By Shachi Kurl, President
April 26, 2024 – You couldn’t blame Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he’s been feeling as downcast and rejected as a hapless magician hired for the children’s party. I mean, what hasn’t he done for the young folk?! In a series of spending and program announcements this month all aimed at Millennials and Gen Z adults, he’s performed the political equivalent of pulling rabbits out of his top hat, making animal balloons, doing the never-ending handkerchief trick with his sleeve, with the grand finale of releasing doves. And what’s the audience reaction? They’re on their phones, watching YouTube videos of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
It is almost pitiable, how badly the Liberals’ great reset is going in its admittedly early days. All that effort around a carefully curated budget aimed at, as the Liberals dubbed it, “generational fairness” has not moved the political needle even a millimetre. Correction: it has moved the needle a millimetre, just in the wrong direction.
In polling we released at the Angus Reid Institute post-budget, the opposition Conservatives are up a couple of points to 43 per cent in vote intention, while the Liberals are down a point, to 23 per cent. Pollsters like me will say this is statistically insignificant movement. But given the pull-out-all-the-stops effort at a “generational fairness” budget, party strategists and spin doctors must be reaching for the liquid anti-acid, if not something stronger.
“Give it time,” they’ll tell you publicly. “People don’t know what’s in the budget yet.” But even when you tell them, the Liberals remain thwarted, unrewarded. The aforementioned poll showed half of respondents the budget highlights up front in the questionnaire, before asking about vote intention. The other half got the budget details towards the end. In turn, vast majorities of Canadians professed to like individual aspects of the budget measures, such as increased defence spending, more housing infrastructure, pharmacare, dental care, and even the new disability benefit (that many advocates in the disability community have themselves panned). Even then, more than half (56 per cent) told us the budget makes them more pessimistic about the future.
Read more from the article in the Ottawa Citizen here.
Image Credit – Adam Scotti/PMO
