The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Greg Lyle: How Are Canadians Doing?

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Think about how well you're doing financially these days compared to in 2015, when the current federal government first took power. Are you doing better? Worse? Did COVID have a longstanding impact on your circumstances. Pollster Greg Lyle has been looking into these and other questions. He's the founder and president of the Innovative Research Group.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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federal government first took power. Are you doing better? Worse? Did COVID have an impact on your circumstances? Pollster Greg Lyle has been looking into these and other questions, and the founder and president of the Innovative Research Group joins us now in studio with his findings. Great to see you again. Good to see you. You flew all the way in from the left coast for this. Absolutely. Well, you and Yorkville. There you go. We're happy to have your, we're happy to exploit the fact that you're here to talk to the York, York Minster. Oh, York Minster. That's right. Lecture series to do this. Let's put this graphic up right away.

Sheldon, if you would, you asked the question, Greg, how are you doing these days? And 25% of people said better off, but 41% of people said they are doing worse off now compared to 2015. You're in the field, March 14 to 25, surveying almost 2,300 people. Now, as people considered whether they were doing better or worse, what kind of metrics did they use or did you offer to determine the answer to that? Well, we asked people to tell us. So we then said, why do you feel that way? And so if you say you're better off, you normally attribute that to your own personal efforts, right?

So I got ahead in my career or I've retired or we've had kids or things like that. If you say worse off, then you usually attribute that to inflation, the cost of living, the cost of housing. I can't get a home or if I can get a home, I can't get a home in the neighborhood I grew up in. The biggest chunk of people who said they were better off said they were better off because they got a better job or they made more money in their current job. The biggest chunk of people who said they were better off said they were better off because they got a better job, or they made more money in their current job. The biggest chunk of people who said that they were worse off complained about what in particular? What aspect of that list?

Well, it was several things, right? So inflation and cost of living, though, were central. And within cost of living, housing is the single biggest issue. Let me follow up on inflation. I know inflation hit 7% a couple of years ago, but inflation has been a lot tamer recently. Why are people still saying inflation is terrible? Well, I actually think that that's not really what they're responding to. So a lot of economists have been talking about the fact that Canadian real incomes have been declining and that's tied into productivity. So there's a whole policy side to this that the average person is not that into. But when we look at what the reasons are, it really comes down to, particularly for younger people, that the cost of

buying into the housing market or even just renting now is far higher than it used to be as a if you look at the multiples of income to buy a home now whereas in previous generations it was three or four times your annual income was the price of a house now it can be 10 or 15 times an annual income that's a big difference um and you know when you see a politician like Polyev out there saying, we had a deal, and that deal is broken, and we need to get it back, there's a lot of people that feel that way. And that's been a big part of his connecting. But the real income thing, this is where inflation, a lot of people might think the Bank of Canada reduces interest rates. They never do just one.

There'll likely be more. If interest rates come down, affordability should go away. But if the real issue is real incomes, then what happens is that when interest rates come down, you still look around and say, you know, I used to be able to buy this stuff five years ago. Now I can't buy that stuff anymore. I miss my old life. So that's a much trickier problem. This may seem like a strange follow-up here, but are you sure, I know you have to do this all the time when you put questions out in the

field, are you sure people are giving you the straight goods? Yes. Yeah, because we ask several questions that all link together, right? So we've actually built this over some time. So in 2007, Roger Martin, who some people watching the show may remember, was running the Competitive Institute. And we were doing, we did a set of questions for him on satisfaction with standard of living. And at that time, three times as many people were satisfied with their standard of living as dissatisfied. And we looked at that again in 2018, it had come down, and we looked at it again in 2024, and it came down dramatically. So now we're in a situation where if you're Gen Z, Gen X,

or a millennial, there are as many people unhappy with their standard of living as happy. There are as many people unhappy with their standard of living as happy. And if you go to Gen X and the boomers, well, Gen X is basically like millennials and Gen Z. The boomers are quite a bit less satisfied now. They're more satisfied than dissatisfied, but it's come down a long way. The only group that's still mostly happy is the silent generation that's well into retirement now. I guess I'm asking this because, you know, there's a lot of antipathy for the current prime minister across the country right now. And how do you know that when you

