IPSOS Poll on grocery affordability and housing

Making ends meet is still top of mind of many Canadians, especially at the grocery store. New Ipsos pulling exclusively for Global News finds increasing food prices have Canadians looking for other places to cut back. Darrell Bricker from Ipsos joins us now with the details. Good morning, Darrell. Thanks for joining us. Morning Jason. So 83% of respondents say they are paying more for groceries now than they were six months ago. How much more are Canadians paying for food now? Well, they’re telling us about $80.00 a month. Now if you add that up, that’s almost $1000 a year. And to give some perspective to your viewers this morning and what we’re talking about here, when you mean 80% sounds like, you know, what’s that number mean? Four and five of the people that you’re going to encounter today are saying that they’re in the circumstance. Four and five of the people who are walking around in downtown Vancouver, walking around in in Surrey, walking around in White Rock today and other parts of the province are in that situation. Every just about half of the people that you encounter, actually more than that 80%. Almost everybody that you encounter. That’s a great way to put it. Yeah, is it is significant. And people are now cutting back in order to manage their increased cost of living. What are they cutting back on? Well, they’re cutting back on everything. So they’ve got strategies for dealing with this, which is things like, for example, I’m going to focus on different grocery stores, different different retailers. I’m going to use more coupons. I’m going to maybe not shop as frequently. I’m going to do things that are really just good strategies for saving money. Those are the ones that are I I guess just smart thinking. But there are others that are tragic. So more people using food banks, more people saying they’re holding back on on getting their medications or buying their medications because they they need to have a space to be able to buy food. So the the it’s really comprehensive when you when you take a look at the list, but every single thing that you can do, people are doing more of this year than they were last. Darryl, you also asked Canadians opinions on housing affordability and it seems more people now think owning a home in this country is only for the rich. Yeah, 80% of us think about that. 80% think that the thing that defines the middle class home ownership is only for the rich now. And as a result, what’s happened is people have given up on the idea that they can own a house. But more importantly in all of this is that they don’t think it’s possible to have a safe and secure financial future unless you do own a home. So this is a real difficult mix of things that are coming together that that they’re going to cause a lot of problems for governments going forward. Do poll respondents expect house prices to increase or decrease this year? Many more, more than half of us think that it’s going to go up and and it’s up almost 25% over what we thought last year. So increasing amount and also decreasing supply. All right. Finally, interest rates always top of mind, what do Canadians think will happen with interest rates for this year? Well, they think they’re actually going to go down, which shows that Canadians aren’t thinking that interest rates are the primary driver of the crisis that we’re having in housing right now. It really is a question of supply. So supply and affordability is the issue, not just interest rates. Daryl Bricker, thank you so much for taking us through the results of your latest poll. Thank you.