Do the Liberals still have time on their side? The signs say the opposite is happening

Following the Liberals' federal cabinet retreat a year ago, ministers believed they could counter growing support for Conservatives with the passage of time. As CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos writes, the opposite seems to be happening a year later.

Exactly a year ago in P.E.I. following the Liberals' federal cabinet retreat, I wrote that ministers believed they could counter growing support for Conservatives with the passage of time.

Today, a year later, they still believe that, despite multiple indicators in the interim that the opposite is happening.

The lead that started to mount a year ago has grown and cemented. The Tories – then a handful of percentage points ahead of the Liberals – are now anywhere from 15 to 20 points ahead in the polls and have been since February. Those same polls, perhaps even more significantly, show Canadians are not thrilled with the direction the country is taking. And before you come at me and say polls are just polls, they became reality at the end of June when the Liberals suffered a shocking loss in the Toronto-St. Paul's byelection, a riding the party had held for 30 years and one even the Michael Ignatieff-led version of the party retained in 2011.

It's against that backdrop ministers gathered this week for a retreat in Halifax, their first collective public appearance since that byelection loss. Liberals acknowledged the loss was significant when it happened and promised to inform their response by listening to Canadians this summer. It appears Canadians told them to keep on keeping on.

There is no escaping that messaging, personally delivered by the prime minister to kick the retreat off and repeated often by others: Canadians want us to keep delivering for them.

Minister after minister lined up at the microphone to say just that, and publicly pronounce their support for the prime minister. Even on the policy front – new rules for temporary foreign workers (hinted at since March), tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (following U.S. and EU moves to do the same) and a working group to look at inter-provincial trade barriers and productivity – it did not exactly send the message that the loss was internalized and big change is on the way.

Part of what is informing the approach is the sense among people at the very top that the economic picture at the individual level is improving thanks to interest and inflation rates on the decline. At the outset of the retreat, Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon called it improving "economic optimism."