Harper foreign policy merely a ‘mild negative,’ poll finds

Posted on Thursday, October 28, 2010 11:58AM EDT93 comments

Pollster Frank Graves has some advice on how Stephen Harper’s Conservatives can turn their humiliation on the world stage into a win: Blame it on the elites.

A new EKOS Research survey, released Thursday morning, shows voters “are underwhelmed with Canada’s actions on the world stage.” Asked whether they disapproved or approved of the Harper government’s foreign policies, 37 per cent said they disapproved compared to 21 per cent who approve and 35 per cent who don’t care either way.

“The data seems to suggest that the Tories don't have huge problems on foreign policy,” Mr. Graves told The Globe. “Wins like Haiti and losses like UN net out as mild negative.”

But the more troubling finding for the Conservatives is the perception the Harper government’s foreign policies are affecting the country’s international credibility.

“On that front there is a clear lean to seeing the net impacts as clearly corrosive to our reputation,” Mr. Graves aid. “This is something many Canadians care about. We have a narcissism of insecurity about how we are seen outside our borders and this could become a significant problem.”

In the EKOS poll, 45 per cent of respondents said Tory foreign policy had a negative effect on Canada’s global reputation, 22 per cent said it had a positive effect and 21 per cent said it had no effect at all.

So how do the Conservatives deal with these results? Mr. Graves has a suggestion.

“The government needs to keep Canadians focused on how things are pretty good and we can't risk the adventure of change,” he said, pointing to the Tory message track that a change in government would mean a coalition of Liberals, NDP and Bloc.

More than that, though, the Tories should play up the anti-elite phobia that’s out there – a phobia that seemed to come through in the election of conservative Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto.

“They will also need to sharpen case that many of these incidents are the vanity preoccupations of the elites and not the bread-and-butter issues of ‘ordinary’ Canadians,” the pollster said.

For fear of being accused of only giving advice to the Conservatives, Mr. Graves also has some thoughts for Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals.

“The challenge for opposition is to fit all of the indigo incidents such as prorogation, census and UN embarrassment into an overall thematic that doesn't wax and wane as the individual issues do,” he said. “And they need to make that narrative simple and emotionally resonant. For example, the government's know nothing-ism approach is producing rule by belief rather than reason and lampooning our previously stalwart international brand.”

The poll of 1,312 Canadians was conducted between Oct. 20 and Oct. 26. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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