WATCH: There’s just four months to go until we cast our ballots. If the polls are correct, it could be a fight to the finish. As Eric Sorensen reports, it looks like a return to the unpredictability of a minority government?
Stephen Harper would win if an election were held today, according to the latest seat projections obtained by Global News.
But it’d be a thin victory and one that could lead to talk of coalitions or agreements between the other two major parties.
Seat projections provided to Global News by the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy (LISPOP) show the Conservatives would win 124 seats, the NDP 108 seats, and the Liberals 102 seats.
“A majority government, particularly a Conservative majority government is unlikely,” Barry Kay, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, said in an interview Tuesday.
The seat projections are based on an aggregate of polls conducted by Ekos, Abacus, and Ipsos between May 6 and June 2 and include interviews with some 11,000 people.
They aren’t much different than the LISPOP projection published May 19; Conservatives are strongest in western provinces and rural Ontario, the Liberal party dominates Toronto, and the NDP is strongest in Quebec.
But the NDP is also gaining momentum in Quebec, something which Kay says speaks to an NDP surge since the party’s unlikely victory in Alberta.
“Clearly since the Alberta election, public opinion has changed dramatically in favour of the NDP,” Kay said
“The NDP victory in Alberta seems to have triggered something not so much just in Alberta, but particularly in Quebec.”
But their surge isn’t due to ideology, Kay suggested. Instead, the NDP victory in Alberta has given them credibility among federal voters they didn’t have before.
“With the notion that a province like Alberta could elect an NDP government signalled to people…. That the NDP is a party to be taken more seriously,” Kay said. “Elections can create a new dynamic. That was shown dramatically in Alberta.”
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