Conservatives Take An 8 Point Polling Lead, While Trudeau And Singh’s Popularity Tumbles

It seems almost every time Pierre Poilievre’s naysaying Liberal and Red Tory critics come out of the woodwork to make a big deal about an outlier poll showing the Conservatives underperforming, by the next week the Conservative Party’s polling average has climbed even higher. 

The poll that really got the anti-Poilievre crowd’s blood flowing was the January 27 poll released by Leger showing the Liberals and Conservatives tied at 34 percent.

Looking past how deeply pathetic it is to be celebrating a poll where the Liberals are only up by a decimal point or two, this clearly was a poll going against the overwhelming trend of Conservative dominance. 

After the Leger poll things went back to normal with a Nanos poll showing the Conservatives up 3 percent on the Liberals, and just yesterday a poll from Abacus Data showed the Conservatives clobbering the LIberals with an 8 percent lead.

Abacus isn’t showing the Conservatives mopping up the Liberals everywhere, the polling in Ontario only shows the CPC with a 2 percent lead over the Liberals. Overall the situation based on this poll and the general trend in all polling shows it would be unlikely Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would form a government after the next federal election. 

Obviously, Trudeau will have an incredibly hard time trying to mount any political comeback because his own personal popularity is near its all-time low at 31 percent (his lowest is 30 percent). 

The only person with worse popularity issues than Trudeau is NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Singh, who just a year ago had a disapproval rating of 23 percent and an approval rating of 40 percent, currently sits at a neutral popularity rating of 34 percent approving and disapproving of his performance as NDP leader. This downward trajectory for Singh’s popularity clearly stems from his role in propping up Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government well past the end of the COVID-19 pandemic (which was a period people were warmer to cross-party unity). 

What makes Singh’s neutral rating worse than Trudeau’s is Singh is in a position where it should be very easy to be popular. All he should be doing is attacking the Liberal government and trying to browbeat them into passing legislation he wants in exchange for providing NDP votes for Liberal legislation. Instead, Singh has been mostly docile to Trudeau and wasting much of his time in Parliament badgering big business for the inflation crisis he helped Trudeau create with out-of-control government spending and tax increases. 

It is true that Pierre Poilievre also has an approval rating in the negatives, but the size of the Canadian population who currently has no opinion about him is so high it makes any polling on him practically useless, plus the high polling for the Conservatives makes Poilievre’s personal popularity a non-issue for now.

It seems unlikely Justin Trudeau will want to call an early election in 2023 because even if he can recover the Liberal Party’s popularity somewhat, the best-case scenario would just be another minority government. On top of that the current NDP under Singh is completely subservient to the Liberal Party’s priorities, so don’t they already sort of have a majority? 

At the very least, Canadians tired of the Liberal-NDP alliance government can rest easy knowing that Justin Trudeau is living on borrowed time. Whether the election is in 2023, 2024, or 2025, Canadians will not be getting back on the Trudeau train if they had previously gotten off, and those who are still on board are not a majority coalition.