EKOS Politics says that the Liberal Party would have a clear majority if an election were held tomorrow. The principal driver has been a burgeoning national identity and search for economic sovereignty in a coming storm produced by the Trump announcements.
So far, Pierre Poilievre has not been able to provide a successful pivot to these new dominant issues and whatever attempts have been made are not reversing these trends. In fact, the Liberal rise has continued even while the Conservatives have made efforts to correct their course, according to EKOS Politics.
A roll-up of results from February 27 to March 5 of a large sample of nearly 2,000 cases sees the Liberal Party with a clear lead for the first time since November 2021. The Liberals are at 40.7 per cent nationally, the first time they have broken the 40-point threshold since May 2020. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are at 35.5 per cent while the NDP is at 12.8 per cent.
These highly favourable numbers for the Liberals understate the party’s seat advantage, as they now have large and stable leads in Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic, while they are competitive in British Columbia.
“This distribution would yield a comfortable majority, an advantage that becomes larger when we specifically prompt with Mark Carney as the party leader. We have blended the generic and leader-prompted ballot results as we think that is a reasonable balance. Without a leader prompt, the results are much closer in Quebec and Ontario so the majority outcome would be less certain,” says EKOS Politics.
The key fault line is gender, with massive inverse results for men and women voters. Liberal strength is also much higher in over-50 Canada and among the university educated and self-defined middle class. The Conservatives hold a large lead with men and fare extremely well with young men and the non-university educated.
“In order to see if things have been shifting since the announcement of the tariffs, we provide a four-day two-day roll-up. In the blended four-day roll, the Liberal advantage expands to just under 10 points. Notably, the effect of citing the leaders does not seem to alter these results, which suggests voters may be taking the “Carney Effect” into account. Looking at just the two nights since the tariffs took effect, the lead over the Conservatives widens to 13 points,” says EKOS Politics.
“The bottom line is that the Trump and Carney effects have wrought a massive change in the Canadian political landscape in a very short period of time. If anxiety and defiance at the Trump threat are the crucial engines of this shift and if Carney is being seen as the most trusted pilot to negotiate these profound threats, it will be difficult for the Conservative Party to reverse these patterns unless Trump decides to take a very different approach, which seems highly unlikely.”
The field dates for this survey are February 27-March 5. In total, a random sample of 1,980 Canadians aged 18 and over responded to the survey. The margin of error associated with the total sample is +/- 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The margin of error increases when the results are sub-divided (i.e., error margins for sub-groups such as region, sex, age, and education).
