With 15 days left before election day, Mark Carney and the Liberal Party of Canada continue to lead popular opinion polls.
CBC’s Poll Tracker and 338canada.com, both of which aggregate the results of national polls, suggest the rookie Liberal leader and his once-woebegotten Grits retain a six-percentage-point lead over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives as the party of choice for Canadians.
Both poll aggregators place Liberal support this week around 44 per cent, compared to 38 per cent for the Conservative.
This is remarkable in the context of recent Canadian elections. Polls suggest Carney’s Liberals are more popular right now than Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were on election night in 2015, when Trudeau won his sole majority government.
As a result, the same poll aggregators say if an election were held today, the Liberals would secure a large majority government, likely exceeding the size of Trudeau’s majority 10 years ago.
Given the inefficiency of Conservative Party support, which tends to be heavily concentrated in relatively few ridings, Liberals tend to win Canadian elections even when the two parties are tied in popular support.
“The important point for the Conservatives is even at that zero-point race, that tie, the Liberals probably still win more seats,” CBC Poll Tracker’s Eric Grenier said earlier this week on Power & Politics.
“Even in the worst polls for the Liberals and the best polls for the Conservatives, Mark Carney still comes out on top.”
The question is whether the current political dynamic will hold.
In late March, when Carney called the election, Liberal support hovered around 38 per cent. Few political observers expected the Liberals’ popularity to remain at that level, let alone grow.
“You have nowhere to go but down, but right now, Mark Carney hasn’t gone down, and it’s a bit of a surprise,” said Mary Agnes Welch, a principal with Winnipeg’s Probe Research.
There is a lot of pressure on Carney, given that he’s running his first campaign as a politician and serving as a caretaker prime minister without any meaningful experience in either role.
“He is in many ways a political neophyte, so the fact that he hasn’t stumbled badly is actually a bit of a miracle,” Welch said.
“There’s also this view that at some point we were all going to wake up and remember that we didn’t like the Liberals very much two months ago — and that hasn’t happened.”
Whether that will happen during the final weeks of the campaign is the biggest question for both Liberals and Conservatives. A disastrous performance by Carney at the coming televised debates could put a dent in Liberal support.
However, several recent polls suggest much of the existing Liberal support is sticky, meaning most Liberal voters are unlikely to change their minds no matter what happens over the next 15 days.
Those same polls suggest Conservative support in this election is even stickier, which is good news for Poilievre in the sense his party is hovering around the same support Stephen Harper’s Conservatives enjoyed when they won a majority government in 2011.
The problem for the Conservatives is NDP support is still very low and that will make life easy for the Liberals on election day if this phenomenon persists.
But there is one factor that may tilt the playing field in favour of the Conservatives. In many ridings, Poilievre’s party appears to have more experienced candidates and more experienced political organizers.
In December, when Liberal support was 20 points lower and the party was preparing to manage a historic defeat, the party populated its nominations with candidates with little or no political experience.
“There is a whole cadre, perhaps even hundreds of those Liberal candidates who were kind of no-hopers,” Welch said.
“This is a Liberal Party that didn’t have as much money, wasn’t very well organized, had a D team running riding races and, to some degree, running its central campaign. And now those people are suddenly running to win.”
Experienced candidates and campaign teams usually do a better job of identifying the friendly voters and getting them to polls on election day.
As a result, the Conservatives ought to have a ground-game advantage over Liberals in Manitoba ridings such as Kildonan-St. Paul and Saint Boniface-Saint Vital, where rookie Liberal candidates are running against more experienced Conservatives.
“We probably should expect on election day that that Tory machine, which has been on the ground and is reasonably well-organized, will poke a few holes into some of that Liberal support,” Welch said.
“The flip side to that, though, is in this election more than any other, we’re not thinking local. We’re not thinking about that nice MP that came to our door who helped us out with a thing that we might like. But we are thinking internationally. We are thinking about Canada’s place in the world and tariffs and who can battle Trump.”
To be clear, polls suggest both the Conservatives and the Liberals are enjoying support near or above historic levels. Looking at this metric alone, both parties are running strong campaigns.
What remains to be seen is whether voters will pay enough attention to those campaigns to change their minds over the next 15 days.