Weekly Writ 12/11: Will Trump give Trudeau a reboot?

Plus a look at how the polls have moved during the fall sitting of Parliament.

Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.

Perhaps inevitably, Donald Trump is dominating the political discourse in Canada. It’s easy to dismiss the taunts about Canada joining the United States as its 51st state. But Canadians have taken more seriously the incoming president’s threats of a blanket 25% tariff on Canadian goods. And they’re worried about it.

It’s the kind of major political development that could shake things up domestically — just maybe giving Justin Trudeau’s Liberals the opportunity they need to improve their sinking fortunes.

As far as polling goes, the early indications do suggest that the Trump issue is one of the better ones that the Liberals have going for them. But it isn’t clear that Trudeau’s handling of the incoming American administration, even if done deftly, could save his own government.

There’s no doubt that Canadians view the return of Trump to the White House negatively.

The Angus Reid Institute found that 72% of Canadians say they are pessimistic and worried about the next four years of a Trump presidency, up four points from when the ARI asked this question in February 2017 just after Trump had been sworn in the first time. Two-thirds of respondents or more said they think a Trump presidency will hurt global peace and security, Canada’s economy and the value of the dollar. Fully 86% of Canadians told the ARI they were concerned about Trump’s tariff threat.

The poll found that 42% of Canadians said they were confident or moderately confident in the Canadian government’s ability to represent the country’s interests in any future negotiations. While that is one of the better scores the Trudeau government has received on any issue in recent polling, that’s still down from 60% in 2017.

Léger had less glittering numbers, finding that just 31% think the Canadian government can successfully negotiate with Trump. But, again, 31% is about 10 percentage points higher than the Liberal Party’s current support.

These figures suggest that the Trump issue could be a winner for the Liberals. Nanos Research found that Trudeau has closed the gap on Pierre Poilievre on who Canadians think is the best leader to negotiate with Trump. Since last January, Poilievre has slipped three points to 36% on this question, while Trudeau is up six points to 34%. Plus, most of Poilievre’s advantage is driven by his high support in the Prairies, where the Liberals have few electoral prospects.

So, should we expect the Liberals’ numbers to tick up as Canadians fret about Donald Trump? Maybe not.

Like Nanos, Abacus Data found that Trump is one of the few issues in which Trudeau and the Liberals are competitive with the Conservatives. Its latest poll put the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives by five points on being the party best able to handle Trump. That five-point lead compares quite nicely with the Liberals’ deficits of nine points on health care, 19 points on housing affordability, 28 points on rising cost of living and 36 points on the economy.

Crucially, however, the Liberals’ lead is among those who consider Donald Trump and his administration to be one of their top issues.

That represents only 19% of the electorate. Twice as many people named housing or health care as one of their top issues, while nearly two-thirds pegged the cost of living as a top issue.

Handling Trump might be a winner for the Liberals, or at the very least an issue on which they aren’t losing. But while Canadians are concerned about the incoming administration, it doesn’t appear to be supplanting their concerns on longer-standing issues — issues where the Liberals are at a severe disadvantage. As long as they are trailing badly on things like housing and affordability, running even or slightly ahead of the Conservatives on Trump is unlikely to give the Liberals any significant boost.

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Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News on one Liberal leader bowing out and an aspiring Liberal leader gathering more supporters.

• Polls show Canadians see politics behind the Liberals’ GST holiday and that the party has lost support since the return of Parliament in September. We also have new provincial numbers out of Ontario and Quebec.

• A bigger majority for Doug Ford and a catastrophic defeat for François Legault if the elections were held today.

• The story of Saskatchewan’s first election in the #EveryElectionProject.

IN THE NEWS

Zach Churchill confirmed as defeated, steps down as leader

On Tuesday, Nova Scotia Liberal leader Zach Churchill announced he was stepping down as leader of the party after a recount in his riding of Yarmouth confirmed that he was defeated by the PCs’ Nick Hilton by a margin of just 16 votes.

Churchill was first elected in Yarmouth in a 2010 byelection. His support peaked in the 2013 provincial election, when he won Yarmouth with 82% of ballots cast. He won by a still-respectable 19-point margin in the 2021 election, but couldn’t buck the anti-Liberal trend that swept away all but two incumbent Liberal MLAs in last month’s vote.

One of those two MLAs, Derek Mombourquette of Sydney-Membertou, will take over as interim leader until Churchill’s replacement is named. The party will announce the details of the next leadership race later.

Resigning was the right thing to do after the shellacking the Liberals got in the last election. Even if Churchill had won in Yarmouth, his leadership might have been untenable. Two seats and 22.9% of the vote was the worst result the Liberals have ever suffered. It’s hard to stay on as leader after a historically bad performance.

