Weekly Writ for June 19: Are Canadians not in 'decision mode' yet?
Justin Trudeau thinks Canadians haven't made up their minds.
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.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared on CBC’s Power and Politics, where host David Cochrane asked Trudeau about his poor standing in the polls as another survey puts the Liberals behind the Conservatives by 20 points.
Trudeau was dismissive of the numbers, saying “Canadians aren’t in a decision mode right now”.
I’ve heard my fair share of excuses and denials from politicians facing bad polling numbers. They usually come in one of three styles:
“The only poll that matters is on election day.”
A classic, right up there with the quip about what John Diefenbaker said about polls and dogs.
Technically, of course, it’s correct. Public opinion surveys are just that — surveys. It’s the votes that actually matter.
But that doesn’t make polls meaningless. That’s like saying weather forecasts don’t matter, because the only thing that matters is what the weather actually is on a given day. Again, technically true, and if you believe it you’ll eventually find yourself standing out in the rain without an umbrella.
“The polls were wrong that one time.”
Or two, or three times — doesn’t really matter. Remember Premier Adrian Dix or President Hillary Clinton? It’s poll analysis whataboutism.
Here again, it’s technically true. But that the polls were wrong on individual occasions in the past doesn’t mean they are always wrong or will be wrong in the future. Polls have been reasonably accurate in the vast majority of elections and, when they’ve missed, it’s rare that the error was to the tune of 20 points.
“Canadians aren’t in a decision mode right now.”
This is the avenue that Trudeau chose on Power and Politics. It’s a variation of the claim that “things can change” or that “campaigns matter”, perhaps the most defensible way to dismiss the polls.
The next election is some 16 months away. Things certainly can change. But no one is claiming with absolute certainty that where things stand today is where they will stand in October 2025. But the two are not completely unrelated — in all likelihood, the results of the next election will have something in common with the poll results today.
This is because 1) in most cases, voting intentions tend not to swing around that dramatically and 2) people’s views might be more baked-in and immovable in the current context.
Trudeau explained that “what you tell a pollster, if they ever manage to reach you, is very different from the choice Canadians end up making in an election campaign”.
The swipe against polling aside (Trudeau, a data geek, knows very well most polls are now conducted online, so the old concern about telephone response rates is not really applicable anymore), he has a point here. Outside of the pressure cooker of an election campaign, people might not have fully-formed their voting choice just yet.
The problem for Trudeau and the Liberals, however, is that current polling is part of a longstanding trend, one that has been working against the Liberals virtually from their 2015 election victory. With the brief exception of a pandemic surge, Trudeau and the Liberals have been on a long, slow decline for nearly nine years.
In an Abacus Data poll published this week (more on it below), only 39% of Canadians said they would consider voting for the Liberals. That number was 46% in the fall of 2021, when the Liberals were re-elected for the second time with a minority government. It was 51% in the fall of 2019 when they won re-election for the first time. It was 70% when the Trudeau Liberals came to power in 2015.
This means fewer and fewer Canadians are willing to even consider the Liberals in their final voting decision. It’s true that many of them might not have made up their mind entirely, but the pool of voters that the Liberals can still persuade to come back to them is getting smaller and smaller.
A poll by the Angus Reid Institute in April suggested that a majority of Conservative voters aren’t going anywhere. It found that 63% are “very committed” to voting for Pierre Poilievre’s party, with another 24% “fairly committed”. If the Conservatives got the vote of only those very and fairly committed voters, they’d still be working with around 36% to 37% of the vote — enough to win a minority government at the very least.
Granted, only 29% of NDP voters said they were “very committed” to the New Democrats, leaving some room for growth for the Liberals. But the Liberals also face a lack of commitment, even from the smaller pool they still have backing them. The ARI found just 40% of current Liberal voters “very committed” to the party. So, it’s possible that when Canadians do get to ‘decision mode’, the Liberals could find themselves in an even worse position.
Canadians might not have made up their minds, but they appear to have a pretty good idea of where they stand. Troubled incumbent governments tend to have great difficulty pulling off comebacks. Stephen Harper’s defeat in 2015 was forecast from early 2013, when the Conservatives dropped to around 30% support. The only question was whether the Liberals or New Democrats would be able to gather enough of the anti-Harper vote around them to win.
But while we remember the significant movement in the polls that occurred over that 78-day campaign in 2015, we often forget that for the first two years after Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader the polls consistently gave the Liberals about 35% to 40% of the vote, the Conservatives around 30%, and the NDP around 20% to 25% — nearly exactly where people landed at the end of the 2015 campaign. Their final decision looked a lot like where they had been before they were in ‘decision mode’.
People could change their minds between now and the next election. But it’ll be far easier for Pierre Poilievre to keep his supporters where they are than for Justin Trudeau to get them back.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on just what went down in the Durham byelection in March and what happened in Manitoba’s byelection upset last night. Plus, a second leadership run for Ruba Ghazal, a possible early election in Nova Scotia, a new high-profile candidacy for the Conservatives in St. John’s and a byelection that might never occur in Halifax.
Polls show the Liberals aren’t in the midst of a comeback, plus we have new numbers out of Quebec and Manitoba.
Pierre Poilievre, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and Wab Kinew would all win majority governments if their elections were held today.
Profile for a key provincial swing riding in Regina.
The Great Depression defeats another government, this time in Saskatchewan, in the #EveryElectionProject.
IN THE NEWS
Poll-by-poll results suggest big suburban swing in Durham byelection
Reading into the tea leaves of a byelection’s results is not for the faint of heart and should be attempted with the greatest of caution. But reading into the tea leaves of the tea leaves? That’s just the sort of thing The Writ is all about.
That brings us to the federal byelection in Durham held this past March.