comparable sample would be 2.24 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
As Abacus and Angus Reid polled Canadians in July, wildfires raged across the country, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. Many fires are still burning, notably in British Columbia and northwestern Ontario.
Coletto said the presence of wildfires in the news, their direct effects like smoke and global extreme weather events, like major fires in Europe, come together to “raise [climate change and the environment] back up onto the agenda.”
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Still, Kurl said it is yet to be seen whether this is a “more permanent uptick” when wildfires are less top of mind for Canadians.
Even as Angus Reid recorded a 50 per cent increase between March and July, climate change and the environment is still far from its peak in voter concern at the end of the last decade.
“Climate change was the number-one issue,” Kurl said. “It was arguably the ballot issue in the 2019 election, among other issues.”
Forty per cent of respondents listed climate change and the environment as one of their top issues in Angus Reid’s June 2019 polling.
Kurl said during the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change took “a significant back seat” to other issues quarter after quarter.
By the 2021 federal election, a focus on climate was seen in policy proposals from all parties, with the Conservative platform including a consumer carbon price, an industrial price, a zero-emission vehicle mandate and a low-carbon fuel standard.
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In 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney ended the consumer carbon tax in his first move at Canada’s helm. During the 2025 election, environmental issues fell out of the top five concerns, according to data from Vote Compass.
In a “forward guidance” video released in June, Carney acknowledged that Canada’s emissions would be on the rise.
“The changes we have made will mean that our emissions will be higher in the next few years than they were projected to be under the previous government’s plan,” Carney said.
Kurl said the current rebound in environmental concerns is “not coming from nowhere,” but wants to find out whether “this is a moment, or a movement.”
Keith Brooks, programs director of Canadian environmental advocacy organization Environmental Defence, said he hopes the rebounding concern is a movement — and that interest continues to grow.
“I think support for climate action has never gone away, it’s just that other things came in as more of an urgent priority,” he said. “I’m hoping that people are grasping the severity of the climate crisis and the fact that it is definitely not going away.”
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Brooks said he would like to see a “complete about-face” from the federal government on climate and the environment. He said Carney “has not done good things” on climate change, rolling back on some of the previous government’s environmental policies.
“The affordability crisis is a real crisis,” Brooks said. “All of these things are legitimate concerns that people should be afraid about, but climate change is among those concerns.…
“Just because something’s not someone’s top concern doesn’t mean it’s not a concern and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be taken seriously by governments.”