You can see in the chart below, however, that the Liberals have lost a step over the last few decades. A few leaders, like W.S. Fielding, George Murray and Angus L. Macdonald were able to put up dominant performances over multiple elections, with Fielding winning three, Macdonald five and Murray an astonishing six. But it hasn’t been since the 1970s that the Liberals have routinely taken at least 40% of the vote — a reflection in part of the rise of the New Democrats, who ate into the traditional parties’ support.

Indeed, with the exception of Stephen McNeil’s two wins in 2013 and 2017, the Nova Scotia Liberals have been struggling since the late 1990s. It could mean that Churchill’s defeat was just part of a longer-term downward trend for the Nova Scotia Liberals, and that McNeil’s wins were the exception.

We’ll see if Churchill’s successor, whoever it is, will preside over a further decline for the party — or its resurgence.

ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS

Two more MNAs, Linda Caron and Michelle Setlakwe, have endorsed MP Pablo Rodriguez in his bid for the Quebec Liberal leadership. He has the support of three members of the Liberal caucus, compared to two for businessman Charles Milliard and one for MNA Frédéric Beauchemin. Neither former Montreal mayor Denis Coderre nor lawyer Marc Bélanger have received any endorsements from the 19-strong PLQ caucus. The next leader will be selected in June.

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THIS WEEK’S POLLS

Canadians have dim view of GST holiday

Three polls published over the last few days show that Canadians are unimpressed by the Liberals’ GST holiday on selected products.

The polls come from Nanos Research, Léger and the Angus Reid Institute, and they all show the same lead balloon for the Liberals when it comes to this idea.

Across all three polls, a majority of respondents said that the GST holiday was either a bad idea or would provide them little or no help at all. Nanos found that 52% of respondents thought it was a bad idea, Léger found 65% saying it would help them little or not at all, and the ARI found 55% saying it wouldn’t have any impact on them.

Léger and the ARI found only between 7% and 12% saying it would help a lot.

When it comes to the $250 cheques going out to Canadians who earned $150,000 last year, Nanos found that 66% thought it was a bad idea. Léger similarly found two-thirds of respondents saying it would help only a little or not at all. Here again, just 5% and 12%, respectively, told the ARI and Léger it would help a lot.

It seems likely that Canadians have such a dim view of these measures not because they dislike tax breaks and free money, but rather because they see an electoral gambit as the motivating factor — not a genuine desire to provide relief. People don’t like to think they’re being bought with their own tax dollars.

Léger found that 70% of respondents agreed with the statement that the two measures were “only electoral measures to get people’s vote”. Roughly 90% of Conservative and Bloc voters saw it this way, but so did 61% of NDP voters and even 41% of Liberals. In the ARI poll, 55% of respondents said the measures were “entirely political”, while another 29% said it was “mostly political”. Little more than 1-in-10 Canadians didn’t see cynicism behind the moves.

With such awful scores for the GST holiday and relief cheques, it should come as no surprise that the polls also suggest the Liberals have little to gain from them electorally. Léger found that only between 3% and 7% of supporters of other parties said these measures would make them more likely to vote for the Liberals. While the Liberals can use every percentage point they can get, they are unlikely to come out ahead. Léger found that 7% of current Liberal voters are now less likely to support the party because of these two measures. The gains and losses cancel each other out.

The Angus Reid Institute found similar numbers, with only 4% of non-Liberal voters saying this would make them more likely to vote for the party vs. 37% who said it would make them less likely to support the Liberals.

It looks like the GST holiday and relief cheques will go right up there with the home-heating oil carve-out, last year’s cabinet shuffle and Trudeau’s podcast tour as failed attempts to get the Liberals’ polling numbers off the ground.

Liberals have lost support since return of Parliament

The latest update to the Poll Tracker has the Liberals at their lowest level of support in this election cycle with just 21.8%, nearly 21 points behind the Conservatives. While the Liberals are projected to win 51 seats, just 10 more than the Bloc, the Conservatives now stand at 220 seats — with the lower end of their likely range starting at 200 seats.

The polls published over the last week are pretty unanimous, with Abacus Data, the Angus Reid Institute, Léger and Nanos Research all awarding the Conservatives between 42% and 44%, followed by the Liberals at 21% to 23% and the NDP at 19% to 21%.

The Liberals’ numbers have deteriorated since the return of Parliament on Sept. 16, the same day the Liberals suffered their byelection defeat in LaSalle–Émard–Verdun. Compared to the Poll Tracker update of Sept. 15, the Liberals have lost 2.3 points nationwide. The NDP has been the biggest beneficiaries, as its support is up 1.7 points. The Conservatives are actually down 0.3 points since the Sept. 15 update — an insignificant movement that suggests stability.

If we drill down into the regions, we see that the Liberals have lost support in every part of the country. But they have fallen most in the Prairies and Ontario (1.5 points in each), Quebec (2.8 points) and British Columbia (3.8 points).

