In a survey that included many right-leaning Canadians, a full 89% of respondents opposed O’Toole’s carbon tax.
Justin Trudeau is not a popular politician.
And yet, most surveys show him and the Liberal party leading, with an advantage of anywhere from around 4 to 15 points over the Conservatives.
That’s because Canadian politics is like running away from a bear in the forest, you don’t need to be fast to survive, you just need to make sure you aren’t the slowest.
So, while Justin Trudeau remains a divisive figure, he is also more popular than Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, who is struggling to resonate with the public.
O’Toole’s biggest problem is that while he shares a high level of unpopularity with Trudeau, he doesn’t have support among his own partisans the way Trudeau does.
Trudeau has a core of supporters who seem willing to accept any amount of lies and endless hypocrisy from him.
But O’Toole doesn’t have that kind of support, and a key reason is his flip on the carbon tax, which has caused him serious long-term damage among those who would have been willing to give him a chance.
This can be seen in stark detail in a poll of 25,000 grassroots Canadians by the National Citizens Coalition.
The survey, which included many centre-right and right-leaning Canadian showed widespread opposition to Justin Trudeau’s agenda:
“A whopping 99% answered that Trudeau does not deserve a majority government.
99% of grassroots Canadians are worried about the expansion of state censorship powers via Bills C-10, C-36, and other reported and rumoured legislation.
96% feel that there must be changes to Canada’s equalization formula to better serve Albertan interests, instead of just Quebec’s.
And 93% feel that the inflation that has occurred on Trudeau’s watch must become a pressing election issue.”
Further, the poll showed 84% opposing vaccine passports, and 91% saying they won’t support any more lockdowns.
Clearly, the survey shows many grassroots Canadians who value freedom and limited government, and oppose the statism of Justin Trudeau.
In short, this should be a group of people that are strong supporters of the Conservative Party, because the CPC is ostensibly supposed to be the party of limited government and individual freedom.
But of course, we know that the CPC, while still having many MPs who share those values, has strayed far from those principles, and that is causing many right-leaning Canadians to lose trust in the CPC.
Huge opposition to O’Toole’s carbon tax
As the National Citizen’s Coalition points out, “Even with a high percentage of those who were polled being moderate-to-right leaning, there appears to be real division and fatigue among the ranks,” when it comes to the Conservative Party.
99% of respondents opposed Trudeau’s carbon tax, again emphasizing that this is a strongly conservative group.
That’s why the CPC should be deeply worried that 89% of respondents also opposed the O’Toole carbon tax.
Clearly, all the manipulative evasions and claim that it’s ‘not a carbon tax’ because it goes into a fund that is ‘private,’ (even though the government makes you pay it and tells you what you are allowed to spend it on), hasn’t made people think it’s not a tax.
Canadians know a tax when we see one, and the O’Toole carbon tax is obviously a tax.
As the NCC notes, “This could be a major problem for O’Toole with his base.”
Indeed, the survey shows that a mere 20% of respondents are “happy with the present direction of the Conservative Party of Canada.”
And most devastating of all for the CPC, “A slim majority are even considering a vote for a right-leaning candidate outside of the CPC.”
The only hope O’Toole may have at this point is the fact that 74% of respondents say they are ‘considering making a strategic vote against Justin Trudeau.’
That seems to be all O’Toole has left at this point, an argument that he’s better than Trudeau so people should grudgingly vote for him.
After all, as the NCC survey shows, O’Toole doesn’t have much personal popularity to rely upon:
“Perhaps most telling, when asked who should be the next prime minister of Canada, no current candidate fared particularly well. O’Toole finished a distant second to “other”.”
Inevitable
As we’ve known for some time, the struggles faced by the CPC are inevitable due to O’Toole’s approach.
The CPC has many good MPs who are actually conservative, and who actually represent their supporters. However, since party agenda’s are set and controlled by the party leader in our rigid and anti-democratic system, and since media focus is almost all on party leaders, those MPs have a diluted voice, and are getting dragged along with what O’Toole is doing.
O’Toole’s reversal on the carbon tax is the most devastating, because of how it poisons everything else.
After repeatedly claiming he wouldn’t bring in a carbon tax, and after signing a pledge that he would never bring in a carbon tax, O’Toole reversed himself, leaving many Conservatives feeling betrayed.
Furthermore, once O’Toole should a willingness to flip so brazenly, it called everything else into question, as it becomes nearly impossible to believe him when he makes further promises on other issues.
It also makes the CPC look worse as a whole, since they spent years fundraising off of their opposition to the carbon tax, and called it a ‘job-killing’ policy that was damaging the country and making life more expensive. How can they say all of that, and flip to supporting that same policy?
In a democracy, people always have choices
Even though our party system is – internally – deeply anti-democratic, Canada still retains many features of a democracy. People can start new political parties, and people can choose to get involved and run as candidates. So, if a party like the CPC starts taking right-leaning voters for granted, those voters can – and will – look for alternatives, whether that is the PPC, Maverick Party, or the new party Derek Sloan has said he is launching.
The same would happen to the Liberals if they all of a sudden shifted to the right out of nowhere – many of their voters would choose another party.
This puts right-leaning Canadians in a terrible situation, as people are being made to choose between voting for a party they feel truly represents them (one of the alternative parties), or choosing a party led by someone who many don’t trust in an effort to beat Trudeau.
Grassroots Canadians deserve much better than this.
You can read about the full Grassroots Canadians poll here.
Spencer Fernando
Photos – YouTube
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