Housing on track to become the most concerning issue for surveyed Canadians: Nanos

After months of pitching what they describe as the most ambitious housing plan ever, a new poll shows concern about the cost of housing is on the upswing while support for the Liberal government is down.

The latest survey by Nanos Research found that housing and the concern around the cost of housing is quickly overtaking jobs, the economy and the environment as the issue of top national concern.

Over the last month, the poll found that concern about housing increased from 8.8 per cent to 12.5 per cent as concerns around inflation being the top national issue dropped from 13.7 per cent to 12.9 per cent.

The chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research Nik Nanos said the findings were not surprising.

“Many Canadians, especially young Canadians, feel like they are getting crushed with high interest rates and just the general cost of housing, whether they are renting or paying for a mortgage,” Nanos said.

“Worry about housing is not going down with all the efforts that the Liberals are putting behind this, it’s actually going up.”

Ottawa realtor and broker Marnie Bennett says she’s been in the business for more than 43 years and has never seen such high levels of anxiety from both sellers and buyers.

“Nobody can predict what is going on in the economy,” she said. “We are dealing as real estate people of this whole balance effect right now.”

Bennett says the average price of a home in Ottawa is about $750,000 and that’s just for what she calls a “typical” 3 bedroom home.

To increase their buying power, Bennett says more and more clients are moving to Ottawa’s East End where prices tend to be nearly $150,000 less, buying fixer uppers, or choosing to buy much smaller homes outside the city than they had initially searched for.

Bennett also says she sees more intergenerational homes and parents gifting their children money so they can afford a down payment.

“Everyone’s dream is to own a home, but I don’t know if that is going to be a reality anymore because how are you going to save the money?” she said.

The latest Nanos federal ballot tracking has the Conservatives now at 41.0 per cent, 15 points ahead of the Liberals at 25.7 per cent. The NDP, meanwhile, are sitting at 17.3 per cent, the Bloc at 8.9 per cent, the Green Party at 4.2 per cent and the Peoples Party at 2.6 per cent.

Nanos says it’s young people, who he called a swing-voting block, appear to be deserting the Liberal government.

“In 2015, Justin Trudeau built his majority around many enthusiastic and positively minded young people who were progressive,” he said. “Fast forward now, and those same young people have deserted the Liberals and are looking at the Conservatives probably because of the anxiety and frustration they are having with the rising cost of living and housing.”

But the problem for the Liberals may stretch beyond any one issue and be more about the Liberal brand itself. Dalhousie University professor Lori Turnbull says that while the Liberals were “late to the party” when it comes to honing in on housing as a major problem, a large number of voters appear to have tuned out the Liberals all together.

“It’s more ‘are people listening to the Liberals at all?'” she asked. “It wouldn’t matter what the Liberals were talking about to some people, it wouldn’t matter if they were putting up all the things they wanted to hear and it wouldn’t matter because they are not listening.”

Turnbull says there is a sense that momentum is gaining behind the Conservatives and that the Liberals, after failing to gain significant strength in poll after poll, are on their path to defeat.

“If it starts to feel like the Liberals are going to lose, then there is going to be less people listening to what their proposed solutions are because they think they will not have the opportunity to implement them anyway,” she said.

So how could the Liberals change the channel and get more people’s attention? Turnbull says that would likely require a new leader, which she calls an unlikely event.

“Would that be a solution to everything? No,” she said. “It looks like Justin Trudeau is on this path and as long as that is the case, it is really hard for a party to show up differently with the same leader, especially when the party has so much taken on the image of Justin Trudeau and remade itself according to his values, his persona.”