Liberal and Conservative supporters are again freshly deadlocked in their voting intentions in Canada, new polling released Monday appears to show.
The “statistical tie” comes after a spike in support for the Conservative party last fall following the post-leadership convention when Pierre Poilievre was elected leader in September 2022, the Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News found.
Now, as these neck-and-neck results have held fairly constant since the 2019 election — when Canadians elected a Liberal minority government — voting intentions have moved back to familiar territory.
“It’s really the Groundhog Day of polls. We’re in this gridlock and it seems to have persisted for a long period of time,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, told Global News.
“What the results show is that the little advantage that the Conservatives picked up in the fall of last year when they elevated Pierre Poilievre to the position of leader has gone away. The Liberals and Conservatives are basically tied again,” he said.
That means, if a federal election were to take place tomorrow, the Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would receive 33 per cent of the vote, tied with Poilievre’s Conservative party, the poll suggests.
In the 2019 election, neither the Liberals nor Conservatives hit the 170-seat threshold needed for a majority government.
The poll showed the NDP, led by Jagmeet Singh, would receive 18 per cent support while Yves-Francois Blanchet and the Bloc Quebecois would take seven per cent, amounting to 30 per cent in Quebec.
Green Party support under the renewed leadership of Elizabeth May, who was elected to return as leader last November, on a joint ticket with 32-year-old Jonathan Pedneault, would stand at four per cent, the poll suggested.
And, while Maxime Bernier and the People’s Party of Canada would come in at three per cent, one per cent of respondents said they would vote for some other party, the poll revealed.
Around one in 10 were also unsure of whom they would vote for in the next federal election and seven per cent said they would not vote or spoil their ballot.
Although politics is “impossible” to predict, Bricker said, “Unless something really significant changes, it’s difficult to see how these numbers change.”
“The numbers are really locked. We’ve been through calamity over the space of the last four or five years and they really haven’t moved that much,” he said.
Demographically, trends also present themselves in the poll among age groups and genders.
Liberals saw equal support among men and women, while Conservative backing was led by men over women, the poll suggested.
While Liberal support is evenly sprawled out through age groups, Conservative loyalty increases with age and is stronger among those with higher incomes.
“What we tend to see is a fairly typical pattern in terms of the numbers,” Bricker said.
“If you want to find a Conservative, find somebody who’s more likely to be a man, who tends to be older and who is earning more money. The Liberals do equally well among the male and female population.”
Conservatives also tend to lead in provinces west of Ontario, while the Liberals regained a small lead over the Tories in Ontario and have remained ahead in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, the poll suggested.
“Canada is really a tale of two different regions,” Bricker said.
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between Feb.15 and 17, 2023, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,350 Canadians aged 18+ was interviewed. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ±3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18 and over been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.