Internal government polling conducted last fall showed 67 per cent of Canadians supported a new or expanded oil pipeline, data that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office was drawing on as it negotiated the framework for a Pacific Coast pipeline with Alberta and British Columbia.
The surveys ran through the Privy Council Office’s weekly polling program, a fixture of Ottawa’s operations since 2015. Although non-partisan PCO staff administer the program, the PMO’s political staff supervise it and help shape each week’s questions alongside bureaucrats.
On two consecutive occasions in mid-November, roughly 2,000 Canadians were reached by live-agent telephone survey and asked whether they backed new or expanded pipeline infrastructure.
Critically, that 67 per cent figure held across every region, including 64 per cent in British Columbia and 56 per cent in Quebec, two provinces typically seen as the hardest sells on pipeline expansion.
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PCO pollsters also tested a far more loaded version of the question, one that pipeline opponents might describe as a fair summary of the tradeoffs and critics might call a push-poll. That follow-up question laid out ecosystem disruption, habitat impacts, and the risk of leaks and spills before asking respondents whether they still backed new pipeline construction. Support dipped, but only to 62 per cent, and majorities held in every region.
A third survey, conducted Dec. 1-7 with 1,000 respondents, asked Canadians directly whether signing the Alberta energy cooperation agreement represented sound national policy. Fifty-three per cent said it did, with pluralities in favour across all regions including B.C. and Quebec. At each step of the pipeline push, in other words, the Carney government had gone looking for public sentiment and found it broadly on side.
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