The survey found that 47 percent of respondents felt their finances had worsened in the past year, the highest number ever recorded since Nanos began asking the question in a weekly poll in 2008. “The bottom line is that Canadians survived the 2008 recession, survived the pandemic and were worried about their jobs,” chief data scientist Nik Nanos said in an interview with CTV News. “Now we’re in the post-pandemic period, and they’re reporting that they’re in worse shape than they’ve ever been in the monitoring that Nanos has done.” Only 13 percent of survey respondents said their finances had improved in the past year. Respondents were also pessimistic about the economy, with 64 percent expecting it to get worse over the next six months and just nine percent expecting an improvement. Meanwhile, 40% of respondents expected house prices to fall in the next six months. According to Nanos, sentiment around real estate has been declining since March, when the Bank of Canada began raising interest rates. The only bright spot in the survey appeared to be job security. Thirteen percent of respondents were at least somewhat worried about losing their job, which is about the average for the weekly poll. Amid rising food costs, another recent survey found that nearly 20 per cent of Canadians are cutting back on meal sizes or skipping meals to save money. “I’m extremely, extremely worried about what the next few months will bring, especially the winter,” Linda MacRae, coordinator of the Glace Bay Food Bank in Nova Scotia, told CTV News. Food costs also concern Montreal salad bar owner Stephanie Russell, who is trying to cut back elsewhere before raising prices. “Just this month our situation with lettuce that generally, I would say on average, like a fair price regardless of season is about $35, has gone up to $75 to $120,” Russel told CTV News. “I had a lot of regular customers who just said, ‘Okay, so I guess you’re going to raise your prices.’ Nanos conducts a weekly telephone survey of 250 Canadians on their views on personal finances, job security, the economy and real estate prices. Bloomberg then publishes the results, results every four weeks and 1,000 responses. Nanos says the method it uses is accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. With files from BNN Bloomberg