Pessimism about vaccine efficacy have grown substantially and impact the likelihood of workplace vaccine mandates.
The results from the annual year-end survey for The Business Monitor are now out. The Business Monitor is a regular B2B omnibus service and is powered by the Modus Business Panel, Canada’s only scientific, purpose-build business research panel.
Three-quarters of Canadians are very concerned about the cost of housing today.
Over the past year, pessimism about the efficacy of vaccines has nearly doubled, growing by over 10 percentage points. At the end of 2020, The Business Monitor measured business leaders’ optimism about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines just as they were about to roll out in Canada. There was a good level of optimism and only a small minority were pessimistic.
The vast majority of Canadians say the real estate market poses a threat to their financial well-being.
Almost half say Canada’s residential real estate market poses a serious risk to their financial well-being. This represents a big jump since 2022.
While this result is more or less consistent across gender, age, income and region, there are some important variations:
- Renters feel significantly more vulnerable than homeowners – 57% versus 35% say high risk, respectively.
- Worries about risks to financial well-being due to the real estate market increases progressively with the share of income spent on housing for both homeowners or renters.
Whether it is rents or home prices, few Canadians see relief on the horizon.
Most Canadians think that both home prices and rents will increase over the next year.
While there has been a dip in the number thinking home prices will increase since 2023, expectations remain much higher than in September 2022.
- As may be expected given recent market trends, expectations for higher home prices are most acute in Alberta (74%).
- Expectations for higher rents decrease progressively with age from a high of 89% of those under 35 to 63% of seniors.
- Expectations for both increased rents and home prices are also higher among renters as compared with homeowners.
Discussion
It would be hard to overstate just how much consternation Canada’s housing situation is causing Canadians. As we reported last week, a large majority think the country is moving in the wrong direction. Housing costs are driving this gloomy sentiment to a large extent. Few Canadians see any relief in sight.
What governments have been doing to address this issue is clearly not working. There’s a lot of focus on ‘affordability’ and little on the actual cost of housing.
Methodology
These results come from the latest Modalis Omnibus which is powered by the Modalis Public Opinion Panel – 100% recruited using random probability telephone sampling. Unlike other panels Modalis contains no AI bots or ‘professional respondents’.
Because the Modalis panel is built entirely using random probability sampling, it is valid to cite the margin of error for this survey. The survey is based on a representative sample of 1,604 Canadian adults and has a margin of error of +/- 2.45% points, 95 times out of 100. The survey data is weighted by age, gender, and region according to the latest Statistics Canada census.
