Tories overwhelmingly opposed to Longest Ballot campaign: Poll

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OTTAWA — They’ve lost their enthusiasm.

After two straight elections targeting ridings challenged by Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, the Longest Ballot Committee has lost support among Conservative voters for their long-running election reform protest — an action that came in response to broken election promises by former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

In a poll conducted by Angus Reid, support for the Longest Ballot Committee is lowest among declared Conservatives, with 79% saying they’d support a law banning such protests in the future.

Only 28% of declared Liberals and 16% of NDP voters expressed support for the law.

The Aug. 18 byelection in Battle River-Crowfoot, where Poilievre hopes to regain a seat in the House of Commons, is facing a ballot of more than 200 names thanks to a protest by the Longest Ballot Committee.

In the protest’s early days when the committee’s targets were byelections favouring Liberals, Conservatives stayed relatively silent while much of the opposition to the protest was heard from Liberals — particularly in the wake of last summer’s Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection, which saw Tory candidate Don Stewart win a startling upset against Liberal challenger Leslie Church.

The ballot for that election was 84 names, breaking the previous record set by the committee’s achievement of a 48-name ballot in the Winnipeg South Centre byelection of June 19, 2023.

The committee began in response to Trudeau’s 2015 promise that the federal election that year would be Canada’s last conducted via first-past-the-post balloting.

In total, 47% of respondents favoured outlawing the protest, while 34% were against it, with 18% unable to express an opinion.

Forty-three per cent of respondents considered the protest inappropriate, while 30% agreed with it, and nearly as many had no opinion.

The poll was conducted between July 23 and 28 among 1,500 Canadian adult members of the Angus Reid Forum. As margins-of-error don’t apply to online panels, an equivalent sample would yield a margin of ±2%, 19 times out of 20.

bpassifiume@postmedia.com
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