1 week Ago By Lorne Gunter
Article content Of course, I’ve noticed the huge crowds Pierre Poilievre has been attracting to his rallies. They are the biggest campaign rallies for any Canadian politician in more than 50 years. Perhaps ironically, the only rallies as large or larger were those held by Pierre Trudeau’s in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
The big difference is that during Trudeau’s campaigns, the polls and the rallies aligned. He was ahead in both. Poilievre only leads in rallies.
Liberal Leader Mark Carney leads in polls by as much as nine points. The pollster I trust the most, Abacus Data, shows the Liberals and Conservatives tied at 39 per cent each. However, as Abacus CEO David Coletto, said last weekend, “because of the efficiency of the Liberal vote,” a tie means at least a Liberal minority government.
(The Liberal vote is spread more evenly across high-population regions.) Do I trust the voting-preference polls? Not entirely. They tend to oversample older voters, who favour the Liberals, and under-sample younger voters who prefer the Conservatives.
But when nearly all major polls show similar results, you can ignore the specific numbers but not the trends. I don’t believe the polls are a conspiracy to hide the truth about Poilievre’s support and manipulate public opinion towards the Liberals. The Libs are ahead, I’m just not sure by how much.
And are they ahead enough to hold off the Conservatives’ groundswell momentum? Recall that most American polls showed Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump, yet Trump (and his rallies) won the day. Having said all that, there is an issues poll (not voting-preference poll) that truly worries me. Indeed, it angers me and makes me despair for the future of Alberta within Canada.
At the beginning of the month, Ipsos asked voters which party they trusted most to develop Canada’s energy sector, create jobs and grow the economy. This is the Conservatives’ issue. Has been for years.
Along with affordability for ordinary families, growing the economy is the one-two punch for Pierre Poilievre and his party. So who do Canadians favour to get our country out of the economic trench the Liberals dug us into over the past decade — the lost Liberal decade? According to Ipsos, more voters favour the Liberals. This is like trusting the doctor who botched your facelift to correct his own incompetent plastic surgery.
Or putting a drunk driver behind the wheel of your Uber. For nearly 10 years, the Liberals presided over the second-slowest economic growth among the world’s 38 developed nations. While America’s per capita GDP has grown nearly 23 per cent over the past 10 years (before Donald Trump’s insane trade war), Canada’s has barely budged — up just 1.
4 per cent. And the OECD estimates that if policies do not change, Canada will have the slowest growth among its member nations until 2045. So, pardon my language, who the hell is foolish enough to think leaving the Liberals in charge will change a damn thing? It’s the Liberals’ environmental policy that scared away at least $300 billion in investment — investment that could have made us stronger in the face of Trump’s attacks.
It’s the Liberals’ “green” obsession that cancelled pipelines that could already be operating to the East and West Coasts in defiance of Trump. They were the ones who promised a middle-class tax cut during the 2015 campaign, then raised family taxes by $6,000 or more during their time in office. President Trump has managed to crash his country’s economy in just a week.
It took the Liberals over nine years longer. However, it amounts to pretty much the same thing. Thankfully, in Ipsos’ poll, Albertans and Saskatchewanians don’t share the nation’s love for the incompetent Liberals.
But central and eastern voters’ willingness to return the same ministers, MPs and staffers who caused such destruction is staggering (and infuriating)..
