Canada's Iran war response: What the polling reveals

0:00What do Canadians think of the emerging war in Iran, and what does it mean for Canadian politics? And on the back half of the show, exclusive for Hope Heroes and Fellows will ask, what's going on in Alberta politics, and what might it mean for a future federal election campaign? As always, I'm grateful to be joined by the founder and share of Abacus Research, David Coletto, for another episode of Hub Politics. David, thanks for joining me. Hey, Sean, good to see you. It's just you and me today. Man is out of the sun of somewhere warmer, so good for her. Precisely. For those audience members who tune in to Hub Politics, not for the two of us, but for Managalbreath. I'm sorry. They're stuck with me and you, and we have to talk to David. We're speaking in the afternoon of March 4th, the big issue looming over our politics is, of course, the military offensive over the weekend from American Israel into Iran. We'll talk a bit about how the different party leaders are responding.

1:03But as always, you bring numbers. Tell us what your polling is indicating about how Canadians are understanding and thinking about the potential protracted war here. Well, for the first time, I don't have Abacus numbers. We're going to launch a survey actually in the next few hours, but Angus Reed came out. I think a good poll started, came out with numbers yesterday that showed most Canadians are opposed to the strikes, to the conflict in Iran, which I don't think is surprising. I wrote a piece in the Toronto Star that sort of laid out my expectation, which is, you know, Canadians typically are opposed to this kind of thing, and two, they have been opposed to anything Donald Trump does. And that's those two things to, you know, conflate together to create, I think, an environment that would be not very hospitable in a public opinion domain to this. And that, I think, appears to be the case initially, right? And I think that we're going to, if you say we're going to talk about Karni and Pauli

2:05haven't a minute, but I think public opinion on this can evolve, and we've seen in the past, in conflicts like this, it has evolved. But I think it's important to always understand that most Canadians, not all, there's this sizable minority who support what's going on in Iran and the US and Israel's actions there. But the inclination I think of Canadians is to be very doubtful about American intervention in parts of the world, and especially if it's Donald Trump doing it. And we saw that in reaction to Venezuela, and we've seen that in other instances where either this Trump or the previous Trump administration has sort of intervened in things like this. So as you just set up on the face of it appears to be a military offensive that Canadians are at least skeptical about if not by large opposed to, and yet over the weekend, Prime Minister Karni released a statement that amongst other things express support for American

3:08intervention. A statement that must be said, David, was probably amongst the most hawkish of any major world leader in the immediate aftermath of the launch of this military action. In the intervening days, we've seen other spokespeople for the government and the Prime Minister himself seem to distance the government from that initial statement. Talk about the interaction between the Prime Minister's seeming endorsement of the war and that public opinion environment that he talked about. And as you do, maybe talk about what may have been influencing the Prime Minister over the weekend and what may be indeed influencing him in the government in the days and weeks to come. Well, I'm not going to speak for the Prime Minister believes and doesn't believe, I think. But when I read his statement, the first statement, I get the sense that he is somebody who does believe what he said in that statement, that it is absolutely a non-starter for Iran

4:11to have a nuclear weapon, and as a result, any effort to prevent one is a good decision and is a good action. He also, I read somewhere, and I don't know if it was him saying this, that he has spoken to the President Trump about this issue about Iran over the last number of months. I wonder if he's been given some form of intelligence that the U.S. has, that has convinced him, that maybe there was an imminent threat of Iran finishing the development of this weapon. But I, so that's the one point, and this is a politics podcast, so I'm not going to argue about the merits of whether this was good or bad. But from a public opinion lens, I think the Prime Minister got into the complexity of this issue because on the one hand, there are close to 300,000 Iranian Canadians in Canada.

5:11I would say the vast majority of them are cheering today and will continue to cheer as this regime is hopefully taken out in their minds. But many of them live in parts of the country where liberals either are competitive or have been competitive, and so politically it's a powerful group, and you add on Jewish Canadians and those who support Israel, then you're starting to build a coalition that is notably important because they're concentrated geographic matters in our political system. But broader coalition of liberals, and we're starting to hear a number of liberal MPs raising serious doubts about not only the conflict, but the government's position on it, suggest that this is very complicated issue for Mr. Carney. And we talk about the new Democrats. We try to bring them in and give them some place because we think they still matter. Mr. Polly have took a position that was more in favor in fact of this, and that's not surprising.

6:15And so there's not going to be a lot of competition to the right of Mr. Carney on this issue, but it's the Avi Lewis, who I think may win the leadership of the new Democrats, that's interestingly perhaps putting pressure here. So I think he felt the pressure from his own caucus, and I think if Americans are opposed to this, then you've got to be pretty sure that Canadians are going to be as well. And the early polling out of the US suggests most Americans are also skeptical about this section. That analysis rings true with my own interpretation of what's played out over the past few days. As you say, there are competing domestic political interests to say nothing of Mr. Carney's own personal views on these matters, to say nothing of the fact that his statement came over the weekend when there may have been less of an opportunity to engage or consult both members of the cabinet and members of the caucus, and so you get the sense that some of that is now happening

7:17in real time. I mean, there's another dimension here, and that is the Canada-US relationship. Yes. Right, you had President Trump out yesterday lambasting the UK Prime Minister for not being more supportive, right? And so this is so complicated for Canada because at the once, we don't want to completely anger Donald Trump that he just rips as crazy things when it comes to Kuzma or economic relationship. But as we've seen in our polling, even we really support just a few days ago on Kuzma and the Canada-US relationship and how Carney is handling it, most Canadians don't want him to be cladred over with Donald Trump. They want him to stand up to him. In fact, half of Canadians say like, I don't even think it's a bad thing if Kuzma disappears, which is a signal to me that this is really difficult for the government politically, because if they are trying to make sure that we aren't pushing, basically, making it harder

