Liberal push to make election a referendum on pandemic only partly successful

Leaders make last-ditch effort to convince voters to buy into their visions

OTTAWA — The federal election campaign entered its final hours on Sunday with party leaders making last-minute appeals in whirlwind tours of swing ridings, all while still trying to convince voters to buy into their version of what this vote is all about.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who is hopping around seven ridings in the metro Vancouver region, and Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, who is spending his final campaign day in the Greater Toronto Area, both want this vote to be a referendum on the leadership of their chief rival, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. Trudeau, following a punishing cross-country Sunday schedule with in-person and virtual events in every province but Saskatchewan, wants it to be about who Canadians trust the most to lead them out of the pandemic.

Jack Jedwab, president of the Association of Canadian Studies, said the election has not been as much about the pandemic response as Trudeau likely had hoped.

“Ideally for the Liberal standpoint, what should have been the key determining issue in the election is ‘are you satisfied with their handling of COVID,’ ” Jedwab said in an interview. “The objective would have been to try to align the satisfaction rates with voter choices, but that isn’t what happened.”

Instead, he said, the pandemic became just one of five or six issues voters are considering when deciding how to cast their ballots, including child care, the environment, Afghanistan and guns. A new poll for Jedwab’s organization, conducted by Leger, found while 60 per cent of respondents are satisfied with how the federal government handled the pandemic, just 40 per cent are letting that opinion influence their vote. Jedwab said that’s down from 48 per cent who said at the end of August that the pandemic response was affecting their choice.

The most recent poll was conducted for the association between Sept. 10 and 12, but can’t be assigned a margin of error because online polls aren’t considered random samples.

The typical voter malaise that accompanies any early election call has not evaporated in this campaign, a fact O’Toole references multiple times in every speech, when he talks about an “unnecessary $600 million election in the middle of a pandemic.” COVID-19 has come back to the fore in the campaign’s final days, particularly as the fourth wave in Alberta forced that province to resurrect health measures like public masking and introduce a vaccine passport system that Premier Jason Kenney had promised would never come to be.

The Leger poll suggests people in Atlantic Canada, Quebec and British Columbia are overwhelmingly happy with how their provinces managed the pandemic. But in Ontario and the prairies, where all governments are conservative, enthusiasm for the provincial response is barely tepid.