ask the question, people aren't thinking to themselves, I'm kind of ticked off at Trudeau today. And so I'm going to say, I feel worse off and I'm angrier about this, that or the other thing. Right. But again, we first became aware of this as a problem without any reference to Trudeau. We first became aware of this as a problem on the standard of living question. And so then where I naturally went to was, okay, well, what does that mean for politicians? Are they wearing this or not? And so I started out with the question that Reagan asked viewers in the Reagan-Carter debate, which is, are you better off now than you were four years ago? But to make it work federally, you have to bring it back to 2015, so you can't directly repeat it. And then I asked people,

do you think your provincial government is making things better or worse for you? And is your federal government making things better or worse for you? So provincial governments aren't doing too well, except in Alberta, where Daniel Smith is actually seen as doing a better than average job of making things better. But if you look at federally, 50% say that the Trudeau Liberal government is making things worse, and only 12% say they're making things better. And so again, I started on how satisfied are you with your standard of living, taking it out of politics and just asking about everyday life. And then I look for the political implications. Gotcha. This is a typical question that people ask as well. They want to know whether they feel they're doing better than their parents or, you know, there's

always the expectation that the next generation does better than the previous. So here you go. When asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement, I am able to afford a better standard of living than my parents, if you go back to 2007, 58% of the people agreed with that notion. 58%. Today, that number is 36%. Why has it dropped so precipitously? Well, and again, the policy answer to that is twofold, right? Number one is declining real incomes. And number two, the issue is housing. And the reason why I think this matters is that neither of these problems is going to be fixed tomorrow, if they're going to be fixed at all. The productivity issue, if you go back to Brian Mulroney's leadership campaign and read the first substantive chapter of his book.

This is 1983. 1983. His first chapter was about Canada's productivity problem. Not a new problem. Right, so it's not a new problem. And again, Roger Martin, the reason I first pulled it was because Roger Martin looked at the facts and said Canada had a problem in 2007.

So, you know, a whole bunch of governments have looked at that problem, Brian Mulroney, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, and not been able to create long-term lasting fixes. Then the second issue is housing. So that's become front and center. Everyone's talking about it. But the reality is it's not getting better yet. Okay. But humor me for a second here. Prime Minister Trudeau, for several years now, has said, you know, if you get in trouble, we've got your backs. And, you know, I'm looking at the programs here, the supports that came forward during COVID, the CERB, the subsidies for business, I mean, they were really generous. They helped a lot of people get through a pretty terrible time in their lives.

There have been tax cuts for moderate income people. There have been tax increases on the better off among us as well. There have been increased supports for child care. I mean, he's got a bit of a record there to run on. And yet people are still pretty sour on him right now because. And yet people are still pretty sour on them right now because? Well, I think the average person would look at those as Band-Aids that are being put on top of a fundamental problem that's not being fixed. Right.

And so they look at the life they live today and say, we can't live today the way we lived five years ago, 10 years ago. We can't keep up with our own standard of living. And so, with the reasons we can all see, and we all, I mean, the reality of the interest rates coming down is that house prices will soon go up again, right? Because when it's easier to be able to afford your mortgage, that usually results in house prices going up. So if you're someone that's been saving up your money trying to get into the housing market and you didn't move yet, you may well see that that basket of money that you put together to buy in, now it's not going to be enough, that you're going to have to save even more to catch up. Okay, but one of the things that has always intrigued me about your business is sometimes public opinion mirrors facts, and sometimes it doesn't.

We saw the polling in the United States in the last couple of weeks which said, what do you think inflation is doing right now? And the majority of people think inflation is out of control. It's not, actually. Empirically, provably, factually true, inflation is not out of control in the States. They said the same thing about, do you feel we're in a recession right now? And the majority of people said yes. And the fact is, they're not in recession in the United States.

