Written By Wyatt Claypool, Posted on July 31, 2020
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently had his personal popularity among Canadians fall sharply from 55 percent in May, down to 44 percent as of July 23. This is likely due to the heating up of the WE charity scandal.
Not only did Trudeau’s popularity fall because of recent events, but his closest allies in the Liberal party, also involved in the WE scandal, have seemed to be the main factor in the party’s diminishing lead on the Conservatives.
Just back in late June, the Liberals were sometimes riding high at 40 percent or even 43 percent compared to the Conservatives 29 or 27 percent. The most recent polling now shows the Liberals as high as 35 percent and as low as 33 percent compared to the Conservatives 29 or 30 percent.
4 week political WE eternity: 4 weeks ago LPC over CPC had an 11 point lead now it is only 3 points > @niknanos weekly tracking > WE hurts LPC > pre Trudeau testimony https://t.co/wMp9j9Rz7K @globeandmail https://t.co/YtzTjSsUmo pic.twitter.com/OFBWAXGm0z
— NikNanos.DataHound.KeynoteSpeaker (@niknanos) July 30, 2020
That’s how much their popularity fell after only the WE scandal had been talked about and hammered on by the Conservative party on social media and the news.
Now that Trudeau has finally had to testify on the issue and the WE scandal has turned into a full blown circus it is predictable that the largest fall in Trudeau and the Liberal Party’s popularity is yet to come.
Trudeau did himself no favours in answering the line of question, from the non-Liberal MPs, often giving contradictory or confusing answers to questions, many of which could have be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Trudeau during a reading of a written statement of his claimed that he did know that his mother and brother were working for the WE Charity, but at the same time never had any idea whether or not they were being paid large sums of money – which they were.
Most embarrassingly when pushed by MP Pierre Poilievre on exactly how much money Justin Trudeau’s family members received from WE Charity Trudeau aggressively dodged the questions but was boxed into the corner by the repeated and repetitive questioning of Poilievre demanding to know the “dollar amount”, which Trudeau more and more blatantly avoided as the line of questions continued.
Trudeau attempted to sidestep the issue later into the questioning by using a very narrow definition of what a family member is from the Conflict of Interest Act, which only considered a spouse and direct dependents as family members.
Even when Liberal MPs tried to come to Trudeau’s rescue and gave him softball questions, optics wise, it looked like they were not taking the WE scandal seriously which is a bad move considering how seriously the media is taking the story.
Trudeau has always been a politician whose popularity among his supporters has always rested heavily on optics and style; not really the policies he champions.
The SNC Lavalin scandal hurt Trudeau’s popularity, but the majority Liberal government he had backing him at the time was able to protect him from ever having the optics nightmare of having to testify in his involvement.
This time, although the WE Charity scandal is not nearly as serious as the corrupt backroom dealings to help SNC, Trudeau had to testify for over three hours and truly get battered by his political opposition in a position where he cannot pass responsibilities to answer questions over to his other cabinet ministers like in Question Period.
Without a doubt, in the testimony, Trudeau came off extremely sly in his pretending to not know anything about anything in regards to WE Charity or the most basic of details of his family members’ own involvement with the charity.
Trudeau’s performance in the testimony was completely opposed to his friendly and progressive image that there is little doubt many people who previously supported the Prime Minister in the past several months will be abandoning him shortly. Trudeau can potentially earn support back but it will be an uphill battle.
Nobody should be that shocked if in the coming weeks Trudeau’s personal popularity plunges below 40 percent as well as the Liberal party’s polling numbers are overtaken by the Conservatives who have cast themselves as Trudeau’s toughest critics.
Only a miracle could save Trudeau and the Liberals’ polling numbers at this point.
Wyatt is a student at Mount Royal University, where he is the president of its Campus Conservative club. In his writing, he focuses on covering provincial and federal politics, firearms regulation, and the energy sector. Wyatt has also previously written for The Post Millennial.
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