Latest B.C. budget most unpopular since Gordon Campbell’s 2010 budet: poll

A new public opinion poll shows that B.C. Premier David Eby and his NDP government have taken a hit from the recent provincial budget.

The poll, from Innovative Research Group, found that this budget was the most unpopular since former premier Gordon Campbell’s budget in 2010.

That was the budget that introduced the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), which he did not mention during this re-election campaign.

The poll also found that the February 2026 budget “is the most damaging to NDP government favourability under Premier (David) Eby.

“Among 41% of those who read, saw, or heard (RSH) about the budget, 67% report that it left them less favourable towards the provincial BC NDP government, with net favourability collapsing to -61, a 43-point drop from Mar ’25 (-18). Only 7% feel more favourable,” the key findings read.

The budget also “drives deeply negative expectations” that it “has overtaken all other news about Premier Eby and leaving people feeling worse about him and government,” and “Conservatives have opened a clear lead in B.C. vote intention.”

Greg Lyle, president of Innovative Research Group, told Global News that reaction to the budget crosses the entire political spectrum.

“So it’s not like it’s got right-wing people upset, but left-wing people are fine with it, even people that wake up in the morning and feel like New Democrats tell us they don’t like the budget,” he said.

Polling found that of the people who paid attention to the budget, 72 per cent expect higher taxes, more than half say this budget will make health care worse and lead to more unemployment and 70 per cent of respondents think we will be paying more user fees.

Just over half of respondents are now dissatisfied with the provincial government, and 60 per cent say it is time for a change. Twelve per cent of those people are considered strong supporters of the NDP.

“One of the hopeful things for the NDP is, is that there’s a lot of people in that somewhat dissatisfied category, and there’s a lot of people in what we call the time for change New Democrat category,” Lyle added.

“So these are people that say it’s time for changing government in B.C., but also say the NDP are the best of a bad lot.”

Political scientists say governing in this climate is challenging and governments around the world are in the same fiscal situation as B.C.

“If it was just the B.C. government running massive deficits, then we would have to look closely at what they’re doing wrong,” Hamish Telford, a political scientist with the University of the Fraser Valley, said.

“But when we see that Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, the federal government, are all running massive deficits, then we begin to see that this is a structural problem.”

Read the full report here.

This online survey was from Feb. 6 to March 3, conducted using INNOVATIVE’s Canada 20/20 national research panel with additional respondents from Lucid, a leading provider of online samples.

Sample Size: n=991 BC citizens, 18 years or older. The results are nationally weighted to n=700 based on Census data from Statistics Canada.

While vote intention tracking was conducted through the full month of February among n=700 BC residents, budget-related questions were only asked in the second half of the month (February 20 to March 3, 2026). Those results are weighted to n= 500.

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