Gas Prices, Trump and Angry Young Men - Inside Canada’s Wild 2025 Election

An interview with friend of the Missing Middle, pollster David Coletto

Meredith Martin

Mike Moffatt

, and

Sabrina Maddeaux

Apr 16, 2025

In this episode, conservative pundit Sabrina and economist Mike Moffatt speak with David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data, to explore the evolving landscape of Canadian election polling.

They discuss the impact of recent policy changes, particularly the carbon tax, on voter sentiment and the shifting dynamics of affordability issues. The conversation delves into the trends among young voters, particularly young men, and the gender dynamics influencing voting behaviour. The discussion also highlights the scarcity mindset surrounding housing and the rising favorability of Mark Carney as a political figure. (This episode was recorded at 9:30 am on Monday, April 14, 2025)

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Your recent polling shows Mark Carney and the Liberals pulling ahead, especially after he axed the carbon tax, something you know to drop gas prices by as much as 20 cents a litre in some spots. Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre, who's been railing against the tax forever, is getting way less credit.

What's going on here, and how did the Liberals manage to flip the script on one of their biggest vulnerabilities?

David Coletto: Two things. It's really important from a policy perspective. One is, in every province that saw the federal carbon tax backstop removed, most people believed the price of gas went down. Two, almost all of them who did attribute it to the removal of the carbon tax. Which is..I think really interesting. And [it’s] not always that a policy change is as quickly understood as that one was.

And then when we ask people, Who do you credit more with this change? Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre? By almost a two-to-one margin, people say Mark Carney.

And so here's a perfect example of a policy change in the middle of an election - mind you, I don't know if it changed the trajectory of the campaign, but it helped, I think, remove a liability that the Liberals have had around affordability and gave people something to point to that said, ‘Hey, Mark Carney did make my life more affordable.’ -Perceived affordability…because the price is, for most people, neutral. Nonetheless, the most talked about, the most well-defined issue for the Conservatives, I think, [went] from a sword issue for them to a very effective shield for Mr. Carney and the Liberals.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So even after all of that repeating axe the tax, axe the tax, it's Carney that gets the credit. Do you think that's just an effect of people tuning in closer to the election and noticing when the tax actually gets axed?

David Coletto: I mean, it could also be the way we ask the question, to be honest. Like we asked: Who do you credit more? Doesn't mean people didn't credit Poilievre and the work that he did over the last two years to try to bring that outcome into existence.

But at the end of the day, I think people looked and said, well, you know, Mark Carney made the actual change and so I'm going to give him the credit.

And I think it was also a reminder of how unpopular Justin Trudeau was and his inability to move past that issue was, I think, reinforced the idea that he was kind of the stubborn leader who wouldn't listen to the public and wasn't responsive.

And on his first day in office, Mark Carney did the thing that so many people wanted to see done. And so all of that, I think, helps explain not only why Carney did it, but also the positive reaction that I think the public had to him.

…One in four Conservative supporters today credit Mark Carney more than Pierre Poilievre for that. So it's also a reminder, I think the Conservatives should have celebrated that instead of kind of getting all angry and a little pissed off that Carney took their issue because they should have taken the win on it.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, there was a real missed opportunity for a victory lap there.

David Coletto: Yeah.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. And that's something that we always try and do at Missing Middle is always take a victory lap whenever we can.

So, you know, if we look beyond carbon tax, up until a few months ago, the Conservatives had an overwhelming lead on cost-of-living issues. We had massive inflation a couple of years ago, particularly at the grocery store.

I'm a father of two. Whenever I go to Food Basic, I just cry when I see what's happened to the price of fishy crackers. And then you look at the housing crisis. It's no surprise that an incumbent party would be doing poorly. But over the last few months, according to your polling, we've seen that lead shrink to a near draw.

So, beyond just the carbon tax issue, how were the Liberals able to close the gap? And why were the NDP never really able to gain traction on the issue?

