New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham and Newfoundland's Danny Williams share a laugh after a meeting of Atlantic premiers in Fredericton on Friday, May 9, 2008.
Man, Canadians are a tough crowd.
They routinely give bad marks to the performance of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Official Opposition. And it seems they are not terribly please with their provincial premiers either.
A poll released Monday by Angus Reid suggests that Danny Williams of Newfoundland and Labrador and Brad Wall of Saskatchewan are the only provincial heads of government who get a positive review from a majority of their constituents.
Mr. Williams, who returned to work Monday after taking six weeks off to have heart surgery in the United States, remains the highest-rated premier with 80 per cent of the respondents in his province they approve of the job he is doing.
Mr. Wall was second but well behind. Fifty-six per cent of those polled in Saskatchewan gave him the thumbs up.
In what the pollsters termed a "stunning reversal," the approval rating for Nova Scotia's Darrell Dexter dropped to 23 per cent this time around from 43 per cent at the end of. Mr. Dexter is joined in the low 20s by three other provincial premiers: British Columbia's Gordon Campbell (23 per cent), Quebec's Jean Charest (22per cent) and Ontario's Dalton McGuinty (21 per cent).
The approval rating for Manitoba's Greg Selinger stands at 27 per cent and almost half of respondents in this province are undecided about the way he has performed since taking over from Gary Doer last October.
The lowest rated premiers in the country right now are Alberta's Ed Stelmach (16 per cent) and New Brunswick's Shawn Graham (15 per cent).
The survey of a representative national sample of 7,000 Canadians included large sample sizes in nine provinces. It was conducted between Feb. 16 to Feb. 23 has margins of error that vary across the provinces.
For British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec the margin of error is 3.1 percentage points, for Saskatchewan and Manitoba the margin of error is 3.5 percentage points, for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia the margin or error is 4.6 percentage points, and for Newfoundland the margin of error is 4.9 percentage points.
(Photo: Mr. Williams and Mr. Graham share a laugh in 2008. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)