What are Canadians willing to sacrifice in the fight against climate change?

The COVID pandemic was a large scale test for governments around the world, but also for citizens — and not just of their endurance. For three long years, governments got a chance to see just how much citizens were willing to sacrifice for a larger good. Much of the behaviour change was impressive: from people rolling up their sleeves and donning masks, to putting family gatherings on hold.

But as the months and years rolled on, the limits to that spirit of sacrifice were exposed, too: frustration and even revolts over mask mandates, rising resistance to mandatory vaccinations. Behavioural scientists will be poring over the lessons learned for decades to come, not just in case of another pandemic, but for other big crises, too — such as climate change.

In Canada, that work is already well under way, inside a government unit known as the “impact and innovation” team, which uses behavioural science to see which programs are working — and not working — with the population. It was a unit kept very busy during the pandemic. after hearing it mentioned in passing during one of those many news conferences of the time.

Last year, with the pandemic slowly receding as the top crisis for the government, the impact unit served notice that it was turning its attention to other areas. In its , the unit announced it had “expanded into a variety of new policy areas and is working with departments to support priority areas including climate action and protecting democracy and misinformation.” So I recently asked to talk to the unit again, to see how pandemic lessons were being applied — to climate change in particular, which looms not just as a global crisis, but the big political issue of our time.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said he wants the next election campaign to be fought on the "carbon tax"; Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government says it would be happy to fight again on the issue of climate change. The behavioural scientists at impact naturally didn’t want to get drawn into political debates, but they did say the pandemic had blazed some research trails for them into studying how climate policies will roll out with the citizens.

The main similarity, they said, is in the sheer scope of the problem. COVID was large and its effects were sweeping, right down to the individual citizen level. So is climate change. What this means, said Rodney Ghali, the lead of the impact team, is that government needs citizens to help, and vice versa.

“In a similar way to the pandemic, where we were looking at a whole of society approach to tackling this problem, climate is the exact same situation,” Ghali said. “Everyone has a role to play in this. Governments alone can't be the holder of all the solutions.” During COVID, the impact unit carried out multiple waves of deep dive research into how citizens were coping with the pandemic and grappling with government measures to contain it.

These surveys were more than mere polls — the questions and analysis went deeper, and results were intended to build on the insights of the preceding ones. A new, equally large set of surveys have been carried out in the past couple of years in the realm of climate change, with specific attention to how much the issue is landing with citizens — from awareness to what they’re willing to do in their own lives to mitigate it.

It’s called the “program of applied research on climate action,” or , for short, and results have slowly been released on the impact unit's website. The surveys show that most people believe in climate change and are even keen to do something about it, but things get a little more complicated when the surveys explored specific actions, such as paying more for carbon emissions.

“Most Canadians think of carbon pricing as costing their households more than they receive in payments, but people express more support for a carbon pricing system that uses revenues to fund environmental projects instead of making payments to households,” said the eighth survey in the PARCA series, which was completed last spring — long before carbon pricing became the hot issue of the fall in Canadian politics.

Even if the impact team is determined to stay out of politics, those survey results could have served as a sharp political warning to Justin Trudeau’s government, of just how difficult it has been to persuade people that the carbon price is not coming as a net cost to most households. Conservatives proclaim regularly that it is; have rebutted that claim.

Moreover, that eighth PARCA survey also yielded this not so great news for the Liberals: “Only a third of Canadians trust the federal government to make good decisions on climate change. Even among those who believe in climate change and/or are worried about it, fewer than half trust the government on the issue.” I have been wondering, as others must be too, whether the jarring experience of COVID would make it easier or harder for governments to ask for sacrifice from citizens.

In some ways, one would assume, it could have primed the pump for an all hands on deck effort on climate change. In other ways, the population might well wonder whether it’s done enough for the greater, global good — for this decade at least. The impact team hasn’t directly asked that question, at least not in the surveys, and from what I learned in this latest conversation with the team, the answers are complicated.

Behaviour can be observed scientifically, but it’s also a bit of an art to discover what motivates citizens to actions and what turns them off. One thing is clear: in a time when governments such as the current one have been lurching from one global crisis to another, the behavioural experts are getting multiple chances to study the science, and the art.

And it’s not just governments being put under the microscope, but citizens too..