Prime Minister Mark Carney's government has made a raft of crime-related announcements over the past week, including new bail legislation and plans to hire more RCMP and border personnel.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
If the Liberals really are fretting that the opposition will force them into a snap election, then they’d better get cracking on shoring up their weak points. Actually, that’s key to their fortunes, anyway.
There’s no doubt that’s why Prime Minister Mark Carney and his ministers have been talking a lot about crime over the past week.
Mr. Carney went out a week ago to say his government had learned lessons about crime and will now take a tougher approach to bail – even though the details of the bill to be tabled Thursday didn’t sound like a radical sea change. He also repeated a promise to hire 1,000 new RCMP personnel and the next day, repeated a promise to hire 1,000 border officers.
On Monday, Finance Minister François-Phillippe Champagne promised the government will create a financial crime agency. The legislation for that won’t be tabled till next spring, but the government went out to talk about it now.
Maybe that’s because the Liberals still have a big, glaring vulnerability around crime and Mr. Carney doesn’t have a lot of time to turn that around.
Opinion: Carney’s crime-fighting superpower is not being Trudeau
That’s not just because the Liberal government’s survival depends on a confidence vote on the budget that Mr. Champagne will deliver Nov. 4, and Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon said Tuesday that he is starting to worry.
It’s also because Mr. Carney’s political success has relied in part on convincing many voters that he is different from Justin Trudeau. He only has so much time as Prime Minister to convince people that he has broken with his predecessor’s approach to an issue where most voters think the Trudeau vintage of Liberal government got things very wrong.
The Liberals have other weaknesses, of course: Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives continue to attack them on the big, broad issue of affordability that played to the Tories’ favour in the spring election.
Carney lays out budget priorities in evening speech to students
But there are two specific issues where there is a wide consensus that the Liberals are getting it wrong. One is immigration – and Mr. Carney’s government is expected to set out new targets in an immigration plan to be outlined in the budget. The other is crime.
If there is one place where that really matters, it is in Ontario, where Premier Doug Ford talks about it a lot. No wonder.
Pollster Nick Kouvalis said public opinion research for Mr. Ford’s Progressive Conservatives shows Ontario voters increasingly see crime as an important issue – not quite on the level of affordability, but in a tier just behind.
And it rates especially high for a couple of demographics that could be crucial swing voters - groups that shunned Mr. Trudeau but might be available to Mr. Carney.
One is a combination of three smaller voter groups, all affluent voters with small-c conservative leanings that overwhelmingly vote for Mr. Ford at the provincial level. Roughly a quarter of that group – and 18 per cent of the typical “hard-conservative, right-winger” voter group – turned to Mr. Carney’s Liberals in the last federal election, moved largely by anxieties raised by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Another voter group is typically “lower-income, lower-education and mostly over 35 years of age,” Mr. Kouvalis said. Ontarians who are generally angry at governments, but lean more to Mr. Ford in provincial elections.
Fight against organized crime hampered by intelligence sharing challenges, experts say
Those are political audiences that could matter a lot in a federal election, voters in Ontario suburbs and towns, in a lot of swing ridings, that might switch between Liberals or Conservatives.
Some of Mr. Carney’s campaign strategists thought they were probably going to win a majority government on election night in April – but the party fell short of expectations in Ontario. Concerns about crime probably weren’t the biggest driver of that shortfall, but it was a factor. Voters see the Liberals as poor at crime policy.
Mr. Carney’s new bail policies won’t turn that around – although they might send a signal that his government wants to be a little tougher than Mr. Trudeau’s. The commitments to beef up the ranks of law enforcement are likely to have a bigger impact on crime, but after six months of repeating the promise, the boots are not yet on the ground.
And Mr. Carney doesn’t have a lot of time to shake the hardened perception that Liberals are weak on crime.