Justin Trudeau has been in office since 2015, originally rocketing into the Prime Minister’s office with high approvals from Canadians, which you can read about from a piece I wrote back in September. Since then his approvals have slowly declined, as one would expect from any Prime Minister after eight years.
The question becomes: How does Trudeau’s favourability fare compared to his recent Liberal predecessors at the time of election?
Martin and the Margins
The start of the Liberal collapse in the last two decades started under Paul Martin in 2004. Riding in on the internal struggles of the Liberal party that evolved from the split among Chretien and Martin Liberals, the party found itself slowly bleeding seats to the newly created Conservative party.
While there’s very little to no public polling still alive from 2004, Martin’s approvals leading up to, and including, the 2006 election remained fairly high for someone leading a government that had been in power since the 1990’s. Martin’s final election in 2006 saw his approval at 45% while his party earned 30% of the vote and 103 seats, slipping behind Harper’s Conservatives.
Unfortunately for the Liberals, the infighting that started brewing during the Martin years would only continue to harm the party.
Dion’s Decline and Ignatieff’s Implosion
In 2008, Stephane Dion would be the one to lead the embattled Liberals into the election against Harper’s Conservatives. The Sponsorship Scandal, a scandal that would embroil the Liberals for years after the fact, would end up weighing heavy on Dion’s electoral performance.
Dion’s personal approvals hovered around 37% on average (Take this with a grain of salt, approval polling in 2008 was scarce, and it’s possible Dion’s approvals were lower than this) while his party earned 26% of the national vote and dropped to 77 seats in the House.
At 77 seats, this was one of the poorest performances for the Liberals since the 1984 election, which saw Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives decimate the Liberals down to 40 seats. Yet, the worst for the Liberals would come three short years later in 2011.
Michael Ignatieff took over for the 2011 election and was heading up a party post-coalition crisis and skating by on little to no party funding. Liberals across the country weren’t particularly beloved, provincial branches of the party had lost seats in their recent elections and the federal scene was still rife with infighting, and this was clear in the federal campaign.
Ignatieff was able to skate by in the polls with support that was similar to Dion’s, but when he took to the debate stage and the NDP’s Jack Layton laid into him, Liberal support sank like a rock. It didn’t help that Ignatieff wasn’t a great campaigner, either.
As the New Democrats ate into the Liberals vote margins in the polls, and even more so into the Bloc’s in Quebec (The BQ would go from 47 seats to 4 in that election), election night would prove disastrous. Ignatieff’s personal approvals averaged around 19%, an abysmal rating for a leader of one of Canada’s major parties, and the results panned out similarly.
The Liberal party would drop to its lowest seat count in its entire 144 year history up to that point, with 34 seats and just under 19% of the national vote. Suffice it to say, the Liberals were in crisis at this point and were threatened with becoming nonexistent at this rate.
Justin Trudeau To The Rescue
Heading into the 2015 election, no one expected the Liberals to be the ones to come out on top and with a majority government nonetheless. The New Democrats were the initial favourites to oust Stephen Harper from power, but as the campaign dragged on, their fortunes began to wane and the Liberals started to benefit from that decline.
Justin Trudeau was widely popular among Canadians by the end of the 2015 election. His approval sat, on average, at 50% and in some instances was even higher than that. It’s not surprising then that the Liberals won almost 40% of the vote and 184 seats, securing the first Liberal majority since Martin’s 2004 win.
Trudeau’s popularity remained high for his first year or so (Again, you can read that here) but it would slowly begin to slip, as all newfound Prime Minister’s do in this nation.
Eight Years and the Toll It Takes
By 2019, the Liberals weren’t in their dominate position anymore as they went up against Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives. Trudeau’s personal approvals by election day sat around 37%, still high but a clear decline from the levels he saw after 2015 (Where some polls had him as high as 60% approval). Yet, even with a decline and the loss of his majority government, Trudeau still held onto 157 seats with his approval slipping to 37%.
Then Covid happened, and the entire country was thrown through a loop. As virtually all leaders did, Trudeau saw a boost to his personal approvals in light of his actions taken to combat the pandemic. He called an early election in 2021 and Canadians went to the polls again.
By the end of the 2021 election, Trudeau’s personal approvals remained around 37-38%, similar to 2019, and his seat count increased marginally to 160. The share of the vote decreased slightly, but only by 0.5% to 32.6%. Some assumed Trudeau called an early election in hopes of using his “Covid bump” to win another majority government, but it was clear Canadians weren’t prepared to hand the Liberals another majority.
What Now?
Fast-forward to today, and Trudeau’s approvals have slipped even more. While Canadians are dealing with a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis, inflation, higher interest rates, and more, their anger is being taken out on the federal government and the Prime Minister.
In the latest iteration of the 338Canada model, the Liberals are down to 83 seats on average, well into Dion territory now. Trudeau’s personal approvals have also taken a further dive, now sitting in the low-thirties and threatening to dive more as the months drag on.
There have been rumours that Trudeau might make a decision whether to stay on as leader or not by the end of February. Ironically, if he did so, that would place his decision to step down as leader of the Liberals at the exact 40-year mark of when his father decided to retire in February 1984.
The Liberal brand was built on Trudeau’s image in the 2015 election, it’s what launched the Liberals back into government and arguably what kept them in government ever since then. Yet, things aren’t quite as peachy as they once were eight years ago.
It’s entirely possible a new, fresh face as leader of Canada’s Liberal party could help to stem the bleeding and maybe even recover lost support. A recent Abacus Data poll suggested that 3-in-10 Canadians who aren’t supporting the Liberals would be more likely to vote for the Liberals if Trudeau wasn’t leader anymore. But it’s clear that Trudeau is starting to become baggage for the Liberal party rather than the boon that he once was.
Baggage is polite. He is the anchor that Canadians have been hoping would have happened much sooner.