Public opinion of the Liberals is up, putting them back on par with the Tories, according to a new Ipsos poll.
The poll, conducted exclusively for Global News, showed that 36 per cent of respondents would vote Liberal if a federal election were held tomorrow — that’s up five points from late March.
At the same time — Conservatives have dropped three points with 35 per cent of respondents of the national popular vote, a virtual tie with the Liberals.
The NDP also fell three points to 20 per cent while the Bloc and Green Party are holding steady at three and six per cent respectively.
Pollster Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, told Global News the Liberals have been recovering from recent controversies, including Justin Trudeau’s India trip. The public opinion of them is rising.
“It’s the fact that they haven’t been in the news in the same negative way they were around the trips to India, so we’ve kind of gone back to a reset,” Bricker explained.
WATCH: Controversy surrounded Justin Trudeau’s India trip
But he said they weren’t back up to their highest approval rating, instead, they’ve just come back to tie with the Conservatives.
That’s also significant, Bricker explained, because Tory Leader Andrew Sheer isn’t as recognizable as Trudeau.
“But even that is, you know, interesting because hardly anybody knows the leader of the Opposition,” he said.
It all culminates to mean that the next election will be a tight one.
The largest battlefield remains in Ontario where the Liberals and Conservatives are neck and neck, with 39 per cent and 38 per cent of the vote respectively.
This Ipsos poll on behalf of Global News was an online survey of 1,907 Canadians conducted between April 24 and 30, 2018. The results were weighted to better reflect the composition of the adult Canadian population, according to census data. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is considered accurate to within plus or minus 2.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.