Britain's Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak disembarks from his plane at Inverness Airport in Inverness, Scotland on May 23.WPA Pool/Getty Images
For a textbook example of political debate unglued from real-world concerns, it’s hard to do better than Tuesday’s Question Period.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland crowed that the annual inflation rate had just cooled to 2.7 per cent. Then Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre countered by wrongly claiming the inflation rate is 35 per cent above target.
The two bickered about which of them was incompetent. Ms. Freeland noted the Bank of Canada’s target is between 1 and 3 per cent. Mr. Poilievre claimed it is 2 per cent. If you happen to care, the truth is that the central bank’s target is a range of 1 to 3 per cent and they aim for the midpoint.
But most people don’t care. They care about interest rates and high prices, but not about the decimal point on the inflation rate. One is real life, and the other is a sterile figure.
The difference between the two, as it happens, is why British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s bet on a snap election is such a long shot. He is gambling that a recent uptick in the economy will help him win a July election.
Britain has recently bounced out of a shallow recession, and its inflation rate has fallen to 2.3 per cent. But Mr. Sunak can’t expect voters to care about the number. The question is whether the recent improvement has really changed the way Britons feel about the economy. Or their prime minister.
One person who should watch closely is Mr. Sunak’s Canadian counterpart, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He, too, has seen his popularity pummelled by higher prices and struggles with affordability. He also has to wonder if an improvement in the economy can help revive his political fortunes. Mr. Sunak’s campaign will be a case to study.
Mr. Sunak, much like Mr. Trudeau, is running about 20 percentage points behind his chief opponent, leading a long-in-the-tooth government, trying to reach a public that appears to have stopped listening.
In some ways, Britain has been Canada’s political bizarro world. The knocks levelled against Britain’s Tories have often been reminiscent of those against Canada’s Liberals, though they are on the flip side of the political spectrum. The British Tories felt a post-pandemic political hangover, a series of small scandals and the angst of a public that saw its buying power shrink with inflation.
One difference is that Britain’s Conservatives had five prime ministers during Mr. Trudeau’s 8½-year tenure. But both Mr. Sunak and Mr. Trudeau are politically near dead. They have to wonder if a little economic recovery could revive their political fortunes.
So Mr. Sunak crowed that inflation is back to normal, just as Ms. Freeland did. That’s more or less true, in both countries, but what people still feel is that prices are far higher than they were. A YouGov poll found 52 per cent of Britons feel grocery prices are much more expensive than a year ago, and another 31 per cent feel they are a bit more expensive.
That’s the lingering after-effect of higher inflation. Surveys have found that people in Canada, Britain and the U.S. think inflation is higher than it is, and the economy is weaker. Inflation is down a lot in Britain, but the number of people who think the government is handling inflation badly is down only a little.
All that suggests that Mr. Sunak’s gamble on a snap vote will end in disaster – justified mainly by the fact that he’s likely to lose no matter when the vote is held. He might make a little progress by telling people things are getting better, but they probably won’t feel it’s true.
In theory, Mr. Trudeau has more time. He can hope the Bank of Canada will start cutting interest rates in June, but even so, a lot of people with mortgages are seeing their paycheques squeezed. Rents are likely to keep going up, as population growth continues to outstrip home-building. And after that, the trick is to convince disaffected voters that Mr. Trudeau represents hope for the future.
In the meantime, Mr. Sunak’s campaign offers Mr. Trudeau’s team a test case of an unpopular prime minister trying to turn a little economic recovery into a full-on political revival. They can only hope Mr. Sunak can show them a way to do it.