Half as popular as he used to be
Polls show PM’S star falling amid economic jitters
It was in July 2017 that Justin Trudeau graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, accompanied by the headline: “Why Can’t He Be Our President?”
Fast forward 18 months and Canada’s golden boy prime minister has seen his approval rating fall below that of the much-maligned U.S. president, Donald Trump.
Real Clear Politics has a rolling average that gives Trump a negative 9.7 per cent rating (42 per cent of respondents in opinion polls approve of the president; 51.7 per cent disapprove).
According to a new Angus Reid Institute survey, Trudeau’s approval rating is a net negative 23 per cent (just 35 per cent approve; 58 per cent disapprove).
When he was elected in 2015, Trudeau had a net plus 34 per cent rating — nearly twice as many people approved of him then as do now.
The ARI poll is not the last word on the subject. It suggested Andrew Scheer is now considered best prime minister by more people than support Trudeau, a finding at odds with the latest Nanos Research poll on the same question (in the ARI survey, Scheer scored 33 per cent against Trudeau’s 27 per cent; in Nanos, Trudeau recorded 37.4 per cent, against Scheer’s 25.6 per cent). But, while the numbers may be up for debate, the trajectory of Trudeau’s fortunes is not.
What has happened to nearly double the number of Canadians who disapprove of their prime minister over the past three years? Half of respondents to the Angus Reid survey said they are worried the economy will worsen over the next 12 months. But there is more to it than that.
Trudeau offered some hints at his year-end press conference in Ottawa on Wednesday. At one point he was asked why Canada has not been more vocal in securing the release of three Canadians being held by the Chinese, apparently in retaliation for the arrest of the chief financial officer of telecom giant Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, in Vancouver earlier this month.
He said that after three years of being engaged in consular cases, he has learned that they are more complicated than he thought they were when he was in opposition.
“I remember standing in the House and challenging Mr. Harper to pick up the phone and get this Canadian released,” he said. “Sometimes, politicizing or amplifying the level of public discourse may be satisfying in the short term but does not contribute to the outcome we all want, which is for Canadians to be safe and secure.”
Yet learning from experience has not been a hallmark of this Liberal government.
Trudeau and his team drew up a plan heavy on progressive ideology ahead of the 2015 election and have charged ahead with unswerving conviction, unburdened by doubt and unswayed by fact or circumstance.
In an interview with the National Post earlier this week, Trudeau said the toughest decision he’d made in office was on the energy and environment trade-off.
“Any issue where you have to say: ‘I’m not doing this because it’s going to make me popular, I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do’ are always those decisions where you have to be really comfortable that you’re doing it because you deeply believe and feel it’s a step in the right direction for the country,” he said.
Trudeau admitted “a different government could have taken a different choice about not taking decisions that would be so clearly antagonistic to certain folks.”
But this is a government so impressed with its own blueprint for a better Canada that it has marshalled the facts to fulfil its own narrative (“the declining middle class” is an example, yet the national median income grew by more than 10 per cent in the decade to 2015).
The environmental plan required a suite of measures to contain the expansion of the oilsands, including effectively killing the Northern Gateway and Energy East pipelines, imposing an oil tanker ban off the West Coast, bringing in stringent environmental assessment regulations and introducing a carbon tax.
When combined with challenges specific to the oil industry that produced a glut of supply in Canadian heavy crude, the effect was a market collapse and widespread resentment in much of Western Canada.
But Trudeau’s problems are not confined to the West.
The Angus Reid survey suggests that animosity is apparent in every region of the country. There is disquiet over the carbon tax, which in France manifest itself in the form of the “gilets jaunes” protesters. Trudeau said Canada will avoid those problems by supporting people through the change in the form of rebates.
Then there is anxiety over the deficit and government spending. Trudeau defended the concept of spending money that will have to be repaid by future generations.
“That’s where you have to make a decision. Is the fact that kids will have more nutritious lunches because their parents have an extra 300 bucks or 500 bucks a month to buy groceries, is that going to make enough of a difference in their lives to make our economy grow to make that a worthwhile investment? ... Absolutely.”
The alternative, he said, was the Conservative solution of “balancing the budget at all cost, cutting programs and services … to get a phoney balanced budget.”
The Liberal plan is giving more resilience to individuals, families and communities than a plan to balance the books “and sit on a bucket of money,” he said.
The problem for the Liberals is that circumstances change — and sometimes, the game plan has to change too.
Statesmen as far back as Cicero, the Roman consul, have compared politics to navigation, where sometimes you run before the wind, sometimes you tack and sometimes you catch a tide. But as Cicero noted, all this takes years of skill and study.
Successful statesmen adapt inflexible principles to changing political circumstances, he said.
Trudeau lacks the guile and experience to do that, and that might explain why he is now only half as popular as he used to be.