Doug Ford government's polling shows shifting views of Ontario's COVID-19 response

Newly revealed polling conducted by Premier Doug Ford's government shows growing public dissatisfaction with its handling of COVID-19 last year as successive waves of the pandemic hit Ontario. 

CBC News obtained 35 weekly polling reports from 2021, assessing public opinion on a wide range of issues related to COVID-19, including public health restrictions, vaccine passports and mandatory vaccination requirements. 

The polling was commissioned by the provincial cabinet office, paid for with public funds and conducted by the Strategic Counsel, a Toronto-based consulting firm. 

The overall trends in the results suggest that with each successive wave of the pandemic, support for the government sagged. 

That could be cause for concern for Ford and his Progressive Conservatives with Ontario struggling through yet another wave of COVID-19, this time driven by the Omicron variant, and election day less than five months away. 

The polling reports show public dissatisfaction peaking in late April and early May, with 51 per cent of respondents saying the government was doing a "poor" or "very poor" job of handling the third wave of the pandemic, and just 19 per cent describing it as a "good" or "excellent" job. 

Each week pollsters also asked a broader question of whether the government was "on the right track or the wrong track, in terms of how it is governing the province?" 

Throughout 2020, the government's "wrong track" numbers hovered down in the 20 to 25 per cent range. But that began changing in early 2021, as the second wave peaked and kept worsening until late April.

Just after the third wave peaked, 52 per cent of respondents said the government was on the wrong track. 

From May until the most recent poll in mid-September, the government's "right track" approval rating recovered somewhat, but had not returned to the levels seen before the third wave. 

The pollsters broke down the "wrong track" scores among a range of demographics, including age, gender, region, income level and whether people were born in Canada or elsewhere.

As seen in the slide above, the trends suggest parents have been more likely than non-parents to say the government is on the wrong track. 

Likewise, people living in Toronto have been generally more likely than people living in the outlying 905 region to say the government is on the wrong track.  

On the other hand, the trends suggest that people born outside of Canada and those who the pollsters define as "minority" have been less likely to say the government was on the wrong track than those born in Canada or the "non-minority" population.