Recently, six of the Canadian premiers got some very bad news – they’re less popular than the populist demagogue president of the United States, Donald Trump.
According to this piece by Angus Reid, our own premier has the unfortunate distinction of being among those premiers who are unable to best Trump in a popularity contest – a list that also includes Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, Quebec Premier Phillipe Couillard, New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.
Some of the most noteworthy jumps or drops in popularity that popped out to me are as follows.
Hitting Close to Home
Our own premier, Stephen McNeil, hardly placed anywhere worth bragging about, and that comes as no surprise given the battles he’s fighting over the recently released budget, the health-care crises faced in the province, and the battle with NSTU over the absolute gong-show that has erupted from the accepted recommendations of Avis Glaze’s report and the school board recommendations therein.
Apparently, Premier McNeil being at 30 per cent is a jump in popularity, but if 30 per cent of people you govern approving of you as premier is a reason to celebrate, I, for one, would be reluctant to pop any corks or bust out the party favours.
But you know what? I wouldn’t be too worried, if I were McNeil. With our whopping, record-setting 53.55 per cent voter turnout last provincial election, it’s not like enough people vote to change the status quo anyway….
Peaks and Valleys
Governing very different political and physical landscapes, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe and B.C. Premier John Horgan are neck and neck leading the pack, sharing a 52 per cent rate popularity. For both of those two, I have one thing to say: give it time.
Both are new premiers and comparatively free of the wear and tear of scandal or controversy.
Oodles of people in rural B.C. who don’t live in the Vancouver or Victoria areas, are getting very upset Horgan and his allies in the Green Party are fighting tooth and nail to block updates to the Kinder Morgan pipeline – something that is obviously not reflected in his three per cent jump to 52 per cent, since the last quarter.
And in the case of Moe, former Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, until recent months that predated his departure, had bulletproof popularity. No offence to Moe, but he just doesn’t have the charisma that Brad Wall possessed. It will only be a matter of time before he makes some false fiscal step and Saskatchewan’s voters punish him for it, as they punished Brad Wall for last year’s Saskatchewan budget, and his flip-flopping on whether or not he’d sell Crown corporation SaskTel.
That Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is among the less-popular-than-Trump bottom six is unsurprising. Albertan voters have punished her for almost everything she’s done in her term as premier. Some “orange crush.”
And with the former PC and Wildrose Parties fusing into a chimerical United Conservative Party, and hungrily eying the upcoming 2019 election, it doesn’t surprise me that you see something as peculiar happening as her NDP party fighting another NDP party to get a pipeline built.
Upper Canada
Unsurprisingly, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is riding the caboose of the premier popularity train, with a dismal 19 per cent, which constitutes a drop since the last quarter.
Wynne’s popularity took a hit presumably from a number of factors. These include sketchy Hydro One deals, investments in green technology and the cancellation of nuclear power plants that led to the inability to maintain reasonable energy prices (especially for rural residents); skyrocketing provincial deficits and debt; fiscal mismanagement on infrastructure projects like the Scarborough subway, and heavy-handed provincial intervention when Toronto wanted to start tolling drivers on its roads to support infrastructure.
Wynne and her government are busy trying to do what they can to rectify these issues, as any reasonable provincial government would do, but does Conservative leader Doug Ford smell blood in the water, as the next Ontario general election looms this summer? Only time will tell!
And let’s be fair, with 28 seats, versus the NDP’s 18 and the Green Party’s 0, the scandal-addled PCs of Ontario are the only ones, right now, giving Wynne a run for her money.
A Caveat
All things considered and all laughs on my part aside, you should probably take the poll I based my column on with a grain of salt. Constituents change their minds, popularity shifts around – and let’s be fair, the poll didn’t even bother with Prince Edward Island or the Territories!
Sam Macdonald is a reporter with The News.