The NDP’s largest gains have been in British Columbia (3.8 points), Atlantic Canada (3.6 points) and Alberta (2.5 points). The Conservatives, meanwhile, have not had a consistent rise or fall across the country — they are down 3.3 points in Atlantic Canada and 1.8 points in B.C., but picked up 3.3 points in the Prairies.

The net result for the Liberals is that they are two percentage points further behind the Conservatives across Canada than they were when this political season began. The NDP has also closed the gap for second place by a net four points. For all their efforts over the last three months, all the Liberals have done is lose more ground and reduced the amount of time left to turn things around.

POLLING NEWS BRIEFS

With speculation rife that Ontario is just months away from an election call, two polls show Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives to be in an enviable position. Abacus Data puts the PCs ahead with 43% to the Liberals’ 25%, followed by the NDP in third at 21%. Mainstreet Research paints a very similar portrait, awarding 42% to the PCs, 27% to the Liberals and 22% for the NDP. The Ontario PCs continue to benefit from a divided opposition, but 42% or 43% is usually more than enough to win a solid majority government in Ontario regardless of the state of the opposition.

Over in Quebec, the Parti Québécois holds a solid lead in two polls. Léger gives the PQ 31%, followed by the CAQ at 24%, the Liberals at 16% and Québec Solidaire and the Conservatives at 13% apiece. Pallas Data pegged PQ support at 35%, followed by the CAQ at 20%, the Liberals at 18%, the Conservatives at 13% and QS at 12%. The PQ has led in every poll in Quebec since November 2023.

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IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY

I am running the CBC’s Poll Tracker with the seat projection and poll aggregation model that I’ve developed over the last four federal elections (and multiple provincial campaigns in between). You can check out the Poll Tracker here. For this election, I am making the seat-by-seat projections available to subscribers here.

In Ontario, Doug Ford’s PCs pick up a few extra seats in the projection and would now win 93 seats if the election were held today. The NDP would form the official opposition again with 17 seats, but that represents a loss of 11 from its current standing at Queen’s Park.

In Quebec, the Parti Québécois is in a solid majority position with 78 seats. The Liberals would win 24 seats and hold its role as the official opposition. With just seven seats, the CAQ could fall as far as fourth — or potentially fifth — in the National Assembly.

If every provincial legislature held an election today the conservative umbrella of parties would have 327 seats, the NDP’s provincial branches would have 186 seats and there would be 95 Liberals and 12 Greens. Quebec sovereigntists would account for 88 seats and there would be four Independents, along with seven CAQ MNAs.

To put this into some context, at the moment of Justin Trudeau’s first election victory in 2015 the preceding provincial elections produced 263 Liberals (buoyed by the existence of the B.C. Liberal Party), 182 Progressive Conservatives and Sask. Party MLAs, 167 New Democrats, 33 sovereigntists, 22 CAQ MNAs, 21 Wildrosers, three Greens and one Alberta Party MLA.

The seat estimates for provincial legislatures are derived from a swing model that is based on trends in recent polls as well as minor tweaks and adjustments. Changes are compared to last week. Parties are ordered according to their finish in the previous election (with some exceptions for minor parties)

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UPCOMING BYELECTIONS

• December 16

  • BC - Cloverdale–Langley City (federal)

• December 18

  • AB - Lethbridge West

• Yet to be scheduled

  • QC - Terrebonne (to call by March)

  • CA - Halifax (to call by March 2)

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(ALMOST) ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject

Saskatchewan’s first election

December 13, 1905

This was first published on December 13, 2023.

When the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were created by Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government in 1905, it was a foregone conclusion that a Liberal would be appointed Alberta’s first premier. It wasn’t so obvious who would be the first premier of Saskatchewan.

Frederick Haultain had been the premier of the Northwest Territories (which included modern Alberta and Saskatchewan at the time) since 1897. But he had been at odds with the Laurier government when it came to drawing up the new map in Western Canada. He wanted one gigantic province called Buffalo to be created, and he wanted this province to have greater provincial powers related to resources and education than Laurier was ready to provide.

Worst of all, though, was that Haultain was a Conservative.

Though he tried to administer the territory in a non-partisan way, he had aligned himself with the federal Tories on a number of occasions. That was enough to tip the balance in favour of a Liberal. That would be Walter Scott, an MP who had been chosen to lead the Saskatchewan Liberals into their first provincial election campaign.

“The new Premier was a prominent Western Liberal,” according to The Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs for 1905, “a member of Parliament for Assiniboia since 1900; a journalist by profession and only 38 years of age; and President of a Company owning the Regina Leader and the Moose Jaw Times. Personally, he was a man of capacity and had been recognized for some years as a coming politician.”