David Coletto: Yeah, I think it's a really important question. Our most recent survey we just put out yesterday, showed that when you ask people who's best on affordability, the Conservatives now only lead by like two or three points, which was, as you said, Mike, like close to 15, 20, not long ago.

I think a few things have happened. I think people's focus on what affordability means has changed. We've gone from a world where almost everybody was like, ‘Just give me some relief.’ Right? These prices feel like they're keeping going up. I don't see any sense that they're getting better. And I think what for a lot of the public today, it's much more about who's going to stop it from getting worse. And that's a subtle but important shift in mindset that gives the Liberals an opportunity to talk about it.

I mean, one of the most impressive things the Liberal campaign has done so far is to completely almost forget and remove itself from the last 10 years, right? The public itself almost has this amnesia over how it felt back in January to how it feels today, right?

Even the government's approval rating, there's this crazy chart I had that shows it basically goes from 60% disapproving to Mark Carney becoming prime minister and that dropping to like 25.

All of those factors, this sense of change, the sense that Carney isn't being associated with decisions that Justin Trudeau's government made or may have, in their minds, made things worse. Plus this subtle shift in mindset, I think, allows for people to say ‘Everything I thought about the last two years, I can forget.’

And now we're looking ahead - back to the carbon tax - Carney has proven he is not like the Liberals ‘I thought were making life more expensive for me’. And that, I think, was an important point for people to get past that hang-up that they had about Liberals and affordability.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Now, one term that really caught my eye is your work tracking young men shifting towards the Conservatives. You've tied it to economic frustration, housing pain, and even platforms like TikTok shaping their views. Why is it that young men in particular are leaning right? And how much could this actually swing the election if it keeps up?

David Coletto: Yeah, I think, you know, I've been fascinated by this question because I've seen it in other places. Canada is not, you know, unique in this. You see it in Germany. You see it in the United States. You see it in most parts of the world where young men are seemingly trending to a Conservative both orientation, but also in terms of their voting behaviour.

And that's new. It's not something we've seen in the past.

You can go back to past elections. You know, there wasn't much of a gender gap among young Canadians when Justin Trudeau won his majority in 2015. But today, the gender gap is the largest among Canadians under 30. So, you know, the same cohort, two different genders moving in opposite directions.

Will it be consequential to this election? It could be, but given where the polls are today, I don't think it will be enough. Young men, like young Canadians in general, are less likely to come out and vote, which is showing up in our data. Only half of them say they're definitely going to vote compared to close to 80% among Baby Boomers. So that's a big gap that won't be probably enough to make up the difference.

But it's also about: What the legacy of that, right? And does this mean the Conservatives have a generation of men that are going to stick with them over time?

I don't know. Is this a poly effect? Is this a Conservative effect?

But what I do think is it's tied to housing. Absolutely. I think it's one of the central issues. Young men not believing they can achieve one of the things they thought was kind of part of that process of becoming a, quote, adult and making a life for yourself and your family. And I also think it's part cultural. I think there is a sense that the world has created barriers that, for history, have benefited white young men, but now are holding them back. And that perception is, I think, being fed by social media and the content that these young men are consuming right now.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, I think the big caveat is that young men are often among the least likely to actually show up to the polls, at least historically. But they do seem so much more engaged and enthusiastic this election. How do you think voter turnout will look for this demographic? Do you see that enthusiasm actually translating?

David Coletto: In some instances, yes. I'm still skeptical that it's going to be as widespread as it was in 2015. I don't know if we're going to see a youthquake this time. And the reason is, I think, in part, because a lot of the issues that young people generally, men and women, want to be discussed aren't in this campaign, right?

While housing has come up, it's not the central focus. While affordability comes up, it's not as much as Donald Trump has defined this election and in the way the media are covering it and the way the parties, I think, in large part are responding to.

And we know in our polling that if you are under the age of 30, you are 30 points less likely to say that Donald Trump is one of the top three issues in this campaign for you.

And so, see, that's the thing about campaigns that you don't know what's happening below the surface.

