Liberal, Conservative supporters ‘gridlocked’ in voting intentions: poll

Liberal and Conservative voters are again freshly deadlocked in their voting intentions in Canada, new polling released Monday appears to show.

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.