Poilievre Could ‘Drop Hard and Fast’

Seasoned pollster Nik Nanos says he has never seen a political landscape quite like the one in Canada right now.

For months, the Conservatives have enjoyed a double-digit lead over the Liberals. Does that mean it is a slam dunk that Pierre Poilievre will be Canada’s next prime minister?

“Absolutely not,” Nanos says. “If Pierre Poilievre makes a mistake, his drop will be hard and fast. And that is true if anyone next to him makes a mistake. I think the Conservatives have to realize that it’s not that they’re winning, it’s that the Liberals are losing. It is not a validation of Conservative policy.”

As for the NDP, Nanos thinks that with their numbers dropping in every byelection since their deal to support the Liberals, the deal will soon come to a close. That’s because the party will need a “six-month cooling off period,” to establish their own identity before voters next head to the polls.

Nanos shared these and other insights about politics and public opinion in a recent conversation with The Tyee, recounting, as well, his path from early youth to becoming the gold standard of Canadian pollsters and research consultants.

Growing up Nikita

When your parents named you Nikita back in the days when the Cold War was freezing life was bound to be interesting.

Especially when you lived in a red-brick duplex with white wooden trim next to Canada’s largest Air Force base in Trenton, Ontario. But young Nikita Nanos was a happy prodigy, or as he puts it “a bit of an odd person.”

His parents, Dimitris and Patricia Nanos, were Greek immigrants with Grade 6 educations — the Second World War having closed the schools in their homeland.

Nikita’s father had to ask friends to pen his letters and notes, because he never learned to write English. “But he was amazing at math, counting money in particular,” his son remembered. “He did the math in his head.”

Nikita’s father opened a pool hall and developed multiple other business interests before his death at just 47. Nikita inherited his father’s knack with numbers, and his entrepreneurial bent.

But there was another side to the kid who excelled in math. He was equally proficient with words. In fact, he was his high school’s “poet laureate.” Today, he is as comfortable with Shakespeare as he is with a survey, or the motivational speeches he regularly gives.

In his early teens, Nikita took a “systematic” approach to “voraciously” reading tomes including Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince and Thomas More’s Utopia.

Nanos was fascinated with politics past and present, an inclination fostered in part by the appearance of the charismatic George Hees.

Hees was a dapper, larger than life figure — war hero, professional athlete, MP and minister of veterans affairs in Brian Mulroney’s first term as PM. He was also part of the cabal that toppled Joe Clark as PC leader, perhaps payback for not being put in the Clark cabinet.

“He was a glad-handing jovial veteran, and a political animal,” Nanos recalled.

Nikita was fascinated by Hees. And for a brief period of time Nanos himself became active in Tory politics. In 1991, he attended a Conservative party policy convention as a delegate from Kingston and the Islands. There, he met Paule Labbé, a delegate from Ottawa-Centre. Their brief dalliance in politics led to a lasting marriage that produced four sons and a tightly knit family.

After abandoning his initial plan of becoming a lawyer, a decision that made his mother cry, Nanos got into the polling, survey and research business. He talked his way into his first contract, despite the fact that he had no experience, no previous clients and didn’t even own a computer.

He struck an unlikely deal with a computer company. They would provide him with a computer and if they liked his survey he could keep it. Not only that, they would also write him a reference letter. Nanos got the computer and the letter.

In 1987, Nanos went to work with SES Research, a company based in Kingston Ontario, while he was still an undergraduate at Queen’s University. After buying out his partners in SES, and moving the operation to Ottawa and Toronto, things gradually took off for the Nanos Research Corp. His calling card was his uncanny talent for getting it right. In the 2006 federal election, Nanos predicted the vote share of each federal party to within one-tenth of one per cent. It was the most accurate pre-election forecasting in Canadian history.

The list of international customers grew, with media clients like Bloomberg, the Globe and Mail and CTV along with a slew of government and non-profit contracts.

How did Nanos wind down and relax when his company was going viral? “I make yogurts, I make yogurt every week. My grandmother’s yogurt. A mixture of three-parts yogurt milk and skim milk. My wife would tease me because she said it was always a science experiment.”

On Nanos’ desk in his Ottawa office sits a sign. “The numbers are the numbers.” Nanos Research Corp. is not affiliated with any political party, nor has Nanos ever been asked to run for any political party. Nanos says his firm publishes what it finds, not what the client hopes it will find. That doesn’t always make for satisfied customers.

“I got an email from a client saying ‘Nik, I love you and I hate you. You put up our dirty laundry every day and we have to react to that’,” he remembers.

During his long ride, Nanos has seen polling become the Delphic Oracle of our time, feeding a market ever more hungry for deep data. Vast audiences are mined for the benefit of smaller audiences who stand to gain from the findings.

“Polling has significant influence on media organizations and journalists rather than Canadians,” he observes. “They want to know whether something is of interest to Canadians. Especially during elections on subjects like crime, abortion and the cost of groceries.”

‘A fragmenting force’

Nanos also notes a big shift in polling’s effect on democracies. “The biggest change? I’ve seen polling and data science move from a unifying to a fragmenting force. Thirty years ago, the question was what do the majority of Canadians think? How can we engage people to mobilize around a common cause? Technology limited the analysis to that. Computers were nascent in those days.”

Today’s advances in computing power allow pollsters to segment the audience, breaking down Canada into pockets of voters politicians can target and cajole.

“It’s the same force that’s happening in news organizations. There could be consensus, news could help mobilize national unity, but now the media landscape itself is fragmented.”

The Conservatives have crafted a communications strategy to suit the new reality.

Nanos says it’s too early to tell if the stunning Liberal byelection loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s was a Waterloo moment dooming Trudeau and his party in the next federal contest. But he was struck by how, in the lead-up, the Conservatives said little in public and avoided interviews, the better to concentrate on getting the vote out.

“We knew it was going to be tight. What surprised me were the advance polls. To me, that demonstrated that the Conservatives outhustled the Liberals in St. Paul’s.”

Nanos says that the significance of the byelection loss is not that it guarantees a Conservative victory in the next election. Rather, that it “laid bare” persistent Liberal problems with leadership and policy. So is there a white knight who could replace Trudeau and change the party’s electoral fortunes?

“The polling reflects name recognition, not their political prospects,” Nanos said. “Almost anyone would be better than Trudeau.”

In the end, Nanos thinks that the party that forms the next government will be the one that best represents change. Right now, he says, the Conservatives are “getting a free ride” by staying out of the news, not doing many interviews and simply riding the national wave of sentiment that the country needs something new.

Nanos sees three possibilities to satisfy the appetite for change. Make Pierre Poilievre prime minister. Or retain Justin Trudeau with “new things in the window.” Or switch to a new Liberal leader who is a so-called “blue Liberal” — someone who would take the party back towards the centre, with a more fiscally conservative vision for the country.

The one thing Nanos says won’t work is running with the old leader and old policy.

“The winner will be the party that can give Canadians a sense of hope, a belief in the social contract — that if you work hard, you can pay your bills. People are working hard now and can’t pay their bills.”

So the Oracle of Ottawa sees the future, by the numbers.