So I'm 44. I'm not being targeted by content by the Conservatives or the New Democrats in terms of reaching young people. Jagmeet Singh used to own a subset of that under-30 crowd. He was the only leader on TikTok. And I think, I don't know what they're doing right now in targeting that group, because I'm not going to see it. But I think the likelihood of them turning out in record numbers, I don't necessarily see.

Mike Moffatt: Now, that's young men. But what do you think younger women who are also experiencing some of the same housing and economic pain, sort of difficulty with stagnant wages and so on as young men, they also spend a lot of time on the same social media platforms, or at least social media platforms in general. But it doesn't seem, unless I'm misreading the data, that they're showing a similar swing. Is it just that young women or women in general don't really like Poilievre personality or tone? Or is there something bigger going on there?

David Coletto: I think there is a clear difference between young men and young women. They're moving in completely different directions. And I think it's partly because, and maybe a large part, because of the appeal of Poilievre himself. I think there's a, I'm going to use this term, but kind of masculinity and maybe a toxic version of that, that really turns them off.

Maybe he's too Trumpy, as some have said. And Trump in particular is despised by women of all ages. And so I think that could be playing into it a little bit. And we've seen it, Mike, in other countries, though. In Germany, for example, we had an election earlier this year, and young men overwhelmingly went and voted for the far right, AFD, in that country. And young women actually went and voted for the kind of far left. So they went to extreme versions. They were looking for kind of extreme answers to the questions that they had and the concerns they had, but they ended up in different places.

And I think in Canada right now, there isn't a version of that extreme - I'm not going to call extreme right versus left - but that more disruptive left.

I think that's a failure, frankly, on the part of the NDP to not being an answer to young people, particularly who look around and say, ‘This world isn't working for me. What are you going to do to fix it?’

I think Poilievre has been very good over the course of the last year, speaking to young people generally about that. And he hasn't connected as much with young women.

But the New Democrats should have owned that space against a Mark Carney-like figure, and they haven't. And so I think we're seeing young women really move to gravitate towards Carney because he seems like a safer, secure option in this kind of disruptive world right now.

Sabrina Maddeau: Now, one stat that really stood out to me from your polls was that 40% of Canadians under 30 think that owning more than one home should actually be illegal, which is obviously a sign of a serious scarcity mindset amongst younger voters. How exactly are these economic pressures splitting the youth vote?

And, are we seeing any… divide between, say, young men looking for disruption and opting out of the system versus those who are looking for systemic fixes and who are still a bit more optimistic?

David Coletto: Yeah, I mean, that question to me summed up the scarcity mindset, right? Like, it shows that there is a demand, a political demand for policies that some people in this country would think is absolutely insane, but is a reflection of just how much housing has become central to a lot of the thinking, particularly among Canadians under 40, I would say.

I think the story around Conservative support in this country in this election is not correct. I actually think there's a lot of support for Pierre Poilievre.

I put out a piece the morning we're recording this about how Mark Carney's favorables have gone kind of through the roof, but PierrePoilievre is not that unpopular. 40% of Canadians have a positive view of him. …He's not Donald Trump and he's not hated.

And I think it's in part because there is a subset of the electorate, and we did some work on this, that actually, to your point, Sabrina, wants disruption. There's this other half that are looking for stability, and so really this election is not about change versus status quo, but it's a choice between a more disruptive version of politics, I think, represented by Pierre Poilievre, who wants to change the way public policy is made, break down barriers that have prevented people from owning a home, from bringing home a more powerful paycheck, as he'd say. Versus the stability now that Mark Carney represents in the face of Trump and the chaos that he's created.

I do think younger Canadians generally are more attracted to the disruptive version of that, right? Because they look around and they say, the system's just not working for me very well.

And there's this middle - the title of your podcast jumped into my head. So I was like, there's this middle, you know, conversation about how do we fix it that I think is lacking still in this campaign.

So I think young men in particular, more than any demographic, are attracted to that disruptor. Like that group remains the most solid in his camp, even to this day, as some other demographics like Boomers have basically abandoned largely the conservatives.

