6 months after his swearing-in, Trudeau's beating expectations

[The honeymoon period isn’t over for Justin Trudeau who is ahead of his counterparts in polling that tracks people’s preference for prime minister. ELLE]

Six months after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet were sworn in on a sunny November morning, they continue to ride high in the polls, beating expectations and trouncing their political rivals.

On policy, however, some experts say the Liberals could do better.

One of the most straightforward ways to evaluate how a nascent government has performed is to look at the hard math: polling numbers. In that respect, the Liberals are dominating.

“The best way to evaluate any prime minister is whether he or she has the confidence of not just the House of Commons, but the people of Canada,” pollster Nik Nanos told Yahoo Canada News.

“It’s pretty clear right now Justin Trudeau has the confidence of both.”

The Liberals are at a 43 per cent approval rating, up from their election night result of 39.5 per cent, according to Nanos. The random telephone survey of 1,000 Canadians using land and cell-line samples took a four-week rolling average of 250 a week ending April 22, and is accurate plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

While it’s typical for a new government to gain support after an election in the so-called honeymoon period, the Liberal numbers are showing an unusual resilience, Nanos said.

“Six months out, usually you expect what we call the market correction, where support goes down to probably where it realistically should be,” he said. “We haven’t seen that with the Liberals yet.”

The party’s numbers are up in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, according to the poll, but down in the Prairies about 10 percentage points. That was likely due to the fallout from the focus the party has put on changing Canada’s environment and energy policy, he said.

The Canadian economy is continuing to adjust after a drop in commodity prices that has led to layoffs and jettisoned investment plans in the sector, such as in the Alberta oilpatch.

Trudeau has maintained that, while building pipelines is a priority to get resources to market, this can’t happen without co-operation with local communities and indigenous groups, and respect for the environment.

Trudeau ‘taken up all the time’

Trudeau is also personally ahead of his counterparts in polling that tracks people’s preference for prime minister.

In a separate Nanos Weekly Tracking survey released May 3, Trudeau stood at 51.6 per cent to Conservative interim Leader Rona Ambrose’s 15.2 per cent and New Democratic Party Leader Tom Mulcair’s 11 per cent. That poll is accurate plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

“What Canadians have learned is that this particular prime minister likes to be out in the country engaging with Canadians,” said Nanos. “For all intents and purposes he’s still on a campaign footing, on a personal basis, reaching out to Canadians and trying to advance his agenda.

“Strategically what this has done is denied the Opposition parties any kind of platform or time, because Justin Trudeau has taken up all the time.”

The Liberals’ political fortunes after six months stand in contrast to those of the Conservatives and the NDP — neither of which have moved up in the polls since election night, according to Nanos.

The NDP’s numbers remain unchanged while the Conservatives are down six points, according to the polling firm. The Conservatives are now at 26 per cent, compared to their 31.9 per cent result on election night.

Meanwhile, the New Democrats are now at 19 per cent, said Nanos, virtually unchanged from their 19.7 per cent election night result.

This means that the NDP delivered their core vote in the last election, Nanos said, but they haven’t moved the needle since then. But the good news for New Democrats, he added, is that the numbers are stable.

Last month the NDP held its convention in Edmonton, and Mulcair was rejected by delegates, who voted 52 per cent in favour of picking a replacement. Mulcair has said he will stay on as leader until his successor is chosen.

Another story on the policy front

Beyond polling numbers, another way of evaluating a new government is taking a look at how it has handled major policy files.

This point of view might take some of the shine off the Liberal success story, at least when judging where the party has now landed on some big election promises.

For example, the campaign trail promise by the Liberals to run “modest short-term deficits of less than $10 billion in each of the next two fiscal years” has proven to be short-lived; their March budget plan projects a $29.4 billion deficit in 2016-17.

The Liberals had also said they would be “honest about the government of Canada’s fiscal position,” but an analysis by parliamentary budget officer Jean-Denis Fréchette concluded that the government “made changes to the presentation of its fiscal plan that have made it more difficult for parliamentarians to scrutinize public finances.”

One of the most politically volatile issues during the 2015 election campaign was the issue of Syrian refugees. When news broke of a Canadian connection to Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler who washed up dead on a Turkish beach last September, then-prime minister Stephen Harper faced intense pressure to take immediate action on the refugees’ plight.

The Liberals said at the time that if they formed government they would “expand Canada’s intake to 25,000 refugees from Syria through immediate, direct sponsorship by the government of Canada.”

There are now indeed 25,000 Syrian refugees in the country, but former Canadian diplomat and refugee expert Mike Malloy says the picture is more complex than the numbers show.

“I give them full marks for reacting to the wave of public concern that was generated by the photos of [Kurdi] and for moving quickly,” he said in an interview.

“The operation for moving the people was phenomenal … and far exceeds anything we’ve ever done. A lot of credit goes to everybody involved.”

What concerned Malloy — who has worked with politicians, bureaucrats and settlement groups on the Syrian refugee file and was in contact with both the Conservatives and Liberals last fall — was the high speed of implementation.

The Liberals initially said they would bring in all 25,000 by Jan. 1, but eventually pushed back that deadline.

“What didn’t work so well was understanding the impact of that many people arriving at that time of the year, on settlement agencies that might typically be asked to settle say five, six, 700 refugees a year, and all of a sudden they’re being faced with three or four thousand,” he said.

“That has been very difficult to manage, and that is going to have implications probably well into this next year.”

Malloy said there was also a breakdown of communication between the immigration department and the Liberals over what was needed versus what was possible.

“I think the politicians clearly did not understand anything about how small the network was, both in terms of civil servants and in terms of resources that these service-providing organizations actually had.”