Canadians divided on budget priorities, Nanos survey finds

Prime Minister Carney will unveil his first federal budget on Tuesday. Colton Praill on how Canadians are feeling.

Canadians are divided on whether Prime Minister Mark Carney should invest big or tighten his fiscal belt in the upcoming federal budget, according to a new survey conducted for CTV News by Nanos Research.

The survey pitted running a budget to invest in programs for Canadians against balancing the budget to ease the tax burden.

• Mark Carney’s first budget plots a sharp departure from past fiscal plans

In pre-COVID-19 polling, 55 per cent of Canadians supported balancing the budget compared to 43 per cent who were in favour of a deficit to fund programming, while just 2 per cent of respondents said they were unsure.

By February 2023, the number of Canadians in favour of running a deficit had dropped to 35 per cent while those who supported balancing the budget remained relatively stable at 56 per cent.

New polling shows the two priorities are statistically tied: 47 per cent say running a deficit to invest is their preferred priority, while 48 per cent would rather focus on reducing the budget and 5 per cent said they are unsure.

“We’re at a point in time where a deficit, at least in the short-term, is seen as being more acceptable than it has been in the past,” Nanos Research chief data scientist and founder Nik Nanos said.

• Carney signals he’s prepared to fight an election over next week’s budget

He added that even with fiscal tightening, the change doesn’t grant the federal government “carte blanche” to continue running deficits, but signals a recognition of the value of investing in infrastructure, economic growth and jobs.

Acknowledgement of the economic pressures facing Canada, highlighted by the August drop in GDP reported this week, also appeared among Canadians’ top priorities for the federal budget.

Health care remains top priority, new issues surfacing

Asked to rank the two areas that Canadians would like to see made a priority in the federal budget, health care was the top answer with 30 per cent of respondents focusing on the issue.

It means health care received double the focus of any other priority but was notably down 19 percentage points from 2023, where nearly half of all respondents listed it as a key priority.

In its stead, new focus appears on housing (12 per cent), inflation relief (6 per cent), defence spending (5 per cent), and tariff relief (4 percent) - all of which were not represented in the 2023 survey.

“I think a lot of this has to do with people being concerned with paying for the rent, paying for the groceries and making sure they have a job in the short-term,” Nanos said.

“For average Canadians, what they want to see is no cuts to health care at this particular point in time but they’re going to want to see investments in the long-term. I think in the short-term, it’s about investments in building roads, jobs, infrastructure and things like that so that our economy can pivot and be less reliant on the United States.”

Methodology

Nanos conducted an RDD dual frame (land-and cell-lines) hybrid telephone and online random survey of 1,045 Canadians, 18 years of age or older, between Oct. 27 and 30, 2025. The firm says its survey results carry a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, 19 times out of 20, and that results were weighted by age and gender using the latest census information to represent the Canadian population.