Election Writ 3/29: Liberals win Week 1
If Carney stepped on a few rakes in Quebec this week, it hasn't had any impact.
The first week of this campaign is (nearly) in the books and it looks like the Liberals come out the better for it.
It wasn’t a perfect week for the Liberals, but it ended on a high note with an apparently positive call with the U.S. president. Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem to be in panic mode as multiple media outlets have found people within the orbit of the party willing to air their grievances out loud. The New Democrats are valiantly, if fruitlessly, trying to get their share of attention.
We’ve only seen the tracking polls from Liaison Strategies and Mainstreet Research over the last few days but I suspect that we’ll hear from more of the usual suspects soon.
The Liberals now lead with just over 41% in the Poll Tracker, with the Conservatives trailing with under 38% and the NDP with less than 9% support.
Since the writ drop on Sunday, the Liberals have picked up 3.7 points in the polling average, making them the big winners of the first week of this campaign. The Conservatives are up 0.5 points. While that’s growth for Pierre Poilievre, the net effect is that the Liberal lead has widened by more than three points.
The NDP has slipped 2.5 points over the last week and the Greens are down 0.9 points. The Bloc Québécois is down just under two points in Quebec, while the People’s Party hasn’t budged.
There were questions about whether the Liberals might take a bit of a hit in Quebec after Carney declined the invitation to participate in the TVA debate and made a gaffe over the Polytechnique shooting. The answer, so far, is that it doesn’t seem to have made a lick of difference. Let’s look at the numbers in Quebec.