This week, John Ivison is joined by veteran pollster, Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, to talk about the unprecedented shift in public opinion in Canada since Justin Trudeau’s resignation announcement in January.
Ipsos reported last week that the Liberals are now ahead of the Conservatives in terms of public support for the first time in its polling since 2021, just six weeks after the firm’s polling showed the Conservatives with a 26 point lead.
Ivison asked if Liberal leadership contender, Mark Carney, has put doubt in the mind of the jury.
“There’s a couple of things that have taken place in, I would say, in sequence that have caused this to happen. The first thing is that the NDP vote has collapsed. And so where we started seeing the initial movement towards the Liberal Party, it was from the NDP declining. The progressive vote started to consolidate back around the Liberals, which is their usual election strategy and it works for them. It’s a good one,” said Bricker.
“Then the second thing that we saw was there were a lot of people who were (supporting) the Conservative Party who didn’t necessarily like (leader) Pierre Poilievre … but they saw (him) as the most realistic option for change. They were voting for change more than they were voting for Poilievre and the Conservatives. (But then) Justin Trudeau resigns, Carney comes on the scene and they’re interested, they want to go take a look.
“The other thing that’s happened is the Bloc Québécois support has started to soften. The leitmotif for all of this, the thing that’s overarching all of it, is the threat from the South. And I think in Quebec, what’s happening is you’re seeing people who have more of a sovereignist orientation more worried in the short term about the status of Canada than they are about the longer term sovereignty projects. So all three of those things have caused what you’re seeing.”
A separate Ipsos poll suggested Poilievre has the edge over Carney when people are asked who is the toughest negotiator (28 per cent over 23 per cent) but that he scores poorly when voters are asked who is more likely to roll over and accept Donald Trump’s demands (31 per cent believed that of Poilievre; only 6 per cent of Carney).
Ivison asked if the Conservatives have a Trump problem.
“They have a really big Trump problem and the charge that (Liberal leadership candidate) Chrystia Freeland makes about Poilievre being ‘a Maple Syrup MAGA’ is very effective,” said Bricker.
“Pierre Poilievre is slightly ahead of Carney on (many metrics). But …. the charge that he is someone who is not only similar to, but friendly with, Donald Trump. That hurts. That hurts.”
All (the Conservatives) have to do is make (Carney’s) negatives equivalent to those of Pierre Poilievre and they win
However, Bricker said Poilievre still has some inherent advantages.
“There’s two things here. One of them is, I think that if we went out and did a poll today, that you would still see the Conservatives ahead on (time for) change. So they’re ahead on the idea that we need to change something in Ottawa. So they’ve got that. What the Liberals have is a guy, and a guy people really don’t know very much about. They don’t have a well-developed sense of what they’re dealing with. The way I would describe it is, you know, it’s kind of a new car smell and they’re kind of driving around in the new car. And the Conservatives’ job is to say, actually it’s not a new car, it’s just a deodorizer that they put in this old clunker. That’s the opportunity that’s available to the Conservatives.”
Bricker said expectations are sky high for Carney and that creates vulnerabilities if he doesn’t meet them.
“On the Liberal side, they’ve got one thing and it’s a person. So that person has to, as the Conservatives found out in 1993 with Kim Campbell, live up to some incredibly high standards…Kim Campbell actually got them back in the game in a very similar way to the way that Mark Carney has got the Liberals back in. And remember at the time people were not excited about Jean Chrétien as the prime minister… But the strategy of putting the air freshener in the old clunker didn’t pay off that time. We’ll see if it pays off this time.”
Bricker said the other trendline is the NDP’s collapse.
“In my view, they missed their chance. Their chance was to have taken (the Liberals) down on the last budget. Basically, back a year ago, they voted with the government for nothing. You know, they had them in an incredibly vulnerable position.
“I remember saying at the time, look: ‘If you vote with the government you give the timing of the election back to the Liberals because now the timing is yours NDP. And the second thing is the possibility that you think that you’re going to be running against Justin Trudeau gets smaller and smaller every day. So, the Liberals could pick a new leader and you’ve lost the timing of the election and all of a sudden somebody else is able to represent change better than you are’. Why would you not take them down? Or at least get a couple of cabinet seats or get something meaningful out of this negotiation. And they basically rolled over and had their tummy scratched and moved on and they are now paying the negative consequences of that. I think history is not going to be kind to Jagmeet Singh, in terms of the wasted opportunity that he had.”
Bricker said the situation is too fluid to make any predictions with any confidence but that there are a number of probabilities.
“There are no certainties. (But) the probability is that Mark Carney wins the leadership contest. Then the next question is, does he call an election right away? The probabilities of that are lower, but still strong.
“The one that is the hardest to predict is who wins that election once it’s called. That one is really uncertain and what has gone from an absolute crushing victory for the Conservative Party has now moved into a real fight. At the moment, even with the Liberals moving slightly ahead, the Conservatives are still in a pretty good situation because the Liberal lead in Ontario is not very big, which means that the Conservatives are probably winning in the 905 (suburbs around Toronto).
The likelihood that a Conservative minority government could exist is more remote than a Liberal minority government. (But) what I’m seeing in the seat modelling that’s out there right now is the combination of the Liberals and the NDP isn’t big enough to have a majority of seats and not the same number of seats as the Conservatives. So it’s really, really uncertain. The lowest probability is on the last one (Liberal majority).
“It all comes down to how Mark Carney and the Liberal Party play it. I really do think that they’re standing on the credibility of one individual and the political strategy for dealing with that is so obvious. You’re dealing with an opponent who has all of the resources, both the level of anger and contempt that’s needed to do this and willingness to sort of go to the nth degree to make their point, combined with the financial resources to be able to do it. One of the problems the Liberal Party has is they have got no money. I expect they’ll be able to get a bank loan and they’ll be able to compete, but the Conservatives have been working at this pretty hard. They’ve got a good campaign team, they’ve got a good message and they’ve (only) one thing they have to do. They don’t have to make Pierre Poilievre more popular than Mark Carney. All they have to do is make his negatives equivalent to those of Pierre Poilievre and they win.”