They're not. I mean, if you define recession by two consecutive quarters of negative growth, they're not in a recession. So that's where public opinion does not mirror the facts. Does it in Canada? But let me just challenge you on that. Okay. So that's averages. There are a lot of people in the United

States that are on the low side of the average, right? And in fact, income disparity, right? The issue of where incomes lie, when you think about the average, there is a small group of people that have a whole lot of money and they're getting more money. And so that pulls the average up, but a lot of Americans don't get to participate in that. Okay, great point. So how we measure these things may not be reflective of how the average person experiences them. But in Canada, do you say the facts mirror public opinion and vice versa? Yeah, I mean, I just rely on the economists. And what the economists tell me is that real incomes are coming down. So after all these programs, real are coming down and a big a big part of that is because we don't

make the same investments in terms of capital as the americans do right american businesses invest more in capital but in this last budget we actually made it more expensive to invest in capital when we increase the capital inclusion rate. Well, we didn't do it. The federal government did. Right. But as a country, we did this, right? Collectively.

So we'll take our partisan hats off and put on our Canadian flags. So we as a country have done this. This is not likely to help real incomes. And in fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find the federal liberals, or in fact, very many federal politicians, talking very much about the problem of real incomes. Right? There's been, you know, this is a broader conversation.

But there's a fairly large disconnect between the political debate that's going on and the substantive challenges facing Canada. Right? I mean, we have a problem that we've all known about for decades. the political debate that's going on and the substantive challenges facing Canada, right? I mean, we have a problem that we've all known about for decades, which is we have an aging population. And what that means is that there's going to be fewer people working and more people claiming entitlement programs like health care. So the bill's going to get up. And there's only four ways to solve that problem. You can borrow money to support public programs. You can cut public programs. You can raise taxes on public programs or raise taxes on the fewer people that are working.

Or you can raise real incomes, right? Well, the easy answer, the politically easy answer, not an easy answer to do in terms of policy, is to raise real incomes, right? So when you look at what's going on, whether you look at it from the lens of how people feel about their quality of life or their standard of living now, or if you look at what will the fiscal house look like in 2035, the answer to both those questions is let's fix real incomes, but it's not on the front of the public stage. Let me share some more numbers here, which, well, I won't characterize them. I'll get you to characterize them. Here we go, Sheldon. Board number two, does our free enterprise

economic system work well? That's the question you asked. You asked it four years ago, and the answer was 54% believe yes. The majority of Canadians believed yes. You asked the same question today and the number is 36%. Only 36% of Canadians polled say the free enterprise system, economically speaking, is working well. Are you as distressed by that as I think most people would be? Well, I'm not distressed about it it's the way people feel and and i i like to know what the reality is out there of how people but if only a third of the people think our current economic system is working well that ain't good it's a symptom of the standard of living again so if my stan if i feel unhappy with my standard of living if i don't think that I can live the Canadian dream, there's got to be a cause for that. And so people, and again, it's not part of the

public debate. We don't hear a lot of people talking about that. So the public doesn't have a narrative to be able to frame what the problem is. And so they're looking around at suspects. And one of the suspects is maybe the rules don't work. And you also have to remember that we had a big debate about this during COVID, right? The whole, we need to build back better. We need a radical transformation of our economic system. And so, you know, there were a lot of questions being raised at that point in time. The issue federally in terms of the debate is that the

liberals are taking a lot of heat for not delivering on a better standard of living. And the NDP have been propping the liberals up. So there's nobody on the center left that can take a sort of Bernie Saunders line on what we need to do to improve standard of living. But once this government falls, as it almost certainly will, then the door opens for either the liberals or the NDP to take that line, that argument. And then what gets interesting then is Polyov gets this. So Polyev understands that there is anger on the right and the left and he's he's trying to channel that anger from both sides and doing so very effectively at the moment. The question will be once he gets into government right how does he keep the angry people inside the tent when

he's the man as opposed to the guy criticizing the man. Okay. You've twice in that answer said the government, as it almost certainly will fall, and Polyev, once he gets into government, you're basically treating the next election as it's a fait accompli. Right. So is that to say they're, I mean, again, based on your experience and your research in the field, is there no path back at the moment for the current prime minister? search in the field, is there no path back at the moment for the current prime minister? No. Period, full stop. It's over for Trudeau. So the main question, if you're a liberal insider and you're Trudeau, the question is, does he serve the party better by taking the hit? Or does he serve the party better by getting out

