GHOST OF ELECTION PAST: TORIES, LIBS NOW MATCH ELECTION ’08 EXACTLY - November 5, 2009
CANADIANS DON’T WANT PARTY INFLUENCE ON STIMULUS SPENDING
[Ottawa – November 5, 2009] – A recession, a new Liberal leader, a new president south of the border – all coming since last year’s Canadian election – but after many ups and downs since then, Canada’s two major political parties are back where they were in the election of 2008, almost to the decimal point.
The Conservatives, who broke out to establish a double-digit lead over the Liberals since the summer, have ebbed a little from their peak. They are now at 37.4% support in the latest EKOS poll, just a fifth of a percentage point from where they were in last year’s election.
Similarly, the Liberals, at 26.8%, are just over half a percentage point above where they were under Stéphane Dion’ s leadership in the last election.
“This is the repetition of a disappointing pattern from Stephen Harper’s perspective,” said EKOS President Frank Graves. “Whenever the Tories surge up into majority territory as they did a few weeks ago, they soon find themselves slipping back, as they have done now.”
“From the Liberal perspective, these results must be deeply troubling. Despite a new leader, and party coffers refilling, the Liberals are not competitive for government at the moment. They desperately need something to shake up the current pattern of support. It may be mildly encouraging for the Liberals to note, however, that they have whittled the Conservatives 15-point lead down to 10 points.”
The poll, conducted weekly for exclusive release by the CBC, has a sample size of 3,327 – the largest of any regular political poll undertaken in Canada. The sample size enables us to see that Ontarians, who control about a third of the House of Commons, are also back almost precisely to where they were in October 2008, with the Conservatives enjoying a lead of about six percentage points.
The Liberals are, however, edging back up ahead of the Conservatives in Quebec.
Of all eligible senior voters, more than half are intending to vote Conservative, by contrast, just 1 in 4 of Canada’s young voters are planning on voting for the Conservatives.
Among the smaller parties, the NDP are off about two percentage points from the last election, and the Greens are up more than three percentage points, though experience suggests the Greens perform better in polls than they do at the ballot box.
In the wake of recent reports that the federal government’s stimulus spending may be going disproportionately to Conservative-held ridings, this week we asked Canadians whether it was OK for communities who had voted for the ruling party to get greater benefits from the economic action plan.
No surprise that Canadians were more than four times more likely to say that the voting record of a community shouldn’t matter. Even Conservative supporters felt that way by a margin of over 3 to 1. Relatively speaking, the young, men, and Quebeckers, are more tolerant of political influence on stimulus spending than other Canadians.
“In principle, at least, Canadians say they object to partisan influence on spending,” said Graves. “How that principle is applied when they see a shiny new hockey rink being built down the street may be different.”
Click here to download the full report: full-report-november-5
November 8th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I don’t know if I can believe that Seniors would vote for the Conservatives! Most of us have lived long enough to know that we are a better Nation under Liberal direction. From whom do you get your replies? Do you poll the same people every week? I am 79 years old, have voted in every election where I was able to make it to the polls, and I have never been asked for whom I would vote by any pollster. I do meet some people from Alberta who say “my parents always voted Conservative, and so do I” . When I point out to them that the Conservative Party of today is not the same party, are not really Conservatives, they do not believe me! Maybe the “pollsters” should point out that fact in some of their comments in the press releases?