Poilievre finally gets some good polling news — but it's not about the Conservatives

OTTAWA — The Liberal government’s lead over the Conservatives has dipped to single digits, a new opinion poll has found, but the second-place Tories may be getting a boost from a surprising source – the New Democrats.

The poll from Liaison Strategies found that the Liberals remain at the top of the heap in federal politics with the support of 41 per cent of Canadians who identify themselves as “decided and leaning voters,” with the Conservatives at 32 per cent.

While support for the two leading parties isn’t far off the results of recent Liaison polls, the big change has been the recent surge by the New Democratic Party, now polling at more than double the 6.3 per cent that the party won just over a year ago during the last federal election. The NDP’s comeback, leaving the party just a stone’s throw from its traditional support level of 15 to 20 per cent, is seen as one of the keys to the Conservatives closing the gap with the Liberals and finding a path to power. The NDP has also jumped about five percentage points in less than two months, the poll found.

“In general, it could be good news for the Conservatives,” said David Valentin, Liaison’s principal.

Analysts say the Conservatives need the NDP to do markedly better than they did during the last election because the Tories need the progressive vote to split more evenly. In the most recent federal election last April, the Liberals won 43.8 per cent of the popular vote — 2.5 percentage points more than the Conservatives — as the NDP vote collapsed and largely migrated to the Liberals.

But Valentin and others cautioned that the numbers are complicated because an NDP rise, while helpful to the Tories, could also be a threat for some Conservative-held seats in Ontario and British Columbia where the NDP is the primary challenger.

Sanjay Jeram, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, agreed that the NDP surge could be good news for the Conservatives, but that the second part of the Tory path to victory — winning votes from the Liberals — is the more challenging of the two.

“This is the traditional path (for the Conservatives).”

Analysts said it’s difficult to explain the NDP rise. Jeram attributed the NDP surge to many of the party’s supporters “drifting back” to their usual home. The big question, he said, is whether those voters will actually cast a ballot for the NDP, or if they just say they intend to when an election isn’t expected for a couple of years.

The NDP may also benefit from having less competition for progressive voters. The Carney Liberals are widely seen as on the centre or centre-right, particularly compared to the party under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, due to the current government’s positions on such issues as pipelines and other major projects, carbon taxes and defence spending.

Pollsters said it’s likely that the NDP’s new leader, Avi Lewis, is also having an effect on the party’s poll numbers. Andrew Enns, executive vice-president for polling firm Leger, said Lewis’s controversial idea about government-run grocery stores as a remedy for rising food prices, for example, is at least presenting a new idea and getting his party some attention. “It’d be hard to take that away from him.”

Valentin said Lewis’s favourability and unfavourability numbers have both been on the rise, as have the number of Canadians who are now familiar with the new NDP leader. The share of Canadians who say they aren’t familiar with Lewis has fallen to 22 per cent from 30 per cent in recent weeks, he said.

But analysts also point out that many voters choose candidates for many reasons beyond ideology. Jeram said one of the complexities could also be a new phenomenon where some voters, working-class, suburban voters in small cities for example, migrate back and forth between the two opposition parties, even though they’re at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.

Liaison surveyed a random sample of 1,526 Canadians between May 31 and June 13 using interactive voice-recording technology. The poll has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The Liaison poll comes just a couple of weeks after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals topped 50 per cent in support in a Postmedia-Leger poll, the first time any governing party has hit that benchmark in popular support in more than two decades.

That poll found that the Conservatives would have the support of 34 per cent of Canadians if ballots were cast at that time, down three percentage points from April. Both the NDP and Bloc Québécois were at 6 per cent support with the Green Party at 3 per cent, making the voter split a significant challenge for the opposition Tories’ quest to challenge the Liberals.

“That’s not a good formula for Poilievre and the Conservatives,” said Leger’s Enns said about the results at that time.

As for the party leaders themselves, Liaison found that Carney clearly remains voters’ top choice. The new poll found that the prime minister has a +20 rating (57 per cent approval, 37 per cent disapproval), while Poilievre has a –12 rating (37 per cent favourable, 49 per cent unfavourable), and Lewis has a +3 rating (26 per cent favourable, 23 per cent unfavourable).

The Liberals now hold a parliamentary majority after benefitting from recent by-election wins and a handful of floor crossers (four from the Conservatives, one from the New Democrats), but the next election isn’t expected to be held for another few years.

National Post

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