Half of Canadians think Poilievre's chances of beating Carney are 'poor,' while PM's honeymoon erodes: poll

OTTAWA — Half of Canadians believe Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s chances of beating Prime Minister Mark Carney are poor at best even as Carney’s approval ratings show the first signs of slipping, according to a new Leger poll.  

“Mr. Poilievre still has work to do… to broaden his appeal to the greater electorate,” Leger executive vice-president Andrew Enns said in an interview.  

A new Postmedia-Leger poll suggests that 50 per cent of Canadians think chances are slim that Poilievre defeats Carney and the Liberals in the next general election. That includes nearly one in five (18 per cent) Conservative supporters. A similar number of Liberal supporters (19 per cent) think Poilievre has a good chance of beating Carney.

Just over one-third of respondents (36 per cent) said they believe the Conservative leader has a good chance of defeating the Liberals, suggesting Poilievre still faces a significant uphill battle in the polls before the next election.

But with nearly three-quarters of Conservatives saying they believe Poilievre has a good chance of beating Carney, it’s likely a positive signal for the party leader ahead of a leadership review in January.

“If you’re the Conservatives, you’ve got to make sure that people are listening to Pierre and you’re connecting not just with your voters” because those numbers suggest Canadians may be tuning Poilievre out, Enns noted.

The picture isn’t entirely rosy for the Liberals either. Carney’s government still leads the Conservatives by nine points (47 per cent compared to 38 per cent), but polling suggests Canadians are getting antsy for the prime minister to start delivering on his commitments.  

Notably, the poll shows a steady decline in Canadians’ satisfaction in Carney’s government since July. The new data suggest 51 per cent of Canadians are satisfied by the Liberal government, a second consecutive decline since early July (55 per cent).  

Dissatisfaction with the Carney government has increased by almost the same measure (33 per cent to 38 per cent) over the same period.  

While satisfaction remains high, the margin between satisfied and dissatisfied Canadians is shrinking fast, Enns said.  

“Month to month haven’t really been big changes. But when you look at the beginning of summer to where we are now, at the beginning of summer they had a 22-point gap advantage in terms of satisfied versus dissatisfied. That’s narrowed to 13,” Enns said.  

“As we get into the fall, as we get to the House coming back, there’s a little bit of ‘OK, let’s get going’,” he added about Canadians’ desire to see the government deliver on its electoral commitments.  

But the polling data also suggest that Canadians weren’t following political news too closely this summer.  

For example, over half of respondents (53 per cent) said they were not familiar with Carney’s “projects of national interest” initiative, a flagship program that the Liberals have discussed near daily since their election on April 28.  

“I would imagine that there might be some folks in the Prime Minister’s Office that would go ‘wow, what the heck’,” Enns said. “They did spend a lot of time talking about these national projects.”  

In the spring, the Liberals passed the Building Canada Act, which gives cabinet sweeping powers to fast-track natural resource and infrastructure projects deemed in the national interest.  

Last week, the Liberals announced the head of the Major Projects Office, former TransMountain CEO Dawn Farrell, who will help “national interest” projects get through government regulation to be built faster.  

None of the projects submitted by provinces to the new office for fast-tracking have been revealed, though Carney has mentioned port expansions such as in Contrecoeur, about 40 kilometres northeast from Montreal on the Saint Lawrence, and the Port of Churchill in northern Manitoba with direct access to Hudson Bay.  

Of all the projects floated as possibilities, the highest number of respondents (46 per cent) said new pipelines to open up markets for Canadian oil and natural gas would have the greatest positive impact on Canada’s economy.  

A significant majority of Canadians (72 per cent) also want major projects to move forward quicker while only 16 per cent said they should move at the usual pace.  

“The expectation in the public on that is that they are going to be faster, they are going to be special and they’re going to move quicker,” Enns said.  

“It’s way easier to say they’re going to move quicker than to actually make them move quicker.”  

The polling firm Leger surveyed 1,592 respondents as part of an online survey conducted between Sept. 5 to 7. Online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not use random sampling of the population.  

National Post, with files from Catherine Lévesque.  

cnardi@postmedia.com

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