Canadian's trust in the prime minister hits a 15-year high, survey finds

Opinions on how Canadians feel about the prime minister, however, paint a different picture.

The percentage of Canadians who have “some” or “a lot” of trust in the country’s leader jumped from 65 per cent in 2010 to 80 per cent in 2025. That number is slightly more than the high levels of support posted in 2021 — a year the report notes was an outlier for elevated trust in political actors and institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the proportion of Canadians specifically expressing a high degree of trust in the prime minister doubled from Stephen Harper’s final years in power to Mark Carney’s first few months in the country’s top job, jumping from 16 per cent in 2012 and 2014 to 32 per cent in 2025.

The findings, shared exclusively with the Star, come from a comparative study of democratic values in countries in North, Central and South America, along with the Caribbean, conducted every two years.

The Environics Institute, which on Thursday released the Canadian portion of the results, conducted the survey online with 3,550 Canadians between July 30 and Aug. 7, meaning the findings were compiled prior to Parliament’s fall return.

Because the survey was conducted online, the research organization did not calculate a margin of error because online polls, while being representative of the population, cannot be considered truly random.

On questions of the country’s leadership, respondents were asked how they felt about the office of the prime minister, rather than the name of the person holding that role.

But those with a lot of trust in the office of the prime minister climbed by nine percentage points from 2023 to 2025, “a change which undoubtedly is connected to the switch in leadership from Justin Trudeau to Mark Carney,” the report notes.

The deepest divides occur along party lines.

Seventeen per cent of Liberal supporters had a high degree of trust in Canada’s Parliament in 2010 in the middle of Harper’s reign, compared to 42 per cent today under Carney’s leadership. Twenty-one per cent of Conservative supporters felt that way about a parliament led by their own government in 2010, compared to 13 per cent of Tory supporters now.

Opinions about the country’s leader are also stark: 60 per cent of Liberals currently have a high level of trust in the prime minister compared to 11 per cent of Conservatives.

The numbers are nearly identical to those posted south of the border, though in the United States it is 62 per cent of Republicans who have a high degree of trust in the American president, while only 10 per cent of Democrats feel the same way.

The overall findings show that assumptions that positive feelings about Canadian political institutions are trending downward are not true, said Andrew Parkin, executive director of the Environics Institute.

That the gap in trust between Canada’s leading political parties is just as large as it is across the border is potentially a “worrying” sign, he said, even though it is natural that trust would be low among supporters of parties whose leaders are not in power.

“One day there’ll be an election the Conservatives will win, and as long as the numbers switch back, then everything’s fine,” Parkin said.

“The question is … what if this is sort of a more permanent reset? Unfortunately, we just don’t know.”

Among all institutions covered by the report, which included levels of trust in elections, the RCMP, the Supreme Court, and the mass media, it was political parties that actually drew in the lowest proportions of a high level of trust.

Only 12 per cent of Canadians had a high degree of trust in political parties; 41 per cent of respondents, in contrast, had a high degree of trust in elections.

When results were broken down by age, it also emerged that younger Canadians — those aged 18 to 29 — trust Parliament more than they did in 2010, with those expressing a high level of trust doubling from 12 per cent to 24 per cent.

The proportion of Canadians aged 60 who said they had a high degree of trust in the prime minister specifically was also much higher than any other age group, rising sharply from 23 per cent in 2023 near the end of Trudeau’s tenure, to 44 per cent by the middle of 2025.