A ”gut check” survey shows that a declining number of Canadians believe the Justin Trudeau government is headed in the right direction, pollster Nik Nanos says.

According to a Nanos-IRPP Mood of Canada survey released this week, just 15% of people rate the performance of the federal Liberal government as “very good,” a plunge of 22% in just one year.

Overall, 54% of Canadians believe Trudeau and his Liberal government are leading the country in the right direction, down 9% over the same time period.

“This concept of Justin Trudeau being exceptionally popular is actually empirically untrue because his scores, for example, on the performance of the federal government are very similar to (former Conservative prime minister) Stephen Harper at the same point in Stephen Harper’s mandate,” Nanos said Wednesday. “So I think this survey is a bit of a reality check.”

While the number of people who say they would vote Liberal hasn’t really dropped, the fact that fewer people believe the government is headed in the right direction could point to future troubles for Trudeau, he said.

Harper put up high scores right after winning elections only to see the numbers soften under the hard reality of governing, he said.

“It looks like the Liberal reputation is not immune to coming up against controversies related to approving pipelines and carbon tax and legalizing marijuana and those types of things,” Nanos said.

But if his government’s performance at home is losing some of its lustre, Trudeau’s reputation on the world stage is getting strong applause from Canadians.

The survey found that 63% think the country’s reputation has improved or somewhat improved under the prime minister’s watch — a 10-year high.

Against a backdrop of political upheaval around the world, “it makes the proactive Justin Trudeau on the world scene look good,” Nanos said.

The Nanos-IRPP survey of 1,000 Canadians — conducted Dec. 16-19 — is considered accurate within 3.1%, 19 times out of 20.