Carney has solidified the Liberal base, but he hasn’t expanded it |
Prime Minister Mark Carney greets Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre during an International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa on Tuesday.Patrick Doyle/Reuters
Mark Carney’s Davos speech appears to have caught Canadians’ attention. The Angus Reid Institute has a new poll out showing him with a 60-per-cent “positive” rating (to 34 per cent “negative”), up eight points since December. Spark Insights has him at 61 per cent.
And Pierre Poilievre? Just 36 per cent rate him positively, according to Angus Reid; 39 per cent, according to Spark.
Indeed, the Liberal Leader consistently runs ahead of his Conservative counterpart in the approval polls by margins of 20 points or more. Ditto for “best prime minister”: Nanos’s most recent poll shows Mr. Carney ahead of Mr. Poilievre by 28 points, 53-25. And yet the Liberal Party only leads the Conservatives by two points, on average.
On the surface, this seems puzzling. We live in an age of leader-dominated politics. Most of a party’s resources and energies are devoted to making their own leader look good, and the other party’s leader look bad. During an election, the media follow the party leaders’ every movement, to the near exclusion of their........