Prime Ministers: Distance makes the voter’s heart grow fonder

Sometimes the distance of time can cause the public to rethink its assessment of a politician. Think of Brian Mulroney, who left office in the early 1990s as one of the country’s most unpopular prime ministers, but whose passing earlier this year was marked by widespread hagiography including from me.

Other times it’s the failures of one’s successor that causes people to reassess a politician. New polling tells us that Stephen Harper is in the second category.

Over the past week, the polling firm, Research Co., released the results of its annual survey on the best and worst prime ministers since 1968. Today, Harper is viewed as the second-best prime minister (behind Pierre Trudeau) over this nearly 60 year-period, and the most popular among the recent prime ministers. These results are consistent with a 2023 poll by Pollara. They represent a significant improvement in the estimation of Canadians since Harper’s time in office.

Although there are no doubt various factors at play, including age and partisanship, it seems pretty clear that a major explanation is the unpopularity of Harper’s successor Justin Trudeau. The current prime minister is overwhelmingly viewed as the worst since 1968. That ostensibly has had some contextualizing effect on how Canadians reassess Harper and his legacy.

Even if one accepts that Trudeau’s poor results are influenced by a degree of presentism, they’re in keeping with other polling that shows he’s far more unpopular than his own government. More than 65 percent of Canadians now say that they disapprove of him and his record. To put this in perspective: Donald Trump’s approval rating never fell this low during his tumultuous term in office that involved an impeachment, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a quasi-insurrection.

The Prime Minister and his supporters can dismiss these results. They can attribute them to forces outside of their control. They can tell themselves that history will validate him. Maybe he’ll be another Mulroney.

But there’s reason to be doubtful. Mulroney’s principal challenge was a time-horizon problem. Many of his signature policies—free trade, privatization, and tax reform for instance—came with short-term pain but long-term gain. There was a good bet that as they were fully implemented, the rewards would eventually manifest themselves.

Trudeau’s problem, by contrast, isn’t really about specific policies per se—perhaps with the exception of the carbon tax and his disastrous immigration record. It mainly stems from a deeper sense that his conception of governing—his assumptions about the economy, public safety, Canada’s role in the world, and identity politics—is wrong.

Canadians are responding to its cumulative outcomes: economic stagnation, a rise in criminality, our diminished global standing, and new sources of division and threats to social cohesion. And it’s far from obvious today which, if any of these, is likely to look different with the passage of time.

The whole experience reminds me of President Jimmy Carter’s famous malaise speech in summer 1979. A key consequence of stagnation and disorder then, like now, was what the president famously described as a “crisis of confidence.” The promise of American society was in doubt just as many now question Canada’s own promise of intergenerational mobility and middle-class dignity.

The chief difference is that Carter sought to confront it, whereas the prime minister has essentially ignored it. His position, including on the margins of this week’s Liberal Party caucus retreat, has amounted to seeming defiance in the face of mounting facts.

Carter’s speech may have ultimately proven unsuccessful but at least he recognized the nature and magnitude of the problem and sought to say and do something different. As Parliament returns next week, the Trudeau government is poised to simply give us more of the same. They’ve said so themselves. There will be no major, new initiatives, no new personnel, no new ideas, no course corrections at all.

The results are therefore similarly bound to be the same. The main beneficiary is likely to be current Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. Another is Stephen Harper who, in comparison, is suddenly looking better and better these days.

The public class vs. the private class

The past week marked the official return-to-work for federal employees who now must be in the office a minimum of three days per week.

The reaction from public sector unions has been over-the-top to say the least. Not only did they characterize the government’s return-to-work policy as “one of the most anti-labour policies” in Canadian history, but the Public Service Alliance of Canada (the largest federal union) even called on public servants not to frequent downtown Ottawa businesses in protest. (It has since backtracked on these instructions.)

As our federal elected representatives prepare to once again convene in Ottawa next week, a recent interaction in my neighbourhood may serve as a harbinger for the exhausting political discourse headed our way.

Several weeks ago, my neighbours congregated in our several-hundred-strong Whatsapp group to celebrate a rare win for sanity as the Ontario government announced our local, publicly-funded drug den would be closing. In the ensuing discussion, one person shared her view that while the announcement was an important step in the direction of public safety, the motivation for it was likely driven more by a desire to woo voters than to keep us safe.

What if it was? Why is that somehow bad? Good policy and good politics aren’t mutually exclusive and indeed are arguably regularly fully aligned in a democracy. Moreover, the notion politicians should ignore the will of their constituents is an odd expectation. Her comment has stuck with me, reverberating as an example of the success of fear-mongering by our pundit class, as they ominously warn of our “recent trend towards populism.”

My neighbour’s comment isn’t just grating because it reflects the lazy tendency to use “populism” as a vague and trite catch-all smear against popular conservatives broadly (which it is), but because it speaks to a deeper problem.

These same politicians and pundits who decry the supposed “trend towards populism” are actually arguing something much more mendacious than a simple partisan slur. The argument they are making is, at its core, an argument against democracy.

Representative democracy rests on the idea that each voter casts a ballot for the member who best represents their views and will vigorously advocate for their interests. Voters have never delegated their ultimate authority over the policies that govern them to an omnipotent class of experts, academics, pundits, politicians, or anyone else. If the politicians they elect do a poor job, before too long voters have the right to fire them and give those jobs to people who will do what they want, within the bounds of the law.

This is not to say that all populism is good, or even innocuous. When used merely as a weathervane, absent principle, it amounts to a weak and ambiguous divination, bound to confound and annoy over time. But when aligned with solid first principles, the populism we hear so often derided amounts to a harmless recognition that voters, and their views, matter most in policy making.

There are any number of pressing issues that clearly matter to voters, that despite being legitimate, have been deemed too gauche or déclassé to be considered by our elite political class. At its best, populism simply recognizes that voters have a much wider field of legitimate issues to consider than many would like to acknowledge. As Cas Mudde, an academic who focuses on populism has put it, “populism brings to the fore issues that large parts of the population care about, but that the political elites want to avoid discussing.”