Weekend reads: On precarity

A Q&A on the national mood, with pollster and public opinion analyst David Coletto

Alice Adler/Getty Images

The news cycle these days is as distressing as it is chaotic. After a nerve-wracking week of tensions between the United States and Canada, President Trump announced another pause in the tariffs on some Canadian goods. Meanwhile, our Parliament is prorogued as the Liberal Party conducts its leadership race, the results of which will be announced tonight.

All this uncertainty is having a profound impact on our country, already in the throes of a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, an immigration crisis, and an opioid crisis.

To make sense of the current moment — and understand its impacts on public opinion — I reached out to David Coletto, founder and CEO of Abacus Data.

This week, David published a piece on his must-read Substack, arguing that the dominant mood in the country has changed from one of scarcity to one of precarity. Here, in this edited and condensed Q&A, we dig into that shift, the widespread economic precarity of our citizenry, the collapse of support for the NDP — and the Conservative Party’s narrowing lead in the polls.

TH: This week you published a fascinating piece about a shift of the mood from a scarcity mentality to one of precarity. The survey the piece draws on was conducted with 3,000 Canadian adults, from February 5th to 11th. Can you define the terms for us? How do we understand a scarcity mindset as opposed to one of precarity?

DC: For about two years now we’ve been noticing in the survey work we do, and the responses we get from Canadians, that there is a sense of scarcity. I define it basically as a feeling that the things people need in their lives are harder to get, more expensive, and if they have them, they are worried they are not going to be able to replace them. Think of a family doctor as the perfect example of that. It has been the prevailing mindset for people of all ages — across the country, gender, you name it. It’s almost a universal feeling. And that has been driven in part by inflation and a period of time that has been extraordinary for most people’s lives. Not everybody, but for a lot of people under 40, they have never really experienced a time in which prices have increased as fast as they did. It’s also, at the same time, that the country has grown its population really rapidly.

This sense that we are metaphorically fighting over the same amount of things, with more and more people needing them, has created this sense of scarcity. That drives people to zero-sum thinking and pushes them down the hierarchy of needs. That’s much more micro in nature. It’s like: The things in my household that I need are hard to get and expensive.

But what we’ve noticed — and I think it’s been driven not exclusively by this, but it has helped fuel it and has accelerated it — is that Donald Trump and the threats that he presents to people are reinforcing a broader concern around uncertainty. I think when Donald Trump first announced the tariffs, a few times ago now, the prevailing question in people’s minds was: How is this going to impact us? What does this mean for me? What does this mean for my family? That leads us now into a mindset that is much more about broader precarity.

Precarity basically means that it’s not just my day-to-day life that I’m worried about, although that’s still the frame in which people assess things. But it is: This world just seems so uncertain, and at any given moment some new crisis might come along that is going to make me shift my priorities. And the kinds of leaders that I’m looking for, politically but also at work and in our public spaces and public lives, [changes].

I think we’re in that transition, where we are more focused on a collective precarity. Hence why we see the patriotism emerging in Canada. We see the collective spirit: I’m going to do my part to push back. But also: I’m still deeply anxious and worried about what effects these bigger forces are having on my life.

You can look at things like climate change, and geopolitical conflict, and rapid changes in technology, particularly AI in the workplace and what it means for work and life — those are all forces that are coming together now to make people deeply uneasy about the world around them. In a way that I don’t think has existed for a really long time.

TH: It does seem like a pretty significant moment. Just to highlight a couple of facts from the report, 68% of Canadians are concerned about affording basic needs over the next six months. 45% of Canadians report that they would struggle to cover expenses for three months if their financial situation changed. You detail how this economic precarity is influencing life plans, causing 70% of people to delay major life decisions like buying a home, starting a family — particularly young people. How do you see this trend impacting our already very low birth rate?

DC: I think there’s clear evidence that it’s causing people to re-evaluate their life goals. For a long time people used to say that Millennials don’t want to have children, or even Gen Z. That’s not the case. There was always that intent to do it. There was the desire. Maybe they are going to have fewer kids, but they still wanted to.

This world now, people are questioning the stability of it. We know that when people feel that the basics in their life are harder to meet … Think of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and the physiological and safety needs. If those are going to be under stress, then I feel less confident in bringing a family into this world. All of that is likely going to have an effect. People might still have a family, but they may be doing it even later in their life than they would have. They may have fewer children than they might have liked to.

When you think of something like climate change, there is this sense among particularly the youngest cohorts of: What’s the point if the world is not going to be a safe place to live? If I can’t even guarantee that there’s not going to be a wildfire or a flood, or something that’s going to severely impact the safety of myself and my family.

