What's With The Heat?

Toronto, ON - The dog days of summer arrived early in many parts of Canada this year and the sweltering summer heat has caused many to wonder -what's with the heat? According to a majority of Canadians (56%) the very hot weather conditions experienced by many Canadians this summer are "part of a trend towards increased global warming". This compares to 43% who say it is "just an example of a very hot summer that Canada experiences every once in a while". These numbers are virtually unchanged from an August 2001 Ipsos-Reid survey when 55% said they felt that hot summer was indicative of increased global warming and 44% thought it was just an occasional hot summer.

Further, assessing whether the Federal government is doing a good job or not on this file appears to correlate directly as to whether Canadians believe the hot summer is due to global warming or more natural causes: Half (52%) of Canadians believe that the Federal government is doing either a "poor" (40%) or a "very poor" (12%) job when it comes to addressing this issue, compared to 44% that believe they are doing a "good job" (40% good/4% very good).

These are the findings of an Ipsos-Reid poll provided exclusively to CanWest/Global and conducted from July 12-14, 2005. For the survey, a representative randomly selected sample of 1001 adult Canadians were interviewed by telephone. With a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate to within 1773.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire adult Canadian population been polled. The margin of error will be larger within regions and for other sub-groupings of the survey population. These data were weighted to ensure the sample's regional and age/sex composition reflects that of the actual Canadian population according to the 2001 Census data.

Please open the attached PDF to view the factum and detailed tables.

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For more information on this news release, please contact:

John Wright
Senior Vice-President
Ipsos-Reid Public Affairs
(416) 324-2900