Premier’s popularity on the rise: poll

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This article was published 22/09/2016 (3321 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a silver medal for Premier Brian Pallister.

The latest poll from the Angus Reid Institute places Pallister second in popularity among premiers only to Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall.

A narrow majority (53 per cent) say they approve of the way Pallister is running the province, up seven points from the last wave of this survey, the pollster said Thursday morning.

“While he says his relatively new Conservative government is bringing a ‘change in attitude’ on issues of spending and accountability, it’s unclear whether his administration will continue to build goodwill over the short term as it gets down to the business of implementing promised spending cuts,” said the Angus Reid Institute in a news release.

Pallister later told reporters, “The same answer as always, people don’t know me yet.”

He has also in the past reacted to popularity polls by saying the only poll that counts is the one taken on election day.

The Angus Reid pollsters also said that in what had been the country’s most overheated housing market, B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s imposition of a 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers of Metro Vancouver homes was among other things, a political gamble, one that for now, appears to be paying off.

Not only was this policy change unequivocally popular with people living in the region when it was enacted, it has also given Clark the most drastic quarterly increase in her job performance approval since winning re-election in 2013, up seven points since the spring, to 34 per cent.

Despite this bounce, Clark’s ratio of disapproval to approval is still nearly two-to-one.

Meanwhile, Wall has dropped from 66 per cent approval in the spring to 57 per cent.

The Angus Reid Institute analyzed the results of an online survey of 4,629 Canadian adults in a randomized and representative sample of Angus Reid Forum panelists from September 5 to 11, 2016. The data was donated by MARU/VCR&C. A probability sample of this size carries a margin of error of +/- 2%, 19 times out of 20.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca