OTTAWA—Canadians are “seriously” worried about the 2012 economy — more pessimistic than they’ve been in almost two decades, according to a sobering new poll on the outlook for the year ahead.

Michael Marzolini, head of the Pollara polling firm, presented the gloomy findings on Thursday morning to an Economic Club of Canada gathering in Toronto.

“This year’s results are the most pessimistic in 16 years across all the indicators that we have been testing since 1985,” Marzolini said. “Canadians are now in need of hope.”

Pollara did extensive polling at the very end of 2011, among nearly 3,000 respondents nation-wide, as it has for the past 27 years.

Canadians were telling Pollara they were in a pessimistic mood a year ago, at the end of 2010, Marzolini reported, but their spirits have only slumped further in the past year.

Among his findings:

• About 70 per cent of Canadians believe the country is in the midst of a recession and more people — a slight majority — believe the economic situation will worsen rather than improve. In most years he’s polled, Marzolini has found that the majority of Canadians are optimistic.

• Only 20 per cent of Canadians expect economic recovery by the end of 2012 — “the smallest level of optimism measured since the downturn began,” Marzolini says in his speech, a copy of which was provided to the Star.

• About 68 per cent of Canadians expect the recession to stretch into 2013, and more than half of these respondents said they believed it would take at least 19 months, or as long as two years, for the economy to rebound.

One-third of respondents said their own financial situation had lost ground over the past few years — a six-point increase from the number of people who reported the same last year. There’s also been an eight-point surge in concern over the value of people’s investments

Much of the pessimism may rest in how Canadians are witnessing global events and our ties to the deteriorating U.S. economy, Marzolini says — a suspicion that “we are being anchored into the shoals of recession by the United States.”

Pollara polled 2,878 Canadians for this newest survey and the results are deemed accurate within 1.8 percentage points.

Marzolini says that the policy implications of this 2012 pessimism are large — Canadians are retrenching to concerns over basic economic survival, and not really in a mood to see their politicians tackling any issues seen as peripheral to fiscal fundamentals. Foreign aid, for instance, and social reforms are probably not high on many Canadians’ agenda.

“Canadians are now more self-centered, they believe themselves to be under siege... (concerned about) paying the bills, affording the house, putting the kids through school, looking after aged parents, paying for catastrophic drug costs, and hoping to have something left over for retirement,” Marzolini says.

“We anticipate that this new issue agenda for Canadians will likely endure longer than the recession, at least until growth in personal economic situation connects with any new growth in the macro economy.”

Marzolini warns that Canadians have been developing sharp aversions to taxes, national debt and inflation over the past few years, and these aversions have only sharpened at the outset of 2012.

Nor are Canadians particularly sold on the idea of economic stimulus to address the recession. About seven in 10 of the respondents to the Pollara poll expected the debt to increase rather than decrease, reflecting some cynicism about promises from the federal Conservative government to wrestle the debt under control.

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There were some sunnier notes among Pollara’s largely gloomy findings. More Canadians are thankful they’re living in this country. About eight in 10 “value our comparative situation,” Marzolini says, a figure that’s up from last year.

As well, while Canadians have been growing more cynical and suspicious about economic prospects, their trust in the Bank of Canada and economists has actually risen since last year. About three quarters of the respondents said they found the Bank believable and 63 per cent said they trusted economists.

Perhaps most surprisingly, however, the poll also shows an upsurge in credibility for television and newspaper reporters, with 53 per cent, a slight majority, saying they were believable. Even politicians, who, like journalists, are usually at the bottom of the believability rankings, have enjoyed an increase in trust, Pollara found, with 28 per cent saying they’d be inclined to believe what their politicians are saying. That’s double the number Pollara found in 2008.