He’s not dead yet, folks. After months of increasingly dire public opinion polls, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party of Canada are finally showing a political pulse. After Pierre Poilievre’s lousy week in mid-November, highlighted by a conspicuously obnoxious confrontation with a journalist and his party’s nonsensical opposition to a Ukraine-Canada free trade deal, I wrote that it might eventually be seen as a turning point.
Well, as I like to say in situations like this: Ahem.
This new Abacus Data poll shows Liberal support snapping back and Poilievre’s negatives on the rise. “It appears that the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre have made themselves less acceptable to these past Liberal supporters over the past few weeks and may have even alienated a small portion of their own past supporters, pushing most back into the Liberal fold,” Abacus Data CEO David Coletto said on Twitter.
Poilievre’s recent shenanigans in the House of Commons, which included his party voting repeatedly against the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement, aren’t likely to help his numbers here. Neither will recent news of the federal government’s deal with Google on Bill C-18, or the growing international trail of evidence behind the Indian government’s involvement in extrajudicial killings in Canada and illegitimate involvement in our democracy. One by one, the issues that Poilievre had been stacking up against the Liberal government are starting to backfire.
Even housing, which has looked like Poilievre’s ace in the hole with young people for a while now, is starting to turn in favour of the government. No, Housing Minister Sean Fraser won’t have single-handedly made homes affordable for young people by 2025, but it will be increasingly difficult to ignore progress being made on that front. For example, as housing expert Mike Moffatt noted, his recent decision to reintroduce the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s catalogue of housing designs “has the potential to be massively beneficial.”
