OTTAWA — Liberal Leader Mark Carney has pulled ahead of the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre as Canadians’ chosen defender against U.S. President Donald Trump, a new The Logic poll by Abacus Data suggests.

The March survey was taken in the days after Carney won his party’s leadership, but before he was sworn in as prime minister on Friday. They show Carney has a small lead over Poilievre on dealing with Trump’s impact, with 36 per cent of respondents saying he’s the leader most capable of standing up for Canada’s interests, compared to Poilievre’s 34 per cent. 

Only nine per cent think NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is best for the job, and 21 per cent say they’re not sure. 

Carney is expected to call a federal election within days that will likely turn on Trump’s erratic tariff policies and his desire to make Canada the 51st American state. The early weeks of Trump’s term have fundamentally changed Canadians’ priorities and the political landscape along with it, said Abacus CEO David Coletto. 

The former central bank governor is viewed as someone who, at a macro level, can deal with the chaos that Trump has wrought on Canada’s economy, he said. “He still has work to do to demonstrate that his Liberal government will be as focused on making life more affordable as people want it to be,” Coletto cautioned. 

Still, it’s hard to overstate the scale of the turnaround. Earlier this year, Liberals were languishing in the polls, and in January only 16 per cent of survey respondents said they would most trust the governing party’s economic stewardship. At the time, 42 per cent said they would put their faith in Conservatives to handle the economy. The Liberals’ enjoyed a near-instant rebound, however, in the weeks following former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation in January, as Trump made good on threats to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian imports. 

The latest results show a sharp nine-point increase in the last month in the number of Canadians who trust the Liberals most to manage the economy. Those gains have almost closed the gap on that key question with the Conservatives, who now lead on economic trust with 36 per cent of respondents compared to the Liberals’ 31 per cent.

When Coletto first started tracking Canadians’ trust in the economic stewardship of political parties with The Logic, he said it wasn’t clear the economy would be a leading indicator of how people would vote in the upcoming election. That has almost certainly changed, he said. “You’re starting to see almost perfect correlation between the two.”

The latest Abacus poll now shows the Liberals and the Conservatives in a nearly dead heat for votes, with the Tories ahead by only four points, with 38 per cent of voters who say they would support Poilievre’s party, compared to 34 per cent of the Liberals. 

“This is now, without any doubt in my mind, a horse race. It’s a competitive election,” Coletto said. “It’s like flip-a-coin kind of territory.”

Poilievre did not respond directly when asked at a press conference earlier this week why Canadians appear to be turning to Carney in the face of Trump’s trade war. Instead, he suggested Carney was no different than the Liberals under Trudeau, who were deeply unpopular only a few months ago. 

“Canadians have a choice in the next election,” he said. “Do they want to give the Liberals a fourth term in power after they drove up housing costs, food prices and taxes, blocked resource projects and made us more reliant on Trump’s America?”