Election Writ 3/28: Are the Conservatives in trouble in Ontario?
An internal poll by the Ontario PCs suggests things could be worse than expected.
Are the Conservatives heading into an Ontario wood-chipper? That seems to be the case, at least according to one internal poll.
The polling story making the rounds yesterday was not about the numbers from any of the media or public polls. It was instead about figures produced by Campaign Research, the Ontario PC Party’s pollster, and first reported by the Toronto Star.
Kory Teneycke, who ran Doug Ford’s campaign and is a familiar voice on the Curse of Politics podcast, has been widely quoted over the last few days as a critic of the Conservatives’ approach to this election. According to him, the release of this poll is an attempt to shake the Conservatives into making the changes needed to get back into the race — a shock to the system meant to show that they’re in more trouble than they might think.
I always treat leaked internal polls with a bit of caution. They only see the light of day because someone wants them to be seen and so we have to understand the motivation behind the publication of internal numbers. For that reason, internal polls are not added to the Poll Tracker, but we can look at them in the context of the polls that are included.
The only polls added this morning came from the daily trackers by Liaison Strategies and Mainstreet Research and all they’ve done is continue the positive trend for Mark Carney and the negative trend for Jagmeet Singh. The Liberals have moved further into majority territory as the NDP makes more space for them.
The Conservatives are holding their support, but the continuing Liberal uptick means that the Conservatives have now lost their lead in British Columbia. Only in Alberta and the Prairies do the Conservatives still lead in the average. They’re now projected to win just 126 seats. The Liberals are at 189.
By any measure, the Campaign Research poll is a bad one for the Conservatives. Across Ontario, it shows the Liberals leading with 48%, followed by the Conservatives at just 33% and the NDP at 11%. With the exception of the last EKOS Research poll, that 15-point Liberal lead is the largest recorded in any recent survey. Even the last poll by the Angus Reid Institute, probably the worst national poll for the Conservatives published so far in this campaign, had the Liberals leading by just seven points in Ontario.
But it’s the regional numbers that make the Campaign poll especially noteworthy, because we haven’t seen any detailed breakdown of how the race is shaping up within Ontario. Let’s dive into those numbers, which are catastrophic for the Conservatives.