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With a shocking new poll showing that Liberal leadership front-runner Mark Carney is poised to win a general election against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, he may be experiencing a phenomenon that would be familiar to two other ill-starred politicians in similar circumstances.
Twice in the past 40 years, an unpopular federal government has shuffled in a new leader at the last minute tasked with immediately leading it into a general election. And in both cases, the new leader enjoyed a brief honeymoon of wild popularity before ultimately leading their party into electoral oblivion.
John Turner was a Liberal prime minister for just 79 days before being on the receiving end of a devastating 1984 landslide victory by the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney. Kim Campbell had a Progressive Conservative premiership of 132 days before suffering a 1993 defeat in which her party lost 154 of its 156 seats.
Both Turner and Campbell had taken over from long-term incumbents who had been driven out of office by spiralling unpopularity. And when both took the helm, polls showed them to be extremely popular and likely to win a general election.
In Campbell’s case, she was briefly one of the most popular Canadian prime ministers in history. Two months after her June 1993 swearing-in, a Gallup poll showed Campbell with an approval rating of 51 per cent against just 22 per cent who disapproved.
That may not sound like much, but it’s miraculously high for a job in which approval ratings frequently dwell in the low 40s. In the entire nine-year tenure of Justin Trudeau, there’s only been a few months in which he could boast of a similar 29-point spread between approval and disapproval.
At the time, Campbell’s 51 per cent was the highest recorded for a prime minister in 30 years.
It’s all the more remarkable given that Campbell was taking over from a prime minister, Mulroney, whose disapproval rating had reached a record-breaking 83 per cent before his departure.
For the first months of Campbell’s time in the PMO, news coverage was mostly about how everyone liked her.
In July 1993 — just three months before the election that would destroy her party — Campbell was easily polling as the country’s most popular choice for prime minister. A Gallup poll asked Canadians if they’d rather have Campbell or then Liberal Leader Jean Chretien as prime minister; 40 per cent said Campbell, with just 23 per cent saying Chretien.
Reporters spoke of “Kimmanie” — an overnight mania for the new Progressive Conservative leader in Quebec. When the writs for the 1993 election were eventually dropped, frustrated letter-writers bemoaned how quickly Kim-crazed Canadians seemed to have forgotten their distaste of the party that Campbell represented.
“Have we such short memories that we forget she was part of the Mulroney government that everyone loved to hate?” read a September 1993 letter to the Hamilton Spectator. “Let’s be honest, what has Kim Campbell done to deserve this popularity?”
Chretien at the time confidently called Campbell’s popularity a “mirage.”
“She wants a different image, but the (Tory) economic policies will remain the same,” he said.
Campbell herself even seemed to be skeptical of her brief and ultimately doomed honeymoon with voters. When asked why polls were showing her to be so beloved, she cheekily answered, “when the polls are good, then they’re very serious and accurate reflections of what the public think. When they’re not good, they are simply but mere transitory reflections of ephemeral moods not to be taken seriously.”
Her and Chretien’s skepticism may have been fuelled by the fact that Canada was only nine years removed from a similar honeymoon with Turner that also led to disaster.
Much as Carney has polled for years as the preferred successor for Justin Trudeau, Turner had been the preferred alternative to then Liberal Leader Pierre Trudeau since at least the 1970s. Polls from the time showed that if Turner had been prime minister in 1979, the Liberals would likely not have lost the election to Joe Clark.
As such, when Turner finally got the job in 1984, polls immediately started showing a surprise boost for the Liberals. A Gallup poll conducted during the Liberal leadership race was said to have “shocked the nation” by showing the party with a six-point lead — an unbelievable turnaround for a party that had spent years scraping new depths of unpopularity under the elder Trudeau.
When Turner called a federal election shortly after his June 30 swearing-in, he enjoyed a comfortable lead. Three separate pollsters gave his Liberals a 10-point advantage over the Progressive Conservatives; more than enough for Turner to win a majority.
But as would happen with Campbell, the refreshing change of a new face in the Prime Minister’s Office would dissolve almost immediately once voters remembered the party and policies he represented.
For Turner, his popularity would never recover after a moment in the English-language leaders’ debate in which he appeared to defend an 11th hour wave of patronage appointments made by the outgoing Pierre Trudeau.
After Turner said he “had no option” to cancel the unpopular appointments, Mulroney famously responded “you had an option, sir.” The phrase now has its own Wikipedia page, which should indicate how badly it went for Turner.
IN OTHER NEWS
Former prime minister Stephen Harper was in the news last month saying that U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada didn’t make a lot of sense and had “shocked” him with their lack of any grounding in fact. And now, at an event this week promoting his new book, Harper said he would “accept any level of damage to preserve the independence of the country.” “I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we’re facing,” he told a crowd in Ottawa. Harper’s new book is about flags.
The Liberal leadership race is effectively consolidating around Mark Carney; he’s gotten virtually all of the race’s major endorsements. However, there’s still two fringe candidates out there running campaigns. Let’s check in on them …
- Ruby Dhalla has promised more czars to fix our national maladies, including a Health Czar. She’s also been uploading AI images of Mark Carney being crowned by Justin Trudeau.
- Frank Baylis delivered an entire Ottawa press conference on Monday in which he said Canada hasn’t been nice enough to Gazans and we should make it up to them by rebuilding their homes.
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