Mike Moffatt: A quick data question, because I think that the point you made about Poilievre still being relatively popular, I think it's overlooked, you know, he's still about like 38, 39% of the polls. So if we compare now to say four months ago, like how much of that closing gap is the Conservatives going down in the polls and how much is it, you know, Liberals taking support from the NDP or the Bloc or whoever?

David Coletto: Yeah, well, I mean, we all compare like January or end of December, 2024, which I think is a false comparison. Because that's when Trudeau was at his least popular, Christian Freeland had just resigned, like the bottom fell out… So the Conservatives did have a 27 point lead. But the better comparison is earlier in the year where the Conservatives were pulling around 42, which I think was kind of their real high watermark.

Well, they're only down depending on the poll, three to five points, right? And so it's not been a collapse of Conservative support. It's been on the other hand, a collapse of NDP support. They're down, you know, eight points and they had been around 18, 17, 18% for basically the entire time Jagmeet Singh was leader. And now they're pulling at eight or 9%, right?

And so the Liberal vote is very much being lifted up by this consolidation from New Democrats, some Bloc supporters, some Green supporters coming to the Liberals and less about the Conservative vote falling apart.

And so while we sometimes say this election is gonna end by this national unity, we're all together, kumbaya and all, I don't see that. I do see some pretty, some deep fissures and divides, not just regionally, but generationally that whoever wins this is gonna have to, I think, I would say, find a way to solve and bring together because this could be one of those elections that leaves a lot of bad taste in people's mouths.

Mike Moffatt: So I totally agree with that sort of division and divide. And I just look at how much stuff has changed over the last four to six months. Like you go to a Polymarket or something like that, where you look at odds of winning and losing for different parties and go way up, way down.

So we're just in this environment full of surprises. And one of the big surprises, at least during the campaign for me, is Mark Carney's favorability rankings have gone up during the campaign, or at least his negatives have been dropping.

The conventional wisdom, and to be completely transparent, is one I shared, is that given Mark Carney's inexperience as voters got to know him better, they'd find things that they dislike and he would become less favorable. But that hasn't seemed to happen. And it doesn't appear it's because he's campaigning particularly well. And I say this with all respect about a man I've worked with for years and quite like on a personal level, Mark Carney hasn't exactly been Justin Trudeau circa 2015 or Jack Layton circa 2011 out there.

So how has he somehow become more popular during the campaign? And do the conservatives have any hope of getting Carney's favorability ratings to substantially drop in the next couple of weeks?

David Coletto: I still think there's a sizable portion of the electorate who is deeply afraid, right, of what's happening around the world. And so they are putting a lot of good vibes at Mark Carney. They're hoping that what they believe he can do, what they believe his experience is, is going to be the kind of savior to the uncertainty that they're feeling.

I don't know if there's enough time for that to be contradicted, right? Or to be reduced. And so the more that they're seeing him, the more, even if he's not exciting and charismatic and particularly articulate, frankly, and almost doesn't matter because that's not what they're looking for, right? Like they're not looking for the best performer. They had a performer for the last 10 years and they're not particularly sure that the outcomes have been particularly good. And so now they're looking for somebody who's almost not a politician.

And so what's also clear is none of the attacks anyone has tried to put on him have worked. In fact, I was thinking about it. It's like every time the Conservatives and New Democrats have attacked Mark Carney, they may have actually informed voters of something that they didn't know but actually now appreciate. Like he miscited things in his PhD dissertation.

Well, I didn't know he had a PhD.

What's it in? Economics. Wonderful!

Mike, look, we need folks like you to help manage the economy right now.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah. Oh, wait, he has a long resume. What's on that resume?

David Coletto: Yeah, tell me more, right? Oh, he was Chair of Brookfield. You mean a multinational real estate and investment and asset company?

Oh, he knows a lot about business!

Pierre Poilievre, have you done anything like that? No.

You know what I mean?

So it really felt like both the NDP and the Conservatives are campaigning like it's 2024. And not like it's 2025.