of the way and letting someone else take a crack? Is there an outside chance that someone else might become safe change versus poly of scary change? Yes. Is it very likely? No. You may not like to comment on the competition, but I did see a poll, I don't know, a week or two ago that said, yes, there's a great deal of antipathy around the current prime minister, but there was no love for Pierre Polyev either. They just sort of, he was considered less worse than the prime minister. What do you infer from that? of, he was considered less worse than the prime minister. What do you infer from that? Well, I don't actually agree with that. So, and I'm not saying there's 11 for Pierre Palliot, but we tested his ads in November, right? So we put seven ads out to the Canadian public and said, what do you think about these ads? And they tested as well as the best ads we've ever tested before, which ironically were Justin

Trudeau's ads in 2015. He feels their pain. When he goes out there and he says, I grew up in a neighborhood like this, right? Increasingly people that are growing up here can't afford to stay here and that's wrong. The system's broke, we need to fix it. A lot of people nod their head. A lot of people that don't feel like conservatives nod their head. I'm going to be very careful how I ask this question. And I've met Pierre Polyev. He's a very capable politician. There's no question about it. He put a 20-minute mini documentary on debt up online and got hundreds of thousands of hits on the thing. So he's got an ability to connect with people on social media in a way that I haven't seen before.

Having said that, I spoke to somebody the other day who said, I really want to vote conservative in the next election, but I'd really like Pierre Polyev to stop acting like such an objectionable, and then he used a word that rhymes with trick. Based on your research, do you think he ought to stop acting like such an attack dog and start acting more prime ministerial? So, based on my research, no. Right? So, you know, I haven't tested everything he's done, right? But again, we tested these seven different ads,

and there's sort of a range of intensity to them and i sort of had the impression that when you're hot on tv in an ad as a politician uh that people tend to react badly to that but that's just not true not at this time for that person people dig that now now i would argue um as someone that's a big believer in democracy and that believes that whipsawing policy is bad for the country, that he would serve the country better by toning down some of that rhetoric. But I understand why he's doing it. He's doing it to connect with the angry people, both on the left as well as on the right.

And he is connecting with them. Okay, in our last minute and change here, I want to ask you about all of the hints that Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, has been dropping over the last few weeks about not adhering to the fixed election date law and in fact, maybe calling an early election three years into a four-year term, which would mean he would go next spring as opposed to June 4th, 2026,

which is when the law says he's supposed to have the next election. Do you have any polling as to whether or not the public would like an early election in the province? Yeah, we haven't polled on this election at this time. Historically, when we've asked those questions, what we've found is people that are not government supporters want an election at any time. They will never complain about an election, whether it's early or on schedule. And government supporters tend to rally behind the premier. Whatever the premier says, they generally buy into. So it's a risk, right? But historically, and we were talking earlier about John Horgan in BC, who had a fixed election

law and then in the middle of COVID broke that law to call an early election. And won a majority. Won a majority government. Yeah. Very quickly, as I follow up on that, because you've had the job of advising premiers on this question of when to go. And I look at the scenario right now and I see Doug Ford almost certainly would rather run with Justin Trudeau in office in Ottawa as opposed to a big Pierre Pogliev majority government. He might want to get out there early and before the RCMP come back, potentially with charges against his government for Greenbelt fiasco shenanigans. And, you know, we've got this history in the province of always whatever party we put in power federally, we put a different one in power provincially. Right.

So add it all up. Do you think you should go early? That's a good question. I'm not sure I would, honestly, because normally you have some external event that you can use as an excuse to go. And right now, I don't see where that event is. And arguably, I don't think he has a lot to fear about the first year in power with the poly of government, because I think they have overlapping agendas. And there's actually quite a bit they could get done in that year. I think once the poly of government has been in there for a bit, I think then I would be more worried about it, but I wouldn't be more, I wouldn't be worried about the first year of a poly of government. Fascinating. That's Greg Lyle, founder and president, Innovative Research Group. Greg, always appreciate your visits to our studio. Thanks.

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