Carney Liberals seeing wide lead in Quebec, new poll suggests

Article content

The federal Liberals under leader Mark Carney are maintaining their lead over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives and entering majority government territory nationally while dominating by double digits in the seat-rich provinces of Ontario and Quebec, a new Léger poll suggests.

The online survey, made public Tuesday and conducted for the Journal de Montréal and the National Post, found the Liberals enjoy 44 per cent support nationally compared with 38 per cent for the Tories, seven per cent for the NDP and five per cent for the Bloc Québécois.

Recommended Videos

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Carney Liberals seeing wide lead in Quebec, new poll suggests Back to video

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

The gap becomes more acute when examined at the provincial level, with the Liberals leading the Conservatives by 10 points in Ontario (49 per cent to 39 per cent) and by 20 points in Quebec (43 per cent to 23 per cent). The Bloc Québécois shares the distant second place in Quebec with the Tories, seeing their support poll at 23 per cent.

While the national gap between the Liberals and Conservatives isn’t as wide, a challenge facing the Tories in this campaign is that much of their support is concentrated in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — which between them possess less than a third of the total seats in Ontario and Quebec.

The last majority federal government elected in Canada was that of the Liberals in 2015 who polled 39.4 per cent of the vote — five points less than the party’s current level of popularity.

Despite a series of perceived gaffes by Carney in Quebec during the first week of the campaign, including refusing to participate in a French-language debate organized by the TVA news network, respondents in that province felt nevertheless that he was the best choice to lead the government.

A total of 49 per cent of respondents in Quebec felt Carney’s mastery of the French language was poor and 52 per cent felt he should have participated in the TVA debate. Meanwhile, the Liberal lead in the province is tempered by a high level (45 per cent) of undecided voters.

The online survey, which cannot be assigned a margin of error, was conducted March 26-31 and polled 3,002 Canadian adults. A probability sample of this size would have a margin of error of 1.79 per cent.