Liberal and Conservative supporters are again freshly deadlocked of their voting intentions in Canada, recent polling released Monday appears to indicate.
The “statistical tie” comes after a spike in support for the Conservative party last fall following the post-leadership convention when Pierre Poilievre was elected leader in September 2022, the Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News found.
Now, as these neck-and-neck results have held fairly constant for the reason that 2019 election — when Canadians elected a Liberal minority government — voting intentions have moved back to familiar territory.
“It’s really the Groundhog Day of polls. We’re on this gridlock and it seems to have continued for an extended time frame,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, told Global News.
“What the outcomes show is that the little advantage that the Conservatives picked up in the autumn of last 12 months after they elevated Pierre Poilievre to the position of leader has gone away. The Liberals and Conservatives are mainly tied again,” he said.
Which means, if a federal election were to happen tomorrow, the Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would receive 33 per cent of the vote, tied with Poilievre’s Conservative party, the poll suggests.
Within the 2019 election, neither the Liberals nor Conservatives hit the 170-seat threshold needed for a majority government.
The poll showed the NDP, led by Jagmeet Singh, would receive 18 per cent support while Yves-Francois Blanchet and the Bloc Quebecois would take seven per cent, amounting to 30 per cent in Quebec.
Green Party support under the renewed leadership of Elizabeth May, who was elected to return as leader last November, on a joint ticket with 32-year-old Jonathan Pedneault, would stand at 4 per cent, the poll suggested.
And, while Maxime Bernier and the People’s Party of Canada would are available in at three per cent, one per cent of respondents said they’d vote for another party, the poll revealed.
Around one in 10 were also unsure of whom they’d vote for in the subsequent federal election and 7 per cent said they’d not vote or spoil their ballot.
Although politics is “unimaginable” to predict, Bricker said, “Unless something really significant changes, it’s difficult to see how these numbers change.”
“The numbers are really locked. We’ve been through calamity over the space of the last 4 or five years they usually really haven’t moved that much,” he said.
Demographically, trends also present themselves within the poll amongst age groups and genders.
Liberals saw equal support amongst men and ladies, while Conservative backing was led by men over women, the poll suggested.
While Liberal support is evenly sprawled out through age groups, Conservative loyalty increases with age and is stronger amongst those with higher incomes.
“What we are likely to see is a reasonably typical pattern when it comes to the numbers,” Bricker said.
“If you would like to discover a Conservative, find any individual who’s more more likely to be a person, who tends to be older and who’s earning more cash. The Liberals do equally well among the many female and male population.”
Conservatives also are likely to lead in provinces west of Ontario, while the Liberals regained a small lead over the Tories in Ontario and have remained ahead in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, the poll suggested.
“Canada is basically a tale of two different regions,” Bricker said.
These are a few of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between Feb.15 and 17, 2023, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,350 Canadians aged 18+ was interviewed. Quotas and weighting were employed to be certain that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population in line with census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. On this case, the poll is accurate to inside ±3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18 and over been polled. The credibility interval shall be wider amongst subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls could also be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
© 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