And Mark Carney probably would not have done as well. I can probably guarantee wouldn't have done as well if people were deeply concerned about the cost of living and were blaming people like Galen Westin and other corporate types for their lot in life as opposed to now blaming Donald Trump for the uncertainty that he's created.

And so I do think it is remarkable, Mike, about Mark Carney's sort of - he's blasting off and everybody's just watching and they can't do anything about it.

And the debates are this week. We'll see whether that is a moment to test that impression that people have of Carney. Either he can reinforce it or it could, the bottom could fall out because people actually realize, wait, this guy isn't anything like he says he is.

At this point, I don't know if that's likely to happen because he's had plenty of opportunities to disprove what people think. And he's in large part reinforced it in a positive way.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, it's a very different environment for sure. And this next data point, I think really reinforces that because you've shared that 47% of voters now expect the Liberals to win compared to just 30% for the Conservatives, which is of course a total reversal from as recently as February.

How much does this bandwagon effect drive voter behavior?

And like you said, could something like the upcoming debates shake up those expectations or is it pretty much too late?

David Coletto: Well, I think, yeah, I mean, the shift is remarkable. And again, just how short a period of time it was. So few people actually thought the Liberals could win in 2024 to now almost being a majority view. I think it benefits the Liberals to an extent, right?

I think we saw it in the Ontario provincial election where it became pretty obvious to everybody that Doug Ford was gonna win. And actually on election day, a lot of his voters stayed home because they thought, ‘eh, it's over.’

So he didn't perform as well as he had hoped, I think, even though he won a big majority, he didn't hit the 90 seats and didn't get close to half the vote that some polls suggested he could have had all his voters come out.

So I think the sense of complacency is a real problem for Liberals because what it's clear is even though the Conservatives are aware that they may not be in a position to win, there's still lots of motivation among Conservatives to go and vote. And they want to like express their dissatisfaction with the liberals by voting. Like that is something that I think a lot of Conservatives still want to do.

So I think the longer this goes on, that's a risk. On the other hand, we saw in the 2015 election that again, are they quote peaking too soon the Liberals?

Maybe, because you want that kind of thing to happen in the last week.

But the good news for the Liberals is, advanced polls start, advanced voting starts this weekend. And currently has a relatively good set of debates. This weekend could kind of lock in that advantage and that sense of them winning, I think could be a driver in those conversations that people are gonna have at the dinner table around Easter and the long weekend in sort of setting that and firming that up a little bit.

Sabrina Maddeaux: As a final thought, this election really does feel like a turning point. There are just so many critical issues at play and party survival might even be on the line for some. When we look back in a few years, what do you think this campaign will be remembered for beyond just who wins or loses?

David Coletto: Oh, wow. I think it will be looked on as one of those elections that we will be shocked once we take full stock of what happened, how much has changed in a very short period of time, right?

Like you had a new Prime Minister who then called an election literally a week after he took office and found himself as the favorite a week later, right?

And a point where people were even saying that the Liberals may not even get party status at some point in 2024, that now they could win a majority government in a way that Justin Trudeau failed to do the two previous opponents.

I think we're gonna look back, though and remember the trauma of Donald Trump in particular. And so this is an election that kind of happened at the same time, right?

This period wasn't an election period. It was the time where we were all figuring out: Is the stock market up or down? Is Donald Trump putting tariffs in or not? And so I think that will still be the defining feature of this moment, we happen to have had an election that occurred at the same time.

So that's my sense of it now. I mean, history always writes itself differently than what we remember. But as a pollster, to see public opinion swing as fast as it did will be the thing I remember because it doesn't happen almost ever where you see people basically wake up one morning and say, ‘I’ve got a completely different perspective of the world than I did yesterday.’

Sabrina Maddeaux: We’re living in unique times for sure. David, thank you so much for breaking it all down for us. It’s always a blast having you on.

And also a big thanks to our producer, Meredith Martin for always keeping us on track.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, thanks, David. That was fantastic. And to our audience, if you have any thoughts or questions about proper citation on PhD theses, please send us an email to [email protected].

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.