Good morning,
Folks, we could have a race on our hands.
The latest weekly tracking survey from Nanos Research shows the Liberals and Conservatives are each tied at 33 per cent support among respondents. The NDP are at 17 per cent, the Greens at 10 per cent, the Bloc Québécois at 5 per cent and the People’s Party at 1 per cent.
Of course, there is a lot of room for movement in the next four months. Over the past year, Liberal support has declined in the polls in fits and starts from about 40 per cent to 30 per cent. Conservative support, meanwhile, has generally bounced up and down between the mid-30s and the high 20s. The New Democrats have been averaging around their current level of support while the Greens have been on a gentle incline.
On the question of leadership, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s approval scores have fallen from the stratospheric heights of the months immediately after the 2015 election to now being about even between those who think he has or hasn’t the qualities of a good leader. Both Andrew Scheer and Jagmeet Singh also score about even, but have very high measures of those “unsure” about their abilities.
“Gripped in a tie, the federal political scene is more like a series of imperfect choices that of an embrace of any party or leader," said Nik Nanos, the chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research. "If an election were held today we would be looking at a minority government or even possibly a hung parliament.”
Nanos Research conducts its weekly tracking survey by telephone and speaks to 250 respondents per week. The four-week rolling survey results represent a sample of 1,000 Canadians and the figures have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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TODAY’S HEADLINES
The lawyers for Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou say the Canadian government should intervene in her case and end the extradition process she is going through. Ms. Meng was arrested in December and faces extradition to the United States, where she is wanted on charges of fraud. Ms. Meng’s arrest caused an immediate chill in relations between Canada and China, and the Chinese government has taken various actions – including arrests and trade sanctions – in apparent reprisal for her situation.
The Liberal government announced this morning that the Canada Infrastructure Bank will play a part in bringing Via Rail’s dreams for a dedicated high-speed rail line between Windsor, Ont., and Quebec City a little closer to reality. Transport Minister Marc Garneau said today’s investment should be taken as a signal that his government is very serious about the project.
The government also unveiled a $13-million fund to “honour the lives and legacies” of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across the country.
The Prime Minister’s special adviser on LGBTQ issues, Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault, says Canadians should no longer be charged for failing to disclose their HIV status to sexual partners.
It has become a little more difficult for companies to challenge the government’s procurement decisions.
Dean French, who left his role as chief of staff to Ontario Premier Doug Ford last week, was back at Queen’s Park yesterday to clear out his desk. Sources tell The Globe that the embattled former aide still has the premier’s ear.
The Hill Times is reporting that a former staffer of Toronto-area Liberal MP Geng Tan says she lost her job without cause, and is accusing Mr. Tan of not paying child support for a daughter she says is his. The Hill Times reports that Mr. Tan told the paper he donated sperm to the staffer, but that he would not address the other allegations without legal assistance. No allegations have been tested in court.
And the Prime Minister drew some jeers on Twitter last night for sharing a photo of a meeting with volunteers that showed the group using plastic cutlery. Mr. Trudeau announced earlier this month that a re-elected Liberal government would ban single-use plastics. The Prime Minister’s Office said this morning it planned to reuse the cutlery.
Emily Laxer (The Globe and Mail) on Quebec’s religious-symbols ban: “Premier François Legault claims that, in passing the bill, his party has closed the book on a more than decade-long debate over secularism in Quebec. But the evidence from France suggests the opposite: that the law risks opening the door to even more troubling erosions of minorities’ religious rights.”
Lise Ravary (Montreal Gazette) in defence of the ban: “Francophone Quebecers’ only home on Earth is a piece of land, most of it barren, in the northeast corner of North America. Full-blown multiculturalism, which encourages newcomers to keep their own cultures and does too little to promote integration, would mean the end of an extraordinary experiment that started in 1608, when Samuel de Champlain founded a settlement that would become Quebec City."
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on Ontario Premier Doug Ford: “It didn’t take an expert to see that Mr. Ford’s problems didn’t really stem from weak ministers. It was an unfocused Premier who relied, completely, on a chaotic aide who seemed to threaten his own team more than the opposition. There were regular reports that MPPs and staffers felt they were being pushed around. The chief of staff was an especially dangerous weakness: He was the Ford government’s biggest problem, but the Premier couldn’t do without him.”
Paul Wells (Maclean’s) on lessons learned from Ford and Trudeau losing top aides: “Of course political lifers live for combat, sweat the next confrontation, hold grudges from the last one. But most voters are voters only every few years. They’re citizens all the time in between, and for the life of them they did not elect their governments for constant combat. The things that excite small donors—the us-or-them polarization, the constant crisis, the nonstop 'Paul, you’ll never guess what my opponents are up to now’ fundraising emails—exhaust everyone else.”
André Picard (The Globe and Mail) on whether a basic income could solve pharmacare access: “Regardless, shouldn’t the priority of policy-makers be to ensure that all Canadians can afford necessities such as food and housing, not just prescription drugs? If you’re going to make a massive investment of public funds, doesn’t it make more sense to embrace a basic income rather than ‘free’ drugs for all.”
Rita Trichur (The Globe and Mail) on airline competition: “The current wave of consolidation is a damning indictment that federal policies are still failing. The takeover proposals for Transat and WestJet come barely a year after the Trudeau government raised the foreign investment limit for airlines to 49% from 25%. Officials said the move would boost competition, but anyone with a lick of common sense knew the changes didn’t go far enough.”
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Chris Hannay