LILLEY: Winning polls is easy – selling a trade deal is not

Liberals keep climbing in polls as Canadians rally behind Carney’s hard line on Trump, but the PM may have boxed himself in when it comes time to make a trade agreement

Published Sep 12, 2026  •  Last updated 25 minutes ago  •  3 minute read

U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are in a tug of war over tariffs as Canada's retaliatory duties came into effect on Sept. 8. Photo by SAUL LOEB and ANDREJ IVANOV /AFP via Getty Images

If Mark Carney did blow the trade talks with the Americans last month for political reasons, the latest poll by Leger for Postmedia shows it is working.

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Carney’s Liberals now sit at 49% nationally, while 57% approve of the government’s direction and 58% approve of his performance.

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In all three measures, the Liberals saw a three-point increase from Leger’s last poll at the beginning of August.

“What Canada did was they walked away from the best deal in the world, so they could fight with President Trump politically,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a TV interview with NBC earlier this week.

Lutnick has been making the claim repeatedly that Carney walked away for political reasons, not economic ones. Politics was clearly part of Carney’s calculation, and it is clearly working for both him and the Liberal Party.

Poll numbers tell the story

While the Liberals are at 49% nationally, the Conservatives are 16 points back at 33%, and the NDP is on life support at 6%. Carney’s team sits at 59% in British Columbia, 57% in Atlantic Canada, 53% in Ontario and 47% in Quebec.

Most troubling for Pierre Poilievre, the Liberals hold 60% support among voters aged 55 and over. They also have a 12-point lead over the Conservatives, 57% to 35%, among men and a 20-point lead, 51% to 31%, among women.

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The Bloc isn’t escaping the Liberal surge in Quebec either.

In the last election, the Conservatives took almost 24% of the vote; they are now down to 16%, and much of their former support has gone to the Liberals, who would win the majority of seats in the province if an election were held today.

The only place where the Conservatives are dominating in this poll is Alberta, where they hold 64% support to 24% for the Liberals. Both parties are essentially where they finished in the last election.

Carney’s polling surge, and the passions he has stirred, raises an interesting question. How does Carney walk back his rhetoric and get Canada to the negotiating table to strike a deal?

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Rhetoric can become a trap

For Trump, who has spent the last several weeks insulting Canada, it’s easy. He flip-flops all the time. Carney has declared that we are at “war” with the United States, and he has said they sign their agreements “in pencil,” meaning they can’t be trusted.

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When the trade talks failed to produce a deal on Aug. 21, there was no screaming, no harsh words, no name-calling. The talks simply ended when a deal couldn’t be reached, mainly over the Americans insisting on keeping 25% tariffs on medium- and heavy-duty pickup trucks.

The Americans have already denied trying to dictate Canada’s French-language policies or override Canada’s sovereignty in signing trade deals.

So what happens if we get to an acceptable position on these trucks?

Can Mark Carney legitimately go to the same Canadian public that he’s been whipping into a lather with his war talk and his pencil comments and say there is a deal and it is good for Canada?

Selling the deal might be harder than making it

A poll released last week by Leger found that 41% of Canadians described the United States as an enemy, almost double the 22% who described our closest neighbour as an ally.

An Angus Reid survey found that 73% believe Canada should take a hard-line position and not offer concessions to the U.S., while 61% oppose allowing greater access for American dairy producers.

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Carney has already agreed, in the deal he walked away from, to give American dairy producers the same access via retailers that Europeans have. It’s not giving the Americans the ability to sell more; it simply makes it easier for Americans to sell what we have already agreed to.

It may be harder for Carney to sell a concession than it was to reject one.

Carney admitted Thursday that he and Trump speak regularly on a number of issues and that a mutually beneficial deal remains possible.

The politics of saying no have been easy. The politics of saying yes may prove much harder.

“You’ll probably see a deal with Canada fairly soon,” Trump said Saturday, while alluding to what he sees as fairer treatment for American dairy farmers.

If and when that deal is reached, will Carney be able to sell it to the same Elbows Up voting public that rallies to him each time he fights with Trump?

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