He’s not dead yet, folks. After months of increasingly dire public opinion polls, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party of Canada are finally showing a political pulse. After Pierre Poilievre’s lousy week in mid-November, highlighted by a conspicuously obnoxious confrontation with a journalist and his party’s nonsensical opposition to a Ukraine-Canada free trade deal, I wrote that it might eventually be seen as a turning point.
Well, as I like to say in situations like this: Ahem.
This new Abacus Data poll shows Liberal support snapping back and Poilievre’s negatives on the rise. “It appears that the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre have made themselves less acceptable to these past Liberal supporters over the past few weeks and may have even alienated a small portion of their own past supporters, pushing most back into the Liberal fold,” Abacus Data CEO David Coletto said on Twitter.
Poilievre’s recent shenanigans in the House of Commons, which included his party voting repeatedly against the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement, aren’t likely to help his numbers here. Neither will recent news of the federal government’s deal with Google on Bill C-18, or the growing international trail of evidence behind the Indian government’s involvement in extrajudicial killings in Canada and illegitimate involvement in our democracy. One by one, the issues that Poilievre had been stacking up against the Liberal government are starting to backfire.
Even housing, which has looked like Poilievre’s ace in the hole with young people for a while now, is starting to turn in favour of the government. No, Housing Minister Sean Fraser won’t have single-handedly made homes affordable for young people by 2025, but it will be increasingly difficult to ignore progress being made on that front. For example, as housing expert Mike Moffatt noted, his recent decision to reintroduce the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s catalogue of housing designs “has the potential to be massively beneficial.”
Fraser may not be moving mountains yet with his seemingly endless schedule of funding announcements and regulatory changes, but he’s definitely moving the needle. How far he can get it to budge, and how clearly young Canadians see that, will weigh heavily on the next election’s outcome.
So, too, of course, will inflation. With each new batch of monthly data, it becomes increasingly clear the worst of the inflationary crisis is behind us and central banks around the world will start cutting interest rates as soon as early next year. The president of the New York Federal Reserve, for example, thinks the United States will hit its two per cent inflation target by 2025 — and as the United States goes, so does Canada. By the time we’re in a federal election, the affordability issues top of mind for so many Canadians may have eased significantly as interest rates for mortgages and lines of credit drop precipitously.
What might that leave as ground over which the election will be fought? Climate, for one, especially if the election is held at the tail end of another smoky summer. Trust might be another battleground, and Poilievre is vulnerable here, given his previous dalliances with far-right influencers and personalities who more mainstream Canadians find hard to stomach. And, of course, there’s always the possibility of another Trump administration, which would upend the political table in ways we still can’t quite (or don’t want to) fathom.
None of this is to suggest that a Liberal comeback is a safe bet, much less a sure thing. But there are historical parallels that show it’s far from impossible. In both 2007 and 2011, Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario Liberals were well behind the opposition PCs in pre-election polls and still won both handily. In 2013, the BC Liberal Party’s Christy Clark was down by 15 points and ended up winning by four. And, of course, Trudeau’s father was actually defeated in an election in 1979 before coming back the following year and winning a crushing majority. Campaigns do matter, and more so in Canada than it might seem.
In the months leading up to the next election, expect the Trudeau Liberals to channel legendary strategist Keith Davey’s famous line that helped pull both his dad and McGuinty out of the political ditch. “Don’t compare me to the almighty,” it advises. “Compare me to the alternative.”
So long as that alternative is a guy who takes cryptocurrency more seriously than climate change and talks about foreign policy like he’s Neville Chamberlain, the Trudeau Liberals will have a fighting chance.
Poilievre breathes new life into Trudeau’s chances
21
0
15.12.2023
He’s not dead yet, folks. After months of increasingly dire public opinion polls, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party of Canada are finally showing a political pulse. After Pierre Poilievre’s lousy week in mid-November, highlighted by a conspicuously obnoxious confrontation with a journalist and his party’s nonsensical opposition to a Ukraine-Canada free trade deal, I wrote that it might eventually be seen as a turning point.
Well, as I like to say in situations like this: Ahem.
This new Abacus Data poll shows Liberal support snapping back and Poilievre’s negatives on the rise. “It appears that the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre have made themselves less acceptable to these past Liberal supporters over the past few weeks and may have even alienated a small portion of their own past supporters, pushing most back into the Liberal fold,” Abacus Data CEO David Coletto said on Twitter.
Poilievre’s recent shenanigans in the House of Commons, which included his party voting repeatedly against the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement, aren’t likely to help his numbers here. Neither will recent news........
© National Observer
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
Michael Kwet
