Poll shows Poilievre has lost edge on affordability

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OTTAWA — It wasn’t so long ago that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had shot to the top of the polls by promising to make life more affordable for everyday Canadians. But two recent surveys suggest he’s losing his edge on all-important pocketbook issues, just as the campaign kicks in to full gear.

A Leger/National Post poll released shortly before Sunday’s election call showed Poilievre trailing Liberal Leader Mark Carney by five points on the question of who’d do a better job of making life more affordable for everyday Canadians.

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Andrew Enns, Leger’s executive vice-president for Central Canada, told the National Post that Carney’s decision to cut the consumer carbon tax to zero per cent has helped him to close the gap.

“The Liberals are probably getting a boost from Carney cancelling the carbon tax as his first order of business,” said Enns.

“I gather Canadians are going to see a fairly significant drop in the price of gasoline at the pump come Tuesday (Apr. 1) and Mr. Carney will get some credit for that happening under his watch.”

The Leger poll showed Poilievre leading Carney on just two of eight key issues, with voters saying he’d do the best job of strengthening Canada’s armed forces and managing the federal budget.

(The firm’s monthly opinion poll was conducted, on this occasion, between March 14 and 16 using a sample of 1,599 adults recruited from a Leger-founded panel. Online polls are not proper representative samples and thus don’t carry a margin of error. However, the poll document provides an estimated margin, for comparison purposes, of plus-or-minus 2.45 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)

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Leger found in a separate week one federal election report, released Monday, that inflation is the top issue of the campaign for one in five Canadians, putting it second behind U.S. aggression and tariffs, which 32 per cent said was the election’s biggest issue.

The Leger/National Post poll suggests Carney holds a commanding 13-point lead on the question of who’d better job manage tariffs and other threats posed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Enns opined that Carney has done an effective job of tying together the campaign’s top two issues.

“I think (Carney’s) gaining some traction on the fact that (his) stance on fighting off the trade aggression and tariffs is being linked to trying to protect the consumer from some of the implications in terms of price increases,” said Enns.

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A different poll, released by Abacus Data on Friday, suggests Carney has also pulled even with Poilievre on his signature issue of housing affordability.

An identical 41 per cent of respondents said they believed Carney and Poilievre, respectively, would either “definitely” or “probably” take action to make housing more affordable if elected.

The survey was conducted with 1,500 eligible voters from March 17 to 20 by recruiting online respondents from partner-affiliated panels. Abacus commissioned and paid for the poll, which like the Leger survey does not carry a true margin of error. However, the comparison margin is calculated at plus or minus 2.5 percentage points 95 per cent of the time, according to Abacus’s website.

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Carney has said he’ll eliminate the GST from the sale of all homes bought for $1 million or less by first-time homebuyers. Poilievre has countered with a promise to waive the GST from all new builds bought for less than $1.3 million.

Poilievre’s oft-repeated promise to “build the homes” for a generation of young Canadians, locked out of the housing market by inadequate supply and exorbitant prices, has anchored his pitch to Millennial and Gen Z voters.

Enns said while Carney has closed the gap on housing, Poilievre still has a foothold with younger voters.

“Poilievre is still tracking quite well with the under-40 crowd… There are still signs that those aspiring new homeowners are seeing more attractive things from the Conservative platform,” said Enns.

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A more recent Leger survey, commissioned by the Canadian Press, has Poilievre four points ahead of Carney among 35-to-54-year-olds and two points ahead for 18-to-34-year-olds.

Carney, meanwhile, has a commanding 18-point lead among Canadians aged 55 and over.

The lack of pick-up on Poilievre’s affordability announcements, including a 2.25 per cent cut workers’ tax cut and tax write-off for travelling trades workers, has reportedly created a rift in Conservative circles.

Kory Teneycke, the manager of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives’ victorious campaign for re-election last month, publicly called on Poilievre to pivot to the “ballot question” of Trump and tariffs in multiple public apperances this week, warning that he’ll lose if he doesn’t.

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Michelle Rempel Garner, who worked with Teneycke in the Harper government, told the National Post the calls for Poilievre to change course doesn’t line up with what she’s hearing on the doors in her northern Calgary riding.

“The people I talk to in my riding appreciate that I’m able to tell them, in a precise and quantifiable way, how much our policies will make life more affordable for them,” said Rempel Garner.

Rempel Garner says she expects the Liberal lead in the polls to evaporate when voters have a chance to sit down and compare the Liberal and Conservative platforms.

“We’re in the early days in the campaign, and you can see us relentlessly, day by day, say here’s what we’re doing, here’s the plan, and that’s coming together in an overall package,” said Rempel Garner.

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Poilievre said not to expect a pivot in his messaging at a Saturday campaign stop in Winnipeg.

“We will obviously retaliate against unfair American tariffs and work to eliminate them, but we really need to do is reverse the weakness caused by the Lost liberal decade.”

National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com