FIRST READING: Trudeau, somewhat incredibly, is one of the *more* popular G7 leaders (2024)

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TOP STORY

As Justin Trudeau left on Wednesday for his eighth G7 summit as prime minister, he has the distinction of being one of the most unpopular first ministers to ever represent Canada at an international summit.

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As per a Trudeau Trackermaintained by the Angus Reid Institute, Trudeau’sapproval rating is sitting at a career low of 28 per cent, against a disapproval rating sitting at a career high of 66 per cent.

It’s the fifth lowest prime ministerial approval rating on record – lower than anything ever charted by Trudeau’s Liberal predecessors of Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin. In fact, the only other Liberal prime minister to even get close to that level of unpopularity is another Trudeau; Pierre dropped to 25 per cent right around the time he was patriating the Constitution in 1982.

But none of this comes close to making Trudeau the most unpopular leader at the G7.

The Canadian leader is not only surrounded exclusively by leaders who have net disapproval ratings – but many of them are in far more dire electoral straits than Trudeau.

The trend was noted in a widely circulated graphicby the American political scientist Ian Bremmer. Againstthe “family photo” of G7 leaders was appended the “net disapproval” ratings of all seven attendees.

Every single result was negative by double digits, meaning that each leader presided over a country in which far more people disliked them than not.

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Both the German and U.K. leaders, meanwhile, showed up with near-unbelievable net disapproval ratings of more than 50 points.

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – who is only three weeks away from an election he is set to lose – ranked as the most unpopular.

According to poll figures released Thursday by YouGov, Sunak isnow polling a “record high” disapproval rating of 71 per cent. When accounting for the mere 21 per cent of Britons who think he’s doing a good job, that’s a spread of 51 points between the pro-Sunak and anti-Sunak factions of U.K. voters.

The numbers are similar for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has been posting disapproval ratingsof 70 per cent all year. One German pollster, Infratest dimap, has charted him as the single most unpopular German leader since they began tracking the metric in 1997.

Japanese Prime MinisterFumio Kishida is posting all-time disapproval highs. French President Emmanuel Macron has spent more than a year being booed basically every time he shows up in public.

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U.S.PresidentJoe Biden is posting one of the better net disapproval ratings at the summit – but that’s largely a function of the binary U.S. political system. U.S. presidents are almost always more popular than their European equivalents given that they usually only have one opponent.

But by U.S. standards, Biden is at catastrophic lows. At this point in his first term, his 38.7 per cent approval rating is lower than any prior U.S. presidentgoing back to Dwight Eisenhower.

The most popular leader at the summit also happens to be the most recent entrant to the G7 club. And even then, Giorgia Meloni is still overseeing an electorate that predominantly doesn’t like her.

Being an unpopular Italian leader is more understandable given that the Italian Chamber of Deputies is divided among more than a dozen political parties, meaning that Italian prime ministers typically take office after winning only a fractional plurality of the vote. Meloni, for instance, became prime minister following a 2022 election in which her party won just 26 per cent of the popular vote.

And yet, it was only a year ago that a majority of Italians still approved of her. On the eve of her April2023 visit to the United States, Pew Research Centre chartedan approval rating of 57 per cent against the 41 per cent of Italians who disapproved.

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Plenty of correspondents have noticed the raw unpopularity of the G7leaders, with The Telegraph calling itthe “most unpopular G7 summit ever.” And the trend of voters turning against incumbents is happening well beyond the G7; with governments everywhere from India to South Africa to Senegal to South Korea being humbled by electoral showings in recent months.

As to why, one clue is a generalized global trend of rising costs and lagging economic growth. It may also be the expected correction from the situation three years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic yielded huge incumbent advantages in popular support basically everywhere.

But even as Trudeau cruises towards a landslide defeat in the next federal election, his position is weirdly enviable as compared to his G7 peers, if only because he’s at least poised to make it to the 2025 G7 summit, which Canada will be hosting in Kananaskis, Alta.

Trudeau is also the one G7 leader who is least constrained by rising unpopularity.

For the other six G7 leaders, plummeting public approval is generally making it harder for them to get anything done. As their disapproval rises, they’re facing dissident caucuses and increasingly uncooperative parliaments.

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Biden, for instance, saw the House of Representatives flip to Republican control. Sunak has overseen a near-endless string of caucus resignations. Macron saw his political allies trounced in the recent European Parliament elections.

But even if Trudeau continues to hemorrhage popularity, all he has to do is keep NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh on side as a coalition partner and he’ll retain the awesome executive powersof his office for 18 more months.

FOREIGN INTERFERENCE

After reading the top secret NSICOP report warning about “witting” collaborators in the House of Commons, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh told a press conference that it’s made him “more concerned” about foreign interference than ever. “Some of this behaviour absolutely appears to be criminal and should be prosecuted,” he said, adding that the report makes a strong case that there are “traitors to the country” in the House of Commons.

What’s weird about Singh’s bone-chilling take on the NSICOP report is that it was almost the exact opposite impression of Green Party Leader Elizabeth May. “I have no worries about anyone in the House of Commons,” May told reporters after reading the unredacted Top Secret report, adding that she was “vastly relieved” at its findings.

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IN OTHER NEWS

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was recently at a rural town hall where he was asked what his government was doing about “chemtrails.” Chemtrails being the conspiracy theory that civilian airliners are being secretly configured as chemical sprayers; and that the exhaust trails visible behind passing jets is actually streams of chemicals to control the weather, wither crops, sterilize the populace or what have you. Moe’s response? He’s going to be “looking into it.” “I don’t know if there is as co-ordinated an approach as some folks think, but obviously there are emissions that are coming out of the jets that are flying over,” he said.

(And since we’re on the subject, it’s not entirely unprecedented that a Canadian first minister would entertain the notion of jetliners as secret chemical sprayers. Former B.C. Premier Bill Vander Zalm is a committed acolyteof the chemtrails theory, telling the Georgia Straight in 2013, “governments will go ahead and do things, particularly in the name of climate control or, you know, for the sake of agriculture or whatever other excuse they can use.”)

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