OTTAWA — The federal Liberals under Mark Carney have surpassed Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives as the party Canadians trust most to handle the economy, according to new findings by Abacus Data in a poll for The Logic.

Turnaround

The Liberals lead the Conservatives 38–33 on the question, having erased a 26-point deficit against the Tories that had them barely ahead of Jagmeet Singh and the New Democratic Party in January. At the time, Justin Trudeau had announced his departure from the prime minister’s chair but Carney wasn’t yet his heir apparent.

The Conservatives’ support on the issue has faded from 42 per cent to 33 per cent, and the NDP have lost much of the small ground they held, falling from being the best economic managers in 14 per cent of respondents’ eyes to just eight per cent.

Scarcity versus precarity

Voters see the Conservatives as the party best able to keep taxes as low as possible, to create more good jobs and to manage immigration. They’re ahead of the Liberals by one point on handling inflation and the cost of living. Those were defining issues last fall.

They aren’t now, said Abacus’s CEO David Coletto: “If this election was about keeping our taxes low, the Conservatives would win this election. But it’s not about that anymore.”

Last fall, Canadians had a “scarcity” mindset driven by pocketbook issues and getting a big enough piece of Canada’s pie, he said. Then Donald Trump started threatening to take the pie away.

Now “precarity” is the national worry, Coletto said. In the current mindset, “a desire for security and certainty becomes the primary demand that the public is asking of their political leaders,” he said.

Seeking a navigator

Before, Canadians wanted someone who could relieve their feelings of financial pain, Coletto said; now, we collectively want someone who can get us through a storm together.

Abacus found Carney and the Liberals are ahead in Canadians’ judgment of who can make Canada more competitive globally, who can develop needed infrastructure and who can promote innovation and technological growth.

When it comes to which leader is best equipped to handle the Trump administration generally, Carney led Poilievre 42–31 in Abacus’s polling. The margins vary but Carney led in all age groups and with both men and women.

Regionally, Poilievre scored better than Carney on the question in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, but Carney was ahead everywhere else, including by 58–11 in Quebec.

“Mark Carney was, honestly, perfectly designed to appeal in this moment,” Coletto said.

A month to go

If voters go into their polling stations on April 28 thinking about Trump, that’s bad for the Conservatives, Coletto said, and it’s what would happen if the Poilievre campaign revamps its strategy to cast him as a Trump fighter.

There are too many pictures of Tories in MAGA hats and Poilievre has taken too much pride in delivering doughnuts to convoy protesters to pull that off, in Coletto’s view. In a way, Poilievre has a version of the problem the Liberals did under Trudeau: voters’ ideas about him are set.

For the Liberals to have found any traction in this election, Trudeau needed to go. Tying Carney to the prime minister Canadians were sick of is the Tories’ best bet for a message in the rest of the campaign, Coletto said.

“It’s got to be about tax relief, but more importantly, I think it’s got to be about change,” he said.