The Liberal Party appears to be enjoying a polling bump at the expense of the Conservatives after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement he will not lead the party into the next election, according to the latest numbers from Ipsos Research for Global News.
Trudeau’s pending departure and the threat of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war seem to be tightening the race in federal voting intention, despite voters not knowing who will become the next Liberal leader and prime minister.
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives still have a commanding lead in the national poll, with 41 per cent of respondents saying they’d vote for the party if an election were held tomorrow. That’s a 13 percentage point lead over the governing Liberals (28 per cent), according to the poll taken while the imminent threat of Trump’s tariffs loomed.
But the Liberals have seen an eight percentage point jump in their numbers compared with Ipsos’s survey in early January, largely at the expense of Poilievre’s Conservatives, who were down five percentage points over that same period.
Jagmeet Singh and the New Democrats are in a distant third in Ipsos’s latest survey with 16 per cent support, followed by the Bloc Québécois with nine per cent.
“To the degree that Justin Trudeau was an impediment to the Liberal government’s success in a future election, he’s gone, and so that issue is gone away. Obviously, there’s a fair bit that sticks to the party too, but at least as a personality, he’s gone,” Darrell Bricker, the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, said in an interview with Global News Thursday.
“But even more than that has been the ascent of Donald Trump and the fact that he announced that we’re going to have a 25 per cent tariff, even though it’s been off and on, all the comments he’s made about [Canada] being the 51st state, has vaulted that up to being probably the top issue in the minds of Canadians.”
The Ipsos poll surveyed 1,000 voting-aged Canadians online between Jan. 30 and Feb. 3 and is considered accurate within 3.8 percentage points.
Regionally, things still look pretty rosy for Poilievre and the Conservatives. In Ontario, they lead with 46 per cent of respondents saying they’d vote Conservative compared with 34 per cent for the Liberals and 13 per cent for the NDP.
The Conservatives are leading in every region of the country except for Quebec, according to Ipsos’s numbers, including in the former Liberal stronghold of Atlantic Canada, where Poilievre’s party enjoys 43 per cent support to the Grits’ 37 per cent.
Regional breakdowns have a smaller sample size and, therefore, a larger margin of error, but still give a sense of the mood of the electorate across the country.
The Conservatives’ numbers are still firmly in majority territory, Bricker said, particularly given the importance of Ontario’s seats to which party ultimately forms government.
But while the Conservatives are in pole position, Bricker said they need to pay attention to whether the recent Liberal bump – which has also been reflected in recent numbers from other polling companies – becomes a trend.
“There’s momentum [for the Liberals], so the question is: is it sustained? If it tightens up, we’re going to actually have an election contest,” Bricker said.
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“[The numbers] still advantage the Conservatives, obviously, because ‘time for a change’ is still a fantastic ballot question.”
For the past year, Poilievre and the Conservatives have been framing the upcoming federal election as hinging on voters’ feelings about the carbon price. But the two most prominent Liberal leadership hopefuls, former central banker Mark Carney and former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, have backed away from the Liberals’ consumer carbon price.
And Trump, with his continued threat of crippling tariffs on Canadian exports, represents a much larger economic danger both to individual workers and the economy writ large.
Bricker said Poilievre has been adept at tapping into voters’ anger with the Liberals and the rising cost of living. The question for him is which leader can most effectively address voters’ fears and concerns over a potentially catastrophic trade war with Canada’s largest economic partner and its unpredictable commander-in-chief.
“The candidate that best matches the mood is the one that has the advantage,” Bricker said.
“The question for me is, we already know who wins on anger. If you’re really angry, you’re going to vote for the Conservatives.… (But) the other emotion and mood is fear and concern, and who wins on that? Who can provide reassurance and confidence about the future?”
