More Canadians report being affected by extreme weather after hot, dry summer: poll

By Nick Murray in Ottawa

A new poll suggests more Canadians say they are being affected by extreme weather following one of the worst wildfire seasons on record.

A Leger poll of 1,500 people conducted online between Sept. 19 and Sept. 21 says 37 per cent of respondents reported being personally affected by extreme weather events. That is up from the 23 per cent who said the same in a June poll, in the early weeks of the fire season.

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This year saw wildfires consume nearly 90,000 square kilometres in Canada — an area larger than New Brunswick — making it the second-worst wildfire season on record.

The findings are similar to the number of Canadians who responded to a Leger poll on climate impacts a year ago. At the end of summer 2024, 35 per cent of respondents reported being personally impacted by climate change.

While more Canadians are reporting that extreme weather has affected them, it’s not clear how it’s affecting them in all cases.

Sixty-five per cent of respondents said they’ve been forced to stay indoors because of air quality concerns, a figure unchanged from the June poll.

The number of Canadians reporting emotional stress caused by extreme weather has dropped to 23 per cent from 39 per cent since the June poll. The number reporting cancelled travel plans due to extreme weather dropped to 18 per cent from the 27 per cent reported in the June poll.

Twenty-six per cent of respondents selected either “other” or “none” among the list of impacts cited by the poll — which also includes property damage or evacuations due to wildfires or floods.

“I do wonder whether or not we’re potentially missing an impact option,” said Andrew Enns, executive vice president at Leger.

“Is it an impact if my enjoyment of a summer day is not quite what it would be because of the smoke, right? Like, I didn’t stay indoors, I still went camping, but it’s supposed to be a blue sky day, but it’s not. In that sense, I wonder whether we missed something.”

Enns said the timing of the poll also highlights the cyclical nature of Canadians’ perceptions of climate change — though not necessarily whether people think extreme weather events will happen more frequently in the future.

The new poll reports 66 per cent of respondents said there seem to be more extreme heat events compared to five years ago, up from 55 per cent in June.

But the number of people concerned about hot summers and future heat waves only increased by four percentage points to 66 per cent compared to the June survey, and overall, 58 per cent of respondents said they think extreme weather will occur more often, virtually the same as the 57 per cent who said the same thing in June.

“I think some of those broader opinions with respect to climate change and the severity in Canada are more baked in, and less volatile and less impacted by the seasonality or even a particularly bad summer,” Enns said.

He said there’s “a certain percentage of Canadians” for whom climate change “is something that’s at near the top of their mind or something that they sort of monitor,” while others are “more accepting of whatever Mother Nature throws at us, and are not going to get worked up about it.”

The polling industry’s professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2025.