8:19for Donald Trump to justify this war, at the same time that we know that renewing Kuzma discussions are going to ramp up really quickly, add another layer of complexity to one that's already kind of chaotic, and I can't think of more a complex one right now. Indeed, we'll have to take up, David, your Kuzma-related polling in next week's episode, because as you say, it doesn't just touch on the politics of this particular issue. It looms more largely over the potential trade-offs and kind of issues management around eventual negotiations with the Trump administration. But let me zoom out for a minute, because in addition to everything you've just discussed, there is also, it seems to me, some ostensible thought that has to go into Mr. Carney's own persona and credibility. He's someone, of course, who came to politics in an unique, extraordinary way, where he essentially

9:21made the case that he is the man for a crisis, in part, because he understands the nuances of geopolitics, because he's got deep relationships around the world. Is that backdrop, are there risks, David, for him, that when up against a kind of major test of that proposition, he looks a bit unsteady and a bit unsure? I think absolutely. That's the highest risk for him, is anything that challenges those attributes that right now are his strengths, and they've only gotten better and stronger since Davos. I think as an observer of watching Mr. Carney at that press conference yesterday or the event in Australia where the Q&A part, you could see that he hadn't had time or an opportunity to really reflect and hone his own thinking on this, and it came off as being unclear in a way that he isn't when it comes to trade or economics or finance, where he owns

10:24it. Not to say that Mr. Carney doesn't understand foreign policy or doesn't have his own, which he's clearly laid out, but that he doesn't have the same kind of experience, I think, in responding to global military conflicts in the way that he has been very effective at responding to economic ones. And so, yeah, I do think there's some risks there. I also think that, interestingly, as soon as I wrote my column for the star and I published it, I questioned it instantly, and I said, well, maybe the public will follow their lead, you know, the prime minister on this one. If he actually came out and said, look, I support it, we support it, it's the right thing to do, we have to get rid of this regime, it is a threat to us and the world. He is at the point in his own prime ministership where he's probably not had as much political capital as he does now, and so the fact that he didn't back down entirely, but the fact that he kind of wobbled, right, in the face of just some pressure suggests he isn't maybe as confident on some of this stuff as he is on others.

11:25And that, I think, does perhaps challenge the crisis manager that I think so many Canadians see in him and voted for him because of. Let's talk about the other two major parties. You mentioned the New Democrats instinctively opposed to what they would characterize as American, American adventurism, Pierre Pauli of the Conservatives by contrast, strongly supporting at least the American objectives. That's something that Pierre Pauli has spoken about, not just in recent days, but really since the aftermath of the October 7th attacks in Israel. At a time, David, when Pauli of the Conservatives ostensibly were mindful about their proximity to the Trump administration, is there risks for them in being perceived as too vociferously supportive of this military offensive? I do think for Pauli of there's some risk. It was just last week that he was laying out his

12:30version of the Canada-US relationship, naming Trump in his speech and trying to really demonstrate a relevance on that issue. But I also think that unlike Mr. Carney, who has a coalition that's far more complex on foreign policy issues, including ones that include Israel in particular, as we've seen with the issue in Gaza, that Mr. Pauli of the coalition is very coherent here. So he can stake out a position, I think, and say, look, this is the right objective. We'll watch to see how it's achieved, but we've been very consistent that this regime is horrible, and we need to do everything we can to see it disappear. At the same time that he can still not be cheering for Donald Trump, instead being just someone who's on that side. So I don't know if it's entirely risky, because I think people would expect Mr. Pauli to take this position. And the Conservative Party has been fairly consistent on this, I think, for many years.

13:30Final question before we move to the second half of our conversation. Obviously, this is early days. We don't know what's to come in Iran, including, of course, what the government looks like in the aftermath of all of this. Talk about the extent to which this has the potential to influence and shape our politics. We started talking about Canadians having misgivings about the invasion. But what's the probability or likelihood that this becomes a saline issue, an issue that actually influences how people are thinking about politics here in Canada? Okay, I don't know if it's going to become the thing that drives political behavior in Canada, especially if Canada doesn't get involved militarily. This is not Afghanistan, it doesn't feel like in the same way, but that was very different, too, in terms of Canadian supported our

14:31active engagement in that conflict, because of what happened in the US and how we felt so part of that. But it's the other things that happen around this. So we've seen a spike in the price of oil, which is good in some cases for, say, a province like Alberta, but it's not great for consumers. So it's going to add more pressure to some of the affordability challenges that already exist. And I think Canadians are going to feel more pressure on that. Does it affect supply chains? You know, there's a bunch of those secondary effects of this conflict that I'm much more mindful of. Like I do think, for example, the United States, like the price of gas is the huge political driver. And Donald Trump, many people could say, is now caused that price to spike. I don't think people will say the same thing about the Karni government, but it's just a new, it's an added layer of angst that on top of the overall precarity that another war has

15:31creating that public policy and politics has to deal with now. Great insights. We'll stop the first half of the conversation here, free for all members of the hub community, and pick up on the back app exclusive for hub heroes and fellows. We'll unpack some new abacus polling on federal political dynamics in Alberta that may surprise some of audience members. So if you want to check that out, go to the hub.ca to subscribe as a hero fellow and hear directly from David about his polling and what it may mean for our politics. Until then, thanks for joining us and we'll pick back up on the back half in a moment. Thank you. Goodbye.