Ignatieff would take Liberals to worse election showing than Dion: poll
OTTAWA - A new poll shows support for the federal Liberal party has weakened so much that, were an election to be held today, Michael Ignatieff would lead his party to a worse showing than his predecessor, Stephane Dion, did last October.
"The Liberals, these days, just have no traction at all," said Darrell Bricker, CEO of polling firm Ipsos Reid, which provided its latest results exclusively to Canwest News Service and Global National.
Mr. Dion received 26.3% of the popular vote last fall as his party lost to Stephen Harper's Conservatives. The Liberals had not done that poorly at a general election since the country's very first general election in 1867.
The Ipsos Reid poll suggests that, last week, the Liberals would have done even worse, with just 25% of support among all Canadians.
Meanwhile, the governing Conservatives, despite coming under fire last week with accusations of partisan spending of economic stimulus money, have opened up the kind of lead that often points to majority governments.
Ipsos found 40% of survey respondents said they would vote Conservative. But while 40% is usually good enough for a majority -- Jean Chretien won a majority with 37% in 1997 -- Bricker said the Conservative vote tends to be "inefficient," that is, it's concentrated in provinces like Alberta where, even if their support shot up to 100%, it would not translate into more seats and a majority.
That said, the Conservatives appear to be surging in Ontario, opening a nine-point lead -- 41% to 32% -- over the Liberals. That surge, Bricker said, could lead to more Tory seats and puts them "tantalizingly" close to majority territory.
"The Liberal brand is suffering a bit in this province," said Bricker.
Nationally, NDP support remained stable through the month at 13% and the Green Party has the support of 11% of voters, an improvement of three percentage points since Ipsos Reid last polled Canadians in early October.
Ipsos Reid did a telephone survey of 1,003 Canadians from Oct. 20 to Oct. 22, a period last week when Liberals were hammering the Conservatives in the House of Commons on accusations that ridings held by Tory MPs were getting more economic stimulus funds than non-Tory ridings. The week also saw Harper concede that it was wrong for two of his MPs to put a Conservative party logo on ceremonial cheques used as props for riding funding announcements.
During the week, Ignatieff also seemed to back away from his earlier determination to force a general election, qualifying his position to say that while his party still had no confidence in the government, it would approach key votes in the House of Commons on a case-by-case basis.
The Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois seem to have benefitted most from last week's political back-and-forth.
In Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois is the choice of 42% of voters; the Liberals are at 22% and the Conservatives at 18%.
The pollster said its national results are accurate to within 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20, but there is wider margin of error for regional results.
The Ipsos poll is one of several since late summer that show a growing gap between the Liberals and Conservatives. But this latest poll may be particularly alarming for the Liberals.
In 14 polls Ipsos Reid has done since the election of Oct. 14, 2008, Liberal support has only once been as low as it is now and that was in early December when Dion was threatening to topple the government with a Liberal-NDPcoalition government. That coalition government, deeply unpopular with a majority of Canadians, saw Liberal support dip down to 23% on Dec. 3.
Ipsos Reid said that Liberal fortunes have sunk so low that the party would likely lose seats in its stronghold of Toronto to the Conservatives if an election were held this week.
