Projection Update: The Liberals are on the move

But they still have a long way to go.

We can quibble about how much the margin between the Conservatives and Liberals has narrowed in recent weeks, but it’s quite clear that the margin has indeed gotten smaller — quickly and significantly.

Over the last 20 months or so, the trend has really only headed in one direction. The Conservatives were going up and the Liberals were going down. What seemed like an unbelievable double-digit lead for the Conservatives shortly became a 20-point lead. By the time Justin Trudeau finally saw the writing on the wall, the Conservatives were 25 points ahead and prospects for the Liberals were bleak.

Now, the trendlines have reversed. Some polls have shown the margin between the two parties has been cut by half or more. But the consensus does not yet indicate a single-digit race in which a Conservative victory is in great doubt. Emphasis on the “yet”.

Four national polls and one regional poll published over the last week show significant movement in voting intentions. Since the end of December or the first weeks of January, when these polling firms were last in the field, the Liberals have gained four points (Nanos Research), five points (Innovative Research Group) or eight points (Pallas Data and Ipsos). In Quebec, Léger has the Liberals up 10 