All knives are out to pop the Liberals’ popularity bubble: Ivison

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It’s doubtless better to peak early than not to peak at all, but we are in the early days of the general election and opinion polls are suggesting that Mark Carney’s Liberals are at levels of support not seen since Pierre Trudeau won with 45 per cent of the vote in 1968.

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Leger is the latest polling company to have the Liberals in the mid-40s support, more than double the levels of just two months ago.

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The Conservatives remain competitive but have fallen back from the heady days of mid-January when they had the support of nearly one in two voters (Leger has the Liberals at 44 per cent, the Conservatives at 38 per cent and the NDP at just six per cent).

Carney has transformed Liberal fortunes by focusing on the anxieties prompted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s talk about breaking Canada by economic force and annexing the country.

While the prevailing mood before Trump’s inauguration was for change from the tone and policies of Justin Trudeau, now the state of mind is that change is great, if only it would stop.

Carney was in Windsor, Ont., on Wednesday, reiterating his mantra of stability.

His backdrop was the Ambassador Bridge, which carries one-quarter of the merchandise trade between Canada and the U.S., and a group of local autoworkers, “the backbone of the Canadian auto manufacturing sector.”

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He pledged to set up a $2-billion “strategic response fund” to build a “fortified” Canadian supply chain that would “limit” the number of times auto parts cross the border (and are forced to pay a tariff).

Quite how the federal government would control commercial decisions made by the auto companies was not spelled out. But Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers, said that there is substantial demand for automotive products in Canada made by current assemblers. “We should have a healthy conversation about whether it’s possible to build where you sell and to minimize tariff exposure where possible,” he said.

Regardless of whether there is anything substantive to Carney’s All-in-Canada network for auto manufacturing, his message is designed to address the worries and uncertainties that are dominating the political agenda.

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On Wednesday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was in Montmagny, Que., promising to allow seniors to earn more money tax-free, and pledging to keep the retirement age at 65.

These are perfectly valid policies, but they may as well have been planned in a different political era — say January.

Carney’s campaign is talking almost exclusively about how his government would take on Trump; Poilievre appears to be pursuing the campaign he would have run had the Democrats won the White House last November.

Conservatives are nonetheless drawing impressively large crowds to see the leader: they estimate 4,500 turned out in Hamilton on Tuesday night. “Something’s happening,” said one senior Conservative.

It was as big a political gathering as I can remember seeing at a rally. But I also remember the 2011 campaign when Michael Ignatieff was attracting large, enthusiastic crowds in Canada’s biggest cities. After he had crashed to defeat, he reflected on those nights: “We were just talking to ourselves; our party became an echo chamber. All we were hearing was the sound of our own voices.”

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To be clear, I’m not suggesting the Conservatives are in Ignatieff territory — they are plainly still very much in this race.

But they do need to pivot to meet the moment and disabuse people of any notion, as suggested by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, that Poilievre is “in sync” with Trump.

In the Conservatives’ favour, they have a month before election day and all the opposition parties now have Carney squarely in their sights.

The Liberal leader is being assailed from all sides, in English and French Canada.

Radio-Canada reported on Wednesday that as chair of Brookfield Asset Management, Carney was responsible for two funds that registered in Bermuda to benefit from tax advantages.

When asked about it by reporters, he said the arrangement did not avoid taxes because the taxes were paid in Canada by the beneficiaries of Canadian pension funds.

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Yet, as Poilievre pointed out during his press conference, if there were no tax advantages, why wouldn’t the company leave the money in Canada in the first place? The Conservative leader accused Carney of “cheating the system” by “padding the paycheques of millionaires and billionaires like him.”

Poilievre’s policies may as well have been planned in a different political era — say January

Separately, in Quebec, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet attacked Carney for mixing up the setting of the 1989 Montreal massacre (he said it happened at Concordia, not École Polytechnique).

“That is one of the saddest, most dramatic wounds in the history of Quebec and I think Mr. Carney should know that,” Blanchet said.

The Liberal leader compounded the error by getting the name of one of his own candidates wrong: he called well-known Polytechnique survivor Nathalie Provost (running for the Liberals in Châteauguay–Les Jardins-de-Napierville) by the name “Nathalie Provonost.”

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Carney was asked if this suggested an insensitivity to Quebec and French language issues. While he apologized for “misspeaking,” he denied it was because of his struggles in French. “My French is fine, if not perfect,” he said.

The scrutiny on the rookie leader is going to be intense until the end of the campaign.

He has made a good first impression with Canadians but as the novelist Amor Towles notes, first impressions tell us no more about someone than a chord tells us about Beethoven or a brushstroke about Botticelli.

Voters were dazzled by Progressive Conservative leader Kim Campbell in the first week of the 1993 general election, pushing her into an early lead. Yet by the end of the campaign, her support had halved and the party she led was reduced to just two MPs.

If people perceive that he hasn’t earned his mandate, or that he is too similar to Trudeau’s Liberals, Carney could yet see the lead he built so spectacularly disappear just as quickly.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

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