With the federal election campaign now in full swing from coast-to-coast, Justin Trudeau‘s Liberals and Andrew Scheer‘s Conservatives are locked in a dead heat, a new Ipsos poll suggests.
The Ipsos poll, conducted exclusively for Global News and La Presse, found that if an election were held today, the Liberals and Conservatives both have the support of 35 per cent of decided voters. The NDP sit in third place with 14 per cent and Elizabeth May’s Green Party sits solidly in fourth place with nine per cent.
If the Bloc Quebecois were to run candidates across Canada they would receive four per cent of the vote and Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada has two per cent of the vote, according to the poll. On Monday, the official Leaders’ Debates Commission announced it’s inviting Bernier to participate in the English and French debates televised next month.
Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, said no party really has any momentum, which is unusual given the campaign is well underway.
“There is nothing that is really moving. It’s a really tight race,” Bricker said. “The election is like this big gaseous cloud moving through time and space.”
In Ontario, 40 per cent of decided voters support the Liberals. Thirty-two per cent support the Conservatives.
This is good news for the Liberals, who are hoping to hold several key seats in the Greater Toronto Area, an area which played kingmaker in the last federal election.
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However, some ridings encircling Toronto, at this point, could come down to the wire on election night, Bricker said.
“If you take a look at Ontario, there are so many individual races that are going to be within five per cent one way or the other,” he said. “And the Liberals can’t afford to lose any seats.”
Some recent provincial polls have suggested the negative opinions of Premier Doug Ford could impact support for the federal Conservatives across the province. Polls by Mainstreet Research and Angus Reid showed just 20 to 36 per cent of Ontarians have a positive impression of their premier.
Ford, which many saw as a wildcard for Scheer going into the election, has been quiet on the campaign so far.
In Quebec, where the Liberals are looking to steal a number of seats from the struggling NDP in order to make up for lost votes in Western Canada, the party holds an almost 20-point lead with 41 per cent of decided voters over the Tories’ 22 per cent, according to the poll. The Bloc Quebecois have 20 per cent of decided voters, while the NDP have eight per cent.
The poll shows that voters may have moved past the SNC-Lavalin scandal, which saw Canada’s ethics watchdog rule Trudeau violated ethics laws by improperly pressuring the attorney general to intervene in the prosecution against the company.
Despite the Ethics Commissioners report and news the RCMP is reviewing the matter, Bricker said the events have not moved the needle in terms of support for Trudeau.
“What it did do is drive down the Liberal party to the point where they are competitive with the Conservatives,” he said. “If you go back to last January it should have been a walk for Trudeau.’”
Forty-four per cent of Canadians now approve of the performance of the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau, up eight points since last month, according to the polls. The poll of more than 2,500 eligible was conducted Sept. 11-13, both online and via telephone.
Meanwhile, in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Conservatives remain well ahead of the Liberals. The Conservatives lead at 38 per cent in B.C., with the Liberals have 26 per cent support, according to the poll. The NDP and Green Party are both tied with 15 per cent of decided B.C. voters.
In Alberta, the Conservatives have a 36-point lead over the Liberals, and a 22-point lead in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In Atlantic Canada, the Liberals and Conservatives are statistically tied.
With Conservative support is holding solid in the Prairies and Alberta, Bricker said B.C. will become “critically important” as any Liberal losses in those ridings and in Atlantic Canada could narrow Trudeau’s path to re-election.
“It could be a very late election night as we sit down and try to figure out the final seat projections for Vancouver Island,” Bricker said. “The Green Party could be one to watch as they’re doing really well in Vancouver Island.”
For the raw data of the Ipsos poll, visit Ipsosintelligence.ca
The Ipsos poll was conducted September 11 and 13, 2019, on behalf of Global News and La Press, and asked 2,562 Canadian adults how they would vote if a federal election were held tomorrow. For this survey, a sample of 2,062 was interviewed online, via the Ipsos I-Say panel and non-panel sources, and respondents earn a nominal incentive for their participation. A sample of 500 Canadians aged over the age of 18 was interviewed by live-interview telephone interviewers by landline and cellphone, using random-digit dialing. The precision of Ipsos polls, which include non-probability sampling, is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population.
- Global News
