Prime Minister Mark Carney greets Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre during an International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa on Tuesday.Patrick Doyle/Reuters
Mark Carney’s Davos speech appears to have caught Canadians’ attention. The Angus Reid Institute has a new poll out showing him with a 60-per-cent “positive” rating (to 34 per cent “negative”), up eight points since December. Spark Insights has him at 61 per cent.
And Pierre Poilievre? Just 36 per cent rate him positively, according to Angus Reid; 39 per cent, according to Spark.
Indeed, the Liberal Leader consistently runs ahead of his Conservative counterpart in the approval polls by margins of 20 points or more. Ditto for “best prime minister”: Nanos’s most recent poll shows Mr. Carney ahead of Mr. Poilievre by 28 points, 53-25. And yet the Liberal Party only leads the Conservatives by two points, on average.
On the surface, this seems puzzling. We live in an age of leader-dominated politics. Most of a party’s resources and energies are devoted to making their own leader look good, and the other party’s leader look bad. During an election, the media follow the party leaders’ every movement, to the near exclusion of their platforms, their front benches, or their candidates. Research shows that the leader is a big part of what makes up the voters’ minds in favour of one party or another.
Mark Carney denies walking back Davos speech in call with Trump
Except now, it seems. If the Liberals are at 40 per cent, but Mr. Carney is at 60 per cent, that suggests a whole lot of people who like Mr. Carney – even prefer him as Prime Minister – intend nevertheless to vote Conservative.
I explored some of the pollsters’ research into why that might be in another column. For today I just want to consider the electoral implications for the parties, and the leaders.
Mr. Poilievre, for example, is facing a leadership review this week. Does the fact that he is polling well behind his party suggest the Conservatives would improve their standing with another leader?
That’s not obvious. It would depend, in part, on whom they replaced him with. But it would also depend on whether party preferences are still driven by leader preferences – at least as far as Conservative voters are concerned.
There is considerable evidence that Conservative voters are a breed apart. Where left-of-centre voters tend to be fluid in their party allegiances, flitting back and forth from party to party, Conservative voters tend to be rock-solid in their loyalty.
There are Liberal-Conservative switchers. We saw that after Justin Trudeau stepped down, when a huge swath of Liberal-leaning voters who had parked their vote with the Conservatives, largely out of distaste for Mr. Trudeau, returned to the fold. But at this point the party is down to the hard core.
Carney unveils hike to GST credit, other measures targeting affordability
If its support has a relatively high floor – it has been at 35 per cent or more since late 2022 – it also has a low ceiling. Only for a very brief period, in the last days of Mr. Trudeau, did its support exceed the 40 per cent or so it would need to have any hope of forming a majority.
So it’s not clear the Conservatives would gain much from dumping Mr. Poilievre. Most Conservatives like him, a lot. The remainder seem inclined to support the party even with him as leader. There don’t seem to be a lot of voters who would switch to the Conservatives if he were gone.
This may be Mr. Carney’s chief contribution to the Liberal cause. For all his personal popularity, he has not yet succeeded in making inroads among traditional Conservative voters. Rather he has allowed the Liberals to hold onto their own supporters. He has solidified the base, rather than expanding it.
He is not, after all, a transformative leader: the kind who inspire great waves of enthusiasm in the public, who change their way of seeing the world. His selling point is steadiness, competence, coolness under fire. That was enough for some voters during the last election, in the face of Donald Trump’s threats to annex the country. But it hasn’t been enough to move many votes since then.
That might change. Mr. Trump’s threats to the country are mounting, as are the separatist threats within. Coolness and unflappability will no longer suffice: the government will increasingly be judged by its actions – by the measures it takes to protect our economy, our independence, and our territorial integrity.
Until now Mr. Carney has been viewed as merely competent. How he responds to these threats will change that, for good or ill. It will decide whether he lifts Liberal support up in line with his personal approval, or the reverse. It will make him or break him.