He didn’t have the experience or the reputation of Haultain, though. Sticking to his non-partisanship, Haultain formed the Provincial Rights Party. What Haultain saw as a party fighting for respect for the constitution Scott termed a “party of agitation and law suits.”

Walter Scott (left) and Frederick Haultain (right) - (The Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs)

Both the Liberals and the Provincial Rights Party adopted similar planks in their platform related to the ownership of public utilities and the building of railroads and schools. But Haultain’s platform also included demands for full provincial autonomy equal to that of other provinces. To do so, Haultain would take the Dominion government to “the highest Court of the Empire."

“The issues involved are so momentous to the future well-being of the country,” stated the Provincial Rights Party platform, “that it would be unpatriotic and detrimental to the future advancement of the Province and country to entrust their decision to the result of a contest on Dominion party lines.”

Newly installed as premier in September, Scott set up his government and delayed the election until after Alberta went to the polls (the fault of the harvest, of course). The Liberals’ sweeping victory in that province helped build momentum for the party in Saskatchewan, and in the meantime Scott used the opportunity to tour the province by train and buggy, delivering speeches.

The Liberals had much working in favour, including a good slate of speakers, an effective organization, federal patronage and that “everybody was feeling satisfied over the bountiful harvest and good times.”

Scott made his ministers run in difficult ridings in order to help tip the balance in the Liberals’ favour, and attacked Haultain and the Provincial Rights Party as more concerned with litigation and constitutional matters than improving the lives of Saskatchewan people. The Liberals, according to their slogan, were for “Peace, Progress and Prosperity.”

The legislation that had created Saskatchewan, Scott argued, was “not only passably good, but abundantly good; that is to say they are practically wise, constitutionally sound, and financially, especially, favourable.”

And while Scott had obtained promises from Laurier that the Canadian Northern Railway would continue to Regina and that the federal government recognized its responsibility in building a railroad to Hudson’s Bay, Haultain, according to the Liberals, was in the pocket of the hated Canadian Pacific Railway, which had been exempted from paying taxes to the local government.

Against this barrage, Haultain had less to work with. He didn’t have the same roster of prominent speakers and his organization was not nearly as strong, though he did point to Liberals running as Provincial Rights candidates as proof of his non-partisanship.

A divisive issue on the campaign trail was the existence of separate denominational schools, and that the Autonomy Act that created the province had mandated they be allowed in Saskatchewan. Haultain, while not explicitly coming out against separate (and predominantly Roman Catholic) schools, said that it should be up to Saskatchewan, not Ottawa, to decide how its educational system should work.

That got him support from Protestants and Orangemen, but not Archbishop Langevin of St. Boniface, whose territory included the new province. He endorsed Scott and attacked Haultain. In a tit-for-tat exchange of public letters, Haultain charged that “the Educational Clauses of the Autonomy Bill are the result of a conspiracy, conceived at Ottawa, against the rights and liberties of the Province and now being aided and abetted by Mr. Walter Scott and his political associates”

The result of the campaign was tight, with the Liberals winning 52.3% of the vote against 47.5% for the Provincial Rights Party. The seat results were more lopsided, however, with Haultain’s party winning nearly all of its nine seats in the southeastern corner of Saskatchewan. The Liberals won most of the rest.

Though 17 Liberals were declared elected, one of those victories was rescinded after the fact. Peter Tyerman was declared the winner in the riding of Prince Albert, beating the Provincial Rights candidate Samuel Donaldson by 93 votes. But there was a problem — 151 of Tyerman’s votes had come from three poll divisions, all of which delivered zero voters for Donaldson. A subsequent investigation found that those votes were “bogus”, as “there was not sufficient (if any) persons entitled to vote at said Polls Nos. 24, 25 and 26, to offset the majority of the valid votes cast at the election for Mr. Donaldson in the polls which were validly held.” Two years after Donaldson had won, he was able to take his seat in the legislature.

The Liberals lamented that Haultain and his supports had tried to “arouse class and religious prejudice” during the campaign — not a wild claim when one of the slogans became “Haultain or Langevin”. The Conservatives blamed corruption and “the misuse of naturalization papers”.

Haultain would stay on to try to lead the Provincial Rights Party to power in future elections, but when he failed and resigned so did the pretense of non-partisanship. Once Haultain was gone, the Provincial Rights Party became the Saskatchewan Conservative Party, to the shock of no one.

The 1905 election would be the first of Scott’s three victories as leader of the Liberals, and the first of a string of Liberal victories that would see the party govern Saskatchewan for nearly all of its first four decades as a province.

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That’s it for the Weekly Writ this week. The next episode of The Numbers will be dropping on Friday. The episode will land in your inbox but you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps. If you want to get access to the weekly mailbag and other special episodes, become a Patron here!