When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Biden next meet, they will have something to commiserate about: their dismal standing in the polls.
Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party has been sliding rapidly in opinion polls for months, while more recent polls suggest the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre would win any election now held.
Likewise, new polls from The New York Times and Siena College have shown Biden trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six key battleground states.
[Read: Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds]
[The detailed Times/Siena Poll data]
Comparing the political situations in Canada and the United States is a fraught affair because of the variety of differences between the countries and their political systems. And of course, Americans won’t vote for another year, and Canada’s next federal election will likely be in two years.
But dissatisfied voters in both countries share a major problem: inflation and the economy in general.
“There is ample evidence that inflation is destructive to the performance of an incumbent government and to the way people think about it,” David Coletto, the chairman and chief executive of Abacus Data, told me.
Mr Coletto’s latest poll showed that 39 per cent of committed voters would vote for the Conservatives and 26 per cent for Liberal, while the New Democrats were supported by 18 per cent of those voters. (In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois was supported by 34 percent of committed voters.)
That’s a long way back for Mr. Trudeau since his early days as prime minister, when his leadership approval reached an eye-watering level of 73 percent in one poll. The current Abacus poll found that 53 percent of respondents had a negative view of Mr. Trudeau, while only 29 percent had a positive view.
Many factors, Mr. Coletto said, contribute to that dissatisfaction, but inflation, higher interest rates, housing costs and a general sense of boredom with the economy are at the top.
Voters polled in the Times/Siena poll said by a margin of 59 percent to 37 percent — the largest difference on any issue in the survey — they had more confidence in Mr. Trump than in Mr. Biden on the economy.
Some of the criticism of Mr. Trudeau’s economic performance, Mr. Coletto said, is based on perceptions that don’t match reality. In an earlier Abacus survey, Mr. Coletto found that most Canadians wrongly believed that inflation in Canada was higher than in other countries. International Monetary Fund statistics for October show Canada’s rate of 3.6 percent is well below Germany’s 6.3 percent or France’s 5.6 percent. Likewise, Mr. Biden gets little or no credit for the significant job creation under his watch.
“But it doesn’t calm the nerves to say, ‘Folks, things are good here, relatively speaking,’ when compared to where they were five years ago, things are no better,” Mr. Coletto said. “And that’s how people assess their situation, because people don’t live in those other countries where inflation is still very high.”
The other big factor for Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Coletto said, is simply that many voters are fed up with a leader like him, who has been around since 2015 and led his party through three successful elections. Mr. Biden may be only in his first term as president, but he has been a national political figure since he was first elected to the Senate 50 years ago.
Mr. Biden’s age, 80, is also an issue. In the Times/Siena survey, 71 percent of respondents said he was “too old” to serve effectively as president. Only 39 percent thought that about Mr. Trump, who is 77.
“Inflation kills governments, and time kills governments,” Coletto said.
While the status of Trudeau’s Liberal government has never fallen this low in the polls, there have been other periods when his popularity has ebbed and then recovered. And relatively few Liberals have publicly suggested that it may be time for the prime minister to step aside, despite his repeated pledge to fight the next election. Likewise, calls for Mr. Biden to withdraw from prominent Democrats remain limited.
“Will the Prime Minister stay, or will he leave?” said Mr. Coletto. “I have no idea. But where his leadership is today is a very different place than it was five months ago.”
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The newest and youngest residents of the Chartwell Colonel Belcher Retirement Residence in Calgary are the members of the New Zealand curling team, who have come to Canada to hone their skills.
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The trial of David DePape, who police say broke into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and shot her husband in 2022 while she was still speaker of the House of Representatives, is ongoing. Mr. DePape, a Canadian, was living illegally in the United States at the time. His attorney does not dispute prosecutors’ evidence.
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After the bankruptcy filing, WeWork closed four Canadian locations. A Canadian real estate investor told The New York Times that the bankruptcy spelled the end of projections that flexible office space would one day make up a significant portion of commercial office rent.
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Marcel Dzama, the Winnipeg-born artist, spoke with Julia Halperin about his collection of 250 handmade masks.
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Kathleen Mansfield, a Toronto pharmacist, is among a group of people who told The Times Magazine why they wanted the space to be their final resting place.
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A first-class dinner menu from the Titanic dated April 11, 1912, which was found in a 1960s photo album that once belonged to a community historian in Dominion, Nova Scotia, is expected to sell for more than $86,000 at auction.
Ian Austen, born in Windsor, Ontario, educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has covered Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
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