Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is seen as Canada’s best option in dealing with an incoming Trump administration and progressive voters might be moving from the Liberals to the NDP, a new Ipsos poll suggests.
Ipsos polling done exclusively for Global News and released Tuesday shows Liberal support has dropped five points, down to 21 per cent, since September and is now tied with the New Democratic Party, which saw its own share increase by five per cent in the same period.
The Conservatives, down one per cent since September, are polling at 44 per cent support. The Bloc Quebecois has maintained its support at seven per cent, while the Green Party is down two per cent.
“What we’re seeing here is that progressive voters are starting to make a decision to maybe reconsider the NDP. We do know that one of the largest voter blocs in the Canadian population these days continues to be Liberal-NDP switchers,” Darrel Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs, told Global News.
The prime minister’s personal popularity has gone down five per cent, with only 23 per cent overall saying they think Justin Trudeau deserves re-election, and 77 per cent saying they think it’s time for a new party to take over.
Bricker said that latest poll numbers have also dashed Liberal hopes that the election of Donald Trump in the United States was going to give Trudeau a boost.
“There was a lot of speculation that the election of Donald Trump would create a great foil for Justin Trudeau to rebuild his credibility on and (it would be) a great way for the Liberal Party to reintroduce itself to Canadians as a progressive contrast to the new Republican administration under Donald Trump,” he said.
The polling, however, challenges that speculation.
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The Ipsos polls said 22 per cent believe Trudeau would do the best job representing Canada’s interests with a new Trump administration, compared to 34 per cent who said Poilievre would be best suited for that role.
Bricker said the federal Liberals’ attempts to improve their popularity seem to not be working.
“It seems like everything that the federal government does under the leadership of Justin Trudeau is almost like throwing gasoline on a fire,” he said.
Despite the falling popularity of the government, however, the majority of Canadians do not want opposition parties to trigger an early election.
Over half of Canadians (54 per cent) believe opposition parties should work with the government on a case-by-case basis to avoid an early election. Meanwhile, 46 per cent believe opposition parties should defeat the government and trigger an early election.
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between December 6 and 10, 2024, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,001 Canadians aged 18+ was interviewed online. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to Census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18+ been polled.
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.