GOLDSTEIN: New leader may not even help Trudeau Liberals

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Replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their candidate for president in the U.S. election race has clearly given a boost in popular support to the Democrats, although whether it will last up to the Nov. 5 vote is an open question.

However, it obviously has increased the morale of party workers and enriched campaign donations, both vital to the success of a winning political campaign.

It also raises the question of whether replacing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a different leader would have a similar beneficial effect for the federal Liberals.

On that issue, a Nanos/CTV poll released Wednesday suggested the answer is no.

Asked which of eight potential candidates for Liberal leader identified by name in the poll would be the most appealing to them as Liberal leader, the most popular response by far, at 25%, was “none of them”, followed by “unsure” (20%) in the survey of 1,018 Canadian adults from June 28 to July 3.

The most popular choice of an actual person was former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney at 19%, who isn’t a member of the Liberal government, although Trudeau has been courting him to join.

That was followed by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland at 9% (whose support has plummeted from 18% in December 2023, when she was the leading choice among the eight potential candidates named in the poll) and Trudeau himself at 9% — the same support he received in December 2023.

The rest of the field in descending order were Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly (5%); Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne (4%); Treasury Board President Anita Anand (3%); Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc (3%) and Housing Minister Sean Fraser (2%).

To be sure, a poll asking this question more than a year away from the next federal election, assuming the Liberals’ supply-and-confidence deal with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh survives until then, is to a considerable extent going to be influenced by simple name recognition.

It also contains an internal contradiction in that it simultaneously asks about the possibility of a new Liberal leader as well as the possibility of Trudeau staying on the job.

Finally, if Trudeau were to announce he was resigning as Liberal leader, given his current level of unpopularity with Canadians in general, it’s reasonable to assume that overall support for the Liberals would increase to some extent, that levels of support for the seven others named as potential successors would change and there is always the possibility of someone other than those named in the poll running.

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That said, it’s certainly not good news for the Liberals when people are asked who would most appeal to them as Liberal leader, given the choice of Trudeau and six members of his cabinet who have been touted as possible successors, and the most popular answer by far is “none of them.”

Ditto that the second most popular choice, with more than double the support of any current member of the Trudeau government including Trudeau himself, is Carney, an indication of how damaged the Liberal political brand is these days.

Finally, unlike the case of the Democrats in the U.S. where Harris was effectively the heir apparent to replace Biden given how the U.S. political system works, there is no obvious heir apparent to Trudeau.

Indeed, even the leading contender to replace him as leader — Carney, as suggested by the Nanos poll — isn’t a member of the Trudeau government.