Nearly half of Canadians want there to be a federal election in 2023, according to a new poll from Ipsos.
While the deadline for the federal election is 2025, the NDP has agreed to keep the Liberal minority government in power until then as long as it abides by the terms of the governance deal struck between the two parties earlier this year.
That might explain why, despite 49 per cent of Canadians hoping for a federal election, a slightly smaller number — 43 per cent — said in the Ipsos poll that they actually think it will happen.
“When we typically go and ask this question on surveys, you find that all the opposition voters want elections. People who are voting for the government on the other side don’t necessarily want an election,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, in an interview with Global News.
“I think that’s what we’re seeing here. So, yes, that there seems to be a strong desire to have an election, although there isn’t a high expectation that there will be one.”
The desire for a federal election isn’t even across the country, however.
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While a majority of those polled in British Columbia, Alberta, Atlantic Canada and Saskatchewan want an election next year, less than half of Ontarians and Quebeckers are hoping to go to the polls in 2023.
“Canadians aren’t overwhelmingly desirous of an election, particularly — interestingly enough — people in Ontario and Quebec,” Bricker said.
“We’ve just been through elections, so it looks like 2023 could very much be a stand-pat year in Canadian politics.”
Although, Bricker added, “anything can happen.”
Younger Canadians are also far more likely to want to cast a vote next year. Among those aged 18 to 34, 65 per cent said they wanted an election, while less than half of those aged 35 and up said they’re hoping for a 2023 federal vote.
However, a slim majority of those polled are hoping one politician won’t be running in the next election: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Fifty-four per cent of those polled said Trudeau should step down as the leader of the Liberal Party in 2023, though just 27 per cent said they believe he’ll do so.
That sentiment reflects a “continuing pattern that we’ve seen since 2019,” Bricker said.
“They simply aren’t back to where they were in 2019 — that sense of an absolute darling that Canadians really got behind, that’s not what Justin Trudeau is,” he said.
Still, Trudeau’s approval rating remains at 45 per cent among the Canadians who were polled — ahead of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who got a 41 per cent approval rating.
“There have been a few game-changing events in the last little while, in terms of politics in Canada, that should have probably changed the game — but don’t really seem to have changed it that much,” Bricker said.
“The biggest thing that’s happened since the last federal election is that the Conservative Party has a new leader. But when you look at the Conservative Party’s leader’s numbers in this most recent polling, (they’re) not much better than what we saw for his predecessors.”
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, who recently returned to the helm of her party, had an approval rating of 39 per cent, while Yves-François Blanchet has an approval rating of 43 per cent among Quebecers.
People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier’s approval rating sits at 26 per cent,
The most popular leader in Canada, according to the poll, is NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. He got a 53 per cent approval rating — but Bricker warned that, come election time, popular NDP leaders don’t usually see that energy translated into vote results.
“As we’ve seen in elections past with NDP leaders, they tend to do well in the polls and they don’t do so well on Election Day,” he said. “So even though they might like him a little bit, they’re not necessarily prepared to vote for him unless something changes.”
Exclusive Global News Ipsos polls are protected by copyright. The information and/or data may only be rebroadcast or republished with full and proper credit and attribution to “Global News Ipsos.” This poll was conducted between Dec. 14 and 16, 2022, with a sample of 1,004 Canadians aged 18-plus interviewed online. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. This poll is accurate to within ± 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18-plus been polled.
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