Election Writ 4/3: The Bloc is in trouble
And it's helping the Liberals pad their majority.
While the Conservatives have surrendered most of the gains they made in 2023 and 2024 to the Liberals and the NDP has seen half of its vote flock over to Mark Carney, the Bloc Québécois has also taken a big hit since Justin Trudeau announced his resignation in early January.
It’s a consequential shift in the polls that has helped propel the Liberals into majority territory.
The Liberals are holding at just over 200 seats in the Poll Tracker as the numbers have only marginally shifted since yesterday’s update.
The daily tracking from Liaison Strategies and Nanos Research hints at a positive trend for the Liberals as they show the party at between 45% and 46%, up from around 42% in tracking that ended on March 29. This upward movement is tempered somewhat by the steady trendline measured by Mainstreet Research and the one-point Conservative lead registered by Innovative Research Group in a new poll it published yesterday.
While the Conservatives’ 38% support in the IRG poll is right in line with where other polls have the party, the Liberals’ 37% is markedly lower and the NDP’s 12% is markedly higher than what the consensus of the polls suggests.
When a poll like IRG’s comes out it does not invalidate or throw into doubt all the other polls that are being published. Instead, it’s all the other polls that suggest we should throw doubt on the IRG survey. But it also advises some caution. It’s unlikely that a pollster could find a one-point Conservative lead in an environment in which the Liberals are actually leading by nine or 10 points. But it is entirely plausible, if not expected, that some pollsters could produce a result like this if the gap is actually six points, which is where the Poll Tracker puts things.
What’s not in doubt is that the Liberals have moved ahead by a wide margin in Quebec — and that this has largely come at the expense of the Bloc Québécois. Just how many seats could the Bloc lose as a result?