GUNTER: Poll shows fear major motivator steering voters toward disastrous fourth Liberal term

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This week, Postmedia and the pollsters Leger released the most disturbing poll of the federal campaign so far.

No, not one showing the Liberals under Mark Carney with a double-digit lead. I never believed those polls anyway.

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I believe the Liberals are ahead, for now. And so long as the Liberals can keep distracting voters from their atrocious record of the past 10 years and keep focusing on Donald Trump’s tariff and annexation threats, they will tragically stay in the lead until April 28.

Canadians’ voting intensions are, I believe, closer than the polls show. Pollsters tend to undersample younger voters, who are leaning Conservative this time. And they tend to undersample conservative voters. And an increasing number of voters (mistakenly) have come to believe pollsters report information on individual respondents back to the media outlets, parties and governments that sponsor their surveys. So, to avoid getting in trouble, they give what they believe are the politically correct responses.

But I’m not referring to voting-intention polls.

Leger asked voters whether they were making their choices this election out of “fear” or “hope.” The results should be concerning.

Nearly two-thirds of Canadians who intended to vote Liberal told pollsters they were motivated primarily by “a fear of what the future holds for Canada.” Not surprisingly, they cited Donald Trump as the greatest threat to Canadian sovereignty.

On the other hand, over 70 per cent of Conservative voters said they were spurred “primarily by a hope for a better future in Canada to live, work, and raise a family.”

Fear is a lousy reason to vote for any party. A fearful electorate often accepts or even demands lousy policies. It’s not that they don’t want things to get better. Instead, they are worried things might get worse if the switch from the devil they know.

I would think that if you were afraid things might get worse, the last party you’d want to vote for are the Liberals, since they created the mess Canada finds itself in.

Mark Carney’s government contains over 80 per cent of the same cabinet ministers and staffers who worked for Justin Trudeau. Shouldn’t fearful voters be afraid things in Canada will continue to worsen if they leave in charge the very same people who engineered the rot of the lost decade?

This is the same crew whose policies doubled housing prices. Their spending doubled the national debt and increased the size of the federal bureaucracy by nearly three times the rate of population growth. (Are you getting three times better service from the federal government?) They let immigration, inflation, homelessness, crime and drug addiction get out of control. Our health-care system has broken down. And their ethics scandals were too numerous to count.

If I were a fearful voter, I’d be afraid the Liberals would get back in.

Under the Liberals during the last 10 years, Canada had the second-worst economic growth per capita among the world’s 38 industrialized nations.

Aren’t you afraid that if Canadians give the Carney Liberals a fourth term, their continued high taxes and “green” obsession will simply ensure this disastrous record continues?

At the French-language leaders’ debate, Conservative Pierre Poilievre ask Carney, “Your Liberal government for 10 years has the worst track record on immigration, on housing, on immigration, on crime. Doesn’t it embarrass you to ask for a fourth term of office?”

The most disturbing result of all in the Leger poll is that the largest numbers of voters (presumably led by the fearful ones) believe the Liberals are better suited to solve inflation and the affordability crisis, grow the economy, fix health care and immigration and improve government performance.

Unless voters find some backbone, the worst federal government of the past 80 years could well get re-elected because voters — primarily in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada — fear change.