Poilievre is staging rallies this week in the northern Ontario mining country, firing up his base with a vociferous appeal to cut taxes and cut spending. But its message can also resonate with a larger audience.
A survey conducted Wednesday by Abacus Data found only 16% of voters those who consider the economy a top three issue see the Liberals as the best party to tackle it.
47 percent of them believe in Poilievres Conservatives.
With an election until 2025 at the latest, Trudeau acknowledged the uncertainty festering in Canada. But as he presented his renovated bench on Wednesday, which replaced seven veteran ministers with seven starters, he insisted it is the best he has.
“We know times are challenging, but this is the team that will be able to continue the hard work by rolling up our sleeves and delivering for Canadians,” he told reporters.
Not all of them sold. Robert Asselin, senior vice president of policy at the Business Council of Canada, Canada’s largest business lobbying group, dismissed the shuffle as “the triumph of politics over politics.”
“Optics are a big mix,” said Asselin, who once advised Trudeau and former Finance Minister Bill Morneau. “But the government will stay the course in the main direction it has taken, which is not to worry too much about economic policy and will continue to spend a lot of money.”
Trudeau ‘ s a team
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland was one of 12 ministers who were not expelled.
Most ministers entered the swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall with family or senior staff. Freeland toured alongside Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne and International Trade Mary Ng, a show of solidarity on the economic front bench.
Trudeau’s team had issued news of a cabinet overhaul. The fact that Freeland, Champagne and Ng stayed signals that their boss prefers the status quo over wholesale change.
Stevie O’brien, a former chief of staff to two Cabinet ministers who left the government in 2022, told POLITICO that management of the Canadian economy will fall to more than Freeland.
“We’re seeing a fortification of the core economic team,” said O’brien, now a senior adviser at McMillan Vantage. “A combination of steady hands and continuity in Freeland and Champagne, but also adding some real top performers to key economic portfolios.”
She showed Anita Anand on the Treasury Board; Marc Miller, who moves to the Ministry of immigration; Sean Fraser on housing and infrastructure; and Jean-Yves Duclos on public services and procurement.
The four ministers told reporters on Wednesday they were focused on the economy. Fraser will serve as Canada’s leading man in the housing supply crisis.
Asselin and a long list of business groups want the Liberal government to rein in spending and focus obsessively on economic growth. He said he has been assured that some of that work will now fall to Anand, who moved from defence to become the new president of the Treasury Board, an agency of the central government.
Freeland’s most recent federal budget pledged to eliminate billions in spending.
“If the prime minister has decided that spending should be restricted, and those spending revisions were real and serious, then the appointment of Anita Anand is welcome news,” Asselin said. “She’s as solid as you can get in terms of rigor and intelligence and file recognition.”
O’brien, Anand’s chief of staff when she was the public services and Procurement Minister competing with the rest of the world on covid vaccines, said her former boss would be a “cautious gatekeeper” on the Treasury Board.
“She’s going to have to ask tough questions,” O’brien said. “It’s very easy to sit down and talk about how we should spend money on this and we should invest in this. It’s easy if you always choose the Cadillac option. One must be able to drill into it and apply logic and process and rigor.”
The rise of the Conservatives, the fall of the Liberals
The Liberals have followed most opinion polls since last September, when Poilievre won the leadership of the Conservative party. They have also lost the popular vote in two consecutive elections, relying on an efficient vote that gave enough seats in the House of Commons to put out a minority government.
Trudeau’s team woke up to bad news the day of the shuffle. The latest Abacus Data poll put conservative support at 38 percent, up 10 points from the Liberals.
Poll aggregator 338canada, which projects the number of seats based on a weighted average of recent polls, gives the Conservatives (35 percent) a four-point national lead over the Liberals. But the same parties are virtually equal in the latest projected number of 338canada seats, flying around 140 seats each out of 338 up for grabs.
Abacus has Poilievre ahead in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatcheanair, Manitoba and the traditional battlefield of Ontario. He follows in Quebec, where the Pro-sovereignty bloc Quantas the Liberals. But liberals and conservatives are tied in the Atlantic provinces — a bastion of support for Trudeau since he swept the region’s countries in 2015.
The cost of living was the most important issue for voters by a wide margin. Seventy-two percent of respondents ranked it as a top priority. The second issue was health care at 45 percent, with housing affordability following at 43 percent.
Any findings are a warning sign for Trudeau as he seeks that elusive fourth term. If the prime minister hopes to win, this renewed Cabinet record on key issues could make or break the next campaign.
The Abacus survey was conducted on 2,486 Canadian adults from July 20 to 25. The margin of error for a comparable probability-based random sample of the same size is + / -2 percent, 19 times out of 20.
Liberals like what they see
For all the renewal speeches, Trudeau refused to displace Freeland, the deputy prime minister and finance minister. She will tell anyone within earshot that her government is on the right track.
In a recent conversation with POLITICO at the Aspen Security Forum, Freeland garnered applause as he celebrated Canada’s latest inflation data.
Statistics Canada reported a slowdown in headline inflation to 2.8 percent, powered by a year-on-year easing of gasoline prices.
It’s not all good news for nervous families. The cost of food and mortgage interest remained high, rising year-on-year by 9.1 percent and 30.1 percent, respectively.
Most economists acknowledge that inflation has persisted thanks to a variety of global factors, though many policymakers acknowledge that Covid-era government spending has played a role.
A high-profile former Liberal minister added his voice to that chorus this week.
“Excessive government spending at all levels is driving inflation and higher interest rates,” Scott Brison, a former Treasury Board president who left the government in 2019, wrote on LinkedIn. “Canada is a lucky country. Sadly we are frittering our good fortune away.”
A renewed economic agenda could prove the government’s doubters wrong. Trudeau’s new ministers will be briefed in the coming days, and the Cabinet will move to Prince Edward Island for a retreat next month. Their goal: Get ready for the summer.
The House of Commons is back in session in September. 18.
Tyler Meredith, another former economic adviser to Trudeau and Morneau who also drew up federal budgets for Freeland, tells POLITICO a shuffle is just the beginning.
“[The shuffle] it is meant to convey a reset at a time when the economy can turn a corner either for better or worse,” he said. “A reset is ultimately about ideas.”
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