EVENTS KNOCK PM OFF STRIDE.
Your response to a poll always depends on the question, but timing is also important, and the context looking forward is often unforeseeable.
For example, seven respondents in 10 told pollster Nik Nanos at the end of July they didn’t want a summer election, but more than eight in 10 surveyed by Abacus Data in early August said that wouldn’t influence their vote.
Well, “events, dear boy, events,” as Harold Macmillan famously said.
And as it happens, events may be conspiring against Justin Trudeau, not for having dropped the writ when he did at the beginning of last week, but for what has been going on since.
The Liberals’ “internals” evidently portended a majority, which is why they’ve limited the campaign to the minimum of five weeks.
They could not have foreseen that only three days before the call, Dr. Theresa Tam, the federal government’s chief public health officer, would declare the official arrival of the fourth wave of the pandemic, driven by the Delta variant. In the last 18 months, she has become not only a familiar face to most Canadians, but a highly regarded and authoritative figure.
Sure enough, in the two weeks since, COVID cases have essentially doubled.
Never mind that nearly three Canadians in four are now fully vaccinated, and that Trudeau’s government deserves full marks for acquiring and distributing enough doses to the provinces to cover everyone in Canada, as he was pointing out on the weekend at a campaign stop in New Brunswick.
As for mandating vaccination as a condition for federal employees to return to their offices, with many provinces and private sector players also doing so, that should be a matter of simple common sense, not a campaign wedge issue for the Liberals.
Other events are also more compelling than the campaign, notably the western wildfires at home and, abroad, the lighting recapture of power by the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
Canada may have announced acceptance of 20,000 Afghans, but getting them here is clearly difficult, given the frightful chaos at Kabul airport.
Perhaps no one could have foretold the consequences of a fast-tracked American withdrawal, but the result is the disastrous fall of the Afghan government, and an ignominious end to an Allied mission in which thousands of Canadians served and 158 soldiers died.
The coverage of this unforeseen event dominated the Canadian news cycle in the last week, totally eclipsing the election campaign.
And Trudeau’s first week was marked by a significant unforced error in his response to a reporter’s question about monetary policy and whether the Bank of Canada would continue its low interest rates as long as inflation remained in an acceptable two per cent range.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy” he replied. “You’ll understand that I think about families.”
Really? The governor of the Bank of Canada is appointed by the prime minister, and the current governor, Tiff Macklem, was named only last year. The central bank’s five-year “mandate” which includes inflation targets is up for renewal this fall.
As for families, the bank rate is the baseline for commercial interest rates on home mortgages and new cars, among other things.
It was not a good moment for Trudeau, anything but prime ministerial.
And the least foreseen domestic event of the week was the defeat of the Liberals in the Nova Scotia election by Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservatives. No one saw that coming in the Liberal heartland of Atlantic Canada.
In all, no wonder polling numbers at the end of the first week had the Liberals slipping out of majority territory.
The only reason we’re in this campaign is that Trudeau wanted it. Beware of what you wish for.