Opinion | We polled Canadians on Carney’s big projects. They like them — with a catch - Toronto Star

The public is emboldened by wartime rhetoric that inspired a patriotic urgency to get moving. Now it’s up to the government to start building more, while proving to Canadians it’s already happening faster.

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks after LNG Canada said it will go ahead with the Phase 2 expansion project at its LNG terminal in Kitimat, B.C., during an announcement in Vancouver, on Tuesday. The expansion will double LNG Canada’s capacity to 28 million tonnes a year. 

David Coletto is founder and CEO of Abacus Data. Ashley Csanady is a senior vice president at Vantage, a full-service Canadian communications and government relations firm.

Prime Minister Mark Carney boasts some of the highest approval ratings of any prime minister in modern history — but his popularity is not a blank cheque to build whatever he wants, wherever he wants.

Nor is the public in a patient mood to get those big things built.

That’s according to a joint study commissioned by Abacus Data and Vantage (2,278 Canadian adults surveyed from Sept. 18 to 22). We wanted to gauge how Canadians really feel about Carney’s agenda a year into his push to build more big projects, faster.

In short, the public has granted permission in principle, but that support hinges on what is built, where and when.

Two-thirds of Canadians (67 per cent) believe building quickly is a question of Canada’s sovereignty, and half (52 per cent) approve of how the Carney government is handling the file. But only 24 per cent think the country is building too few projects. At the same time they want speed: 61 per cent expect construction to be underway within a year.

The head of the Assembly of First Nations reacted to national-interest designation for the pipeline by noting ‘we win in court.’