This is a mindset that’s deeply corrosive to some of those things that we as a country actually need to happen. We have an aging population. The scarcity mindset created an environment that put incredible pressure on government to change our immigration policy. It’s all related. A broader precarity mindset, I think, only adds to that and makes it much more difficult for people to imagine not just being able to have children and a family, but whether they should. You always hear, “I don’t want to raise kids in this environment.” Well, if that becomes a prevailing [mindset], then that is a mood that is hard to shift.

TH: It is interesting. At the same time of this uncertainty, particularly regarding fears about the economy and the future of the country, support for the historic party of working people, the NDP, has totally collapsed. Their support is the lowest you’ve tracked since 2014. What’s your thinking on why this is happening?

DC: Well, I think there is two things. One is very particular to the New Democratic Party of today, and I think the challenge that they have had as a party, and Jagmeet Singh as the leader, in finding out how to make themselves relevant.

I think of AI and the immense technological change that’s happening, and the impact. If we thought the industrial revolution was a big deal, this is going to be even bigger. And I don’t know if there’s a political movement, or party, that is tapping into it — or that is there to represent those interests.

At the same time, what we see is that although people are deeply anxious about some of these changes that are happening pretty rapidly, the result has been actually that a lot of working-class people in Canada and in other parts of the world are gravitating to more of a conservative option that’s speaking to the cultural changes that are happening. And raising barriers in a way to say, “We’re going to slow this down.” Things around gender and trans rights, and all of these cultural issues, are being accentuated and focused on as a safe harbour. When actually, a whole bunch of other economic and sociological changes are happening.

And so, I think the NDP has found itself in a really difficult place, being a party that is very much socially progressive and embracing and encouraging the kinds of changes on the cultural side, but has been very hard-pressed to speak to the economic anxieties of those same people. And so, their coalition is very much splitting.

[It’s interesting to look] at what we’ve seen in other counties. If you look at Germany, for example, and the election that just happened there, you had the far-right and the far-left do quite well. If you look at the youngest cohort of Germans, young men went to the AfD, which is the far-right party, and young women went to the Left Party. You had that gender split, but they were both moving to the extremes. Because, I think, they feel the precarity of that world around them, whether it’s cultural change, economic change, or having Russia right close to them and challenging their sense of personal security.

So, it’s a fascinating area [of discussion]. I think it’s both [NDP] leadership and the party that are having a really hard time fitting into the conversation today.

TH: The Conservatives have lost some of their lead since Justin Trudeau resigned, although they are still ahead in the polls. You have been saying that you are less bullish now on a Conservative win in the next election. I’ve been hearing skepticism from the public about that overall trend, given how fast it’s changed. But you’re also pointing to new support for Liberals being spearheaded by Baby Boomers, who are the ones most upset by Trump’s threats. Can you flesh that out for us?

DC: I think what has happened over the course of two months is for many Canadians, the question that they are asking, and then the question that they will likely answer in an election, has shifted fundamentally. It has gone from solving the scarcity problem — who can make my life more affordable, who can build more homes, who can deal with the crime that I think is existing around me. The Conservatives had a very simple and effective message to speak to that. And Justin Trudeau, as long as he was leader of the Liberals and Prime Minister, was an easy villain in that story. We could point to him and say, “Under his watch, all these things got worse. If we just get rid of him, we can at least maybe move things in the right direction.”

What’s happened in the past two months is there is a new, bigger, badder villain. Donald Trump represents the complete, in many ways, destruction, reordering, resetting of the world order that Boomers in particular have understood their whole lives. In fact, they built it. This is a world that was designed and built, particularly the West, by that Boomer generation.

We see in almost every indicator that they are the most upset and angry. The sense of betrayal that they feel towards the United States is palpable. They are the most likely to say, “I’m absolutely not going to buy anything that is American. I’m not going to travel anymore to the United States. I’m done with that.” But they are also now reflecting on the leadership that they are looking for.

The simple way that I can describe how this mindset is impacting politics in Canada, and perhaps the outcome of the next federal election, is that previously Canadians were hiring for a job that they saw as fixing the scarcity problem. Today, I think they are asking people to fix the precarity problem. That requires a different type of leader.

If Mark Carney wins [tonight], and I think he will, it will be in part because he’s able to say to people, “I have spent my entire life preparing for this moment.” I think Canadians are looking for a safe pair of hands, somebody who can guide us through. I’m asking a question on a survey that we are going to launch on Monday: Between Poilievre and Carney, who do you think can best captain a ship through a storm? Because the storm, now, isn’t created domestically. It’s a storm created externally.

I think Baby Boomers in particular are consuming far more journalism. I think of my own parents who are Boomers living in the GTA. They wake up at six in the morning and CBC News is on TV pretty much all day long. The last two months have been just a flood of whiplash around Trump: “What is he doing in Ukraine? What is he doing on tariffs? He’s cozying up to Putin.” It’s like it is completely distorting the world that they [previously] understood. They are looking for somebody who can both navigate this, and perhaps bring some security back.