The impact of climate change policies on the economy

Or: the joy of survey research in a regionally diverse country

Today’s post is about climate change – or, more specifically, about what Canadians think about policies to address climate change when they’re not framed narrowly around the carbon tax. But it’s also about the joys of doing survey research in a country as regionally diverse as Canada.

There’s a new Confederation of Tomorrow survey report out on addressing climate change in the Canadian federation – if you haven’t seen it, you can catch up here. It covers a lot of ground. It confirms that, for the moment at least, the cost of living is overshadowing the environment as the public’s top issue. Despite that, opinions on how to balance economic and environmental concerns have hardly changed. Most Canadians, including just over one in two in both Saskatchewan and Alberta, continue to favour at least a gradual phasing out of fossil fuels. And in recent years, the proportion of Canadians who say they are seeing changes where they live that they attribute to climate change has edged upward.

The 2024 survey also asked Canadians whether they think that, over the next 10 years, policies aimed at fighting climate change will generally have a positive or negative impact on the economy of the country, of their province or territory, and of their local community. On this question, there is no consensus – though, overall, people are marginally more likely to believe that the economic impact of climate change policies will be positive.

As you might guess, the national averages mask significant regional differences. In Saskatchewan and Alberta, one in two expect the impact on their economies to be negative. In Quebec and Ontario, only about half as many share the same concern.

Despite these significant differences in opinion, it’s still important to avoid framing the issue simply as pitting one region of the country against another. There’s a mix of views within every province. The proportion in Saskatchewan and Alberta that anticipate that climate change policies will negatively affect their province’s economy barely reaches a majority. One in four Saskatchewanians and Albertans think their province’s economy with benefit.

The story gets even more interesting, however, once we factor in differences among age groups. In general – that is, across the country as a whole – younger people are more optimistic about the economic impact of climate change policies than are their older counterparts. People under age 45 are more likely to say that the impact on the economy of their own province or territory will be positive than they are to say it will be negative; people age 45 and older are more evenly split.

But, given the regional variation in opinions on this question, we thought it was likely that the differences among age groups would vary across regions too. So we checked. And we were right. And it’s startling – check it out:

(To ensure we have good sample sizes for each age group, the chart leaves out Newfoundland and Labrador, and Manitoba. On energy questions, it doesn’t make sense to combine the former with the Maritimes, or the latter with its Prairie neighbours. It works to combine Saskatchewan and Alberta because their residents’ responses to this question are similar.)

There are three distinct patterns.

• In the Maritimes, Ontario and B.C., younger people stand out as being much more likely to anticipate that climate change policies will have a positive impact on their provincial economies. In both Ontario and B.C., there is a 19-point gap between the proportions of the youngest and oldest age groups who say the impact will be positive.

• In Saskatchewan and Alberta, it’s also the case that younger people are more likely than their older counterparts to anticipate a positive impact. But what’s different here is that no age group is more likely to expect a positive than a negative impact. Younger people in these two provinces are more or less evenly split on this issue – which is not the case for younger people anywhere else in the country.

• In Quebec, there is virtually no difference among age groups; for young and old alike, more expect a positive than a negative impact. In other words, the generation gaps on this question that are evident elsewhere in the country are absent in Quebec.

While, in most parts of the country, there are differences between the views of younger and older people on the potential impact of climate change policies on the economy, there are also differences among younger people across regions, and among older people across regions. Even looking just within the West, younger people in B.C. and in Alberta or Saskatchewan look very different; so do older people in these neighbouring provinces.

In a country as regionally diverse as Canada, demographic breakdowns at the national level (e.g., by age, gender or immigration background) will often miss most of the story.

This post features data from the 2024 Confederation of Tomorrow Survey of Canadians. The author is solely responsible for any errors in presentation or interpretation.

The Confederation of Tomorrow surveys give voice to Canadians about the major issues shaping the future of the federation and their political communities. They are conducted annually by an association of the country’s leading public policy and socioeconomic research organizations: the Environics Institute for Survey Research, the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation, the Canada West Foundation, the Centre D’Analyse Politique – Constitution et Fédéralisme, the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government and the First Nations Financial Management Board.

The 2024 study consists of a survey of 6,036 adults, conducted between January 13 and April 13, 2024 (82% of the responses were collected between January 17 and February 1); 94% of the responses were collected online. The remaining responses were collected by telephone from respondents living in the North or on First Nations reserves.