Kurl: Trudeau looks like a sad clown after trying some budget magic

Article content

You can’t blame Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he feels as despondent and rejected as an unfortunate magician hired for a children’s party. I mean, what hasn’t he done for young people? In a series of spending ads and programs this month, all aimed at Millennial and Gen Z adults, he has performed the political equivalent of pulling rabbits out of his hat, making balloon animals, doing the endless handkerchief trick with the sleeve, with the grand finale of releasing pigeons. And what is the public reaction? They’re on their phones, watching YouTube videos of conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

Article content

It’s almost unfortunate how poorly the Liberals’ great reset is going in its early days. All that effort around a carefully curated budget aimed at, as liberals called it, “generational justice” hasn’t moved the political needle one millimeter. Correction: You moved the needle a millimeter, just in the wrong direction.

Article content

In a poll we published at the Angus Reid Institute after the budget, the opposition Conservatives are up a couple of points to 43 per cent in voting intention, while the Liberals are down one point to 23 per cent. Pollsters like me would say this is a statistically insignificant move. But given the effort to achieve a “generational justice” budget, party strategists and policy wonks must turn to liquid antacid, if not something stronger.

“Give it time,” they will tell you publicly. “People still don’t know what’s in the budget.” But even when you tell them, liberals remain frustrated and unrewarded. The aforementioned survey showed that half of the respondents highlight the budget at the beginning of the questionnaire, before asking about voting intention. The other half received the budget details towards the end. At the same time, vast majorities of canadians He professed that he liked individual aspects of the budget measures, such as increased defense spending, more housing infrastructure, pharmaceutical care, dental care, and even the new disability benefit (which many disability community advocates have criticized). . Even then, more than half (56 percent) told us that the budget makes them more pessimistic about the future.

Article content

Worse than that: the younger ones are not only unimpressed, they are leaving altogether. Between Generation Z and voting-age Millennials (those ages 18 to 44) 70 per cent do not believe the Trudeau government is working in the best interests of their generations.. This has to be a painful repudiation, especially as concern at all generational levels about inflation and the cost of living is falling.

Where are younger voters going? Young people aged 18 to 24 lean slightly towards the NDP, while those aged 25 to 34 are split between the NDP and the Conservatives. Older millennials are totally on board with the CCP. At the moment, the ruling party is nowhere in this fight, coming in a distant third among all those voters they are trying so hard to attract. The Liberals eat the NDP’s lunch among those over 45, but still come in second place behind Poilievre’s party by margins of almost two to one.

It is clear that the prime minister has not made the inroads with the voters he needs. Perhaps the only thing left now is to scare them; to believe that conservatives will eliminate and repeal all the good things he says he will deliver; to believe that they will be even worse under the PCC government than under theirs. It will be a difficult case to make, given that Poilievre has maintained message discipline by saying almost nothing about the spending programs he would cut while he criticizes the Liberals’ long history of deficit spending. As is always the case in politics, there is no advantage in the opposition releasing specific details too soon. That said, it’s about time more pressure was put on the Conservative leader about what, if anything, is in his bag of tricks.

shachi kurl He is president of the Angus Reid Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan national public opinion research foundation.

Article content