As wildfires displace Indigenous communities and choke skies across North America, a new poll finds that fewer and fewer Canadians believe that climate change is caused by humans.
About 59 per cent of those polled by Angus Reid last week described climate change as “a fact and is mostly caused by human activities.” That number is a 15-year low and down four percentage points compared to last year.
Belief that global warming poses a “very serious threat” to the planet has also fallen 12 percentage points since 2021, down to 38 per cent, according to the poll released Monday. The online national survey was conducted between July 10 and 14 on the heels of scorching heat waves that saw Toronto reach temperatures as high as 36 C and as wildfires began to burn stretches of northern Ontario, with just under 3,000 responses across Canada.
Shachi Kurl, the president of Angus Reid, highlighted that not only are people more skeptical of humans’ role in climate change, they also feel less pressure to finding immediate solutions.
“That sense of urgency has dropped,” Kurl told the Star. “I want to underscore that a majority of Canadians still say that climate change is a serious threat, it’s just the level of intensity around that perception has decreased.”
The majority of respondents, 57 per cent, do believe that climate change is a “crisis,” though that number is down from April where 63 per cent reported that view. While one in ten people believe it is already too late to curb a climate crisis, 14 per cent think that Earth’s temperatures are “fine” and “nothing needs to be done,” according to the study that also found 19 per cent feel that there is “plenty of time” to course correct.
Nearly 200 wildfires are still active in northern Ontario as of Monday, forcing many communities and Indigenous groups around Thunder Bay to flee their homes in search of shelter. The smoke from those blazes blew into the Greater Toronto Area last week, giving the city some of the most polluted air in the world though Environment Canada’s air quality warnings were lifted on Sunday.
Why the decline
The decline in belief in man-made climate change is spread across many groups, the poll found, though people who vote Conservative and older Canadians were found to have the largest dip in belief compared to previous years. About 80 per cent of Liberal, NDP and Bloc Québécois voters thought that global warming was a “major factor” in the wildfires, though only 22 per cent of Conservative voters shared that view.
Angus Reid added that belief in human-caused climate change declined among younger women compared to five years ago.
The study threw a few theories as to why views are shifting, but was careful not to give any definitive explanations of the data. Researchers said that the climate change issue has taken a back seat to cost of living concerns like inflation and housing and added that the issue is getting increasingly politicized due to carbon taxes and policies around energy sources.
“This may encourage some people to reassess not only proposed solutions, but the underlying cause of climate change itself,” the researchers wrote.
Kurl also highlighted that perception changes by province, based on which governments prioritize environmental policies. She mentioned that Quebec, whose residents reported the most confidence in their leaders to respond to wildfires, identifies climate change as more of an immediate threat than respondents from Alberta.
She said those findings speak to circumstances rather than “wholesale differences in the way people from different provinces think.”
The online poll of 2,649 adults comes from all of Canada’s 343 federal ridings, and Angus Reid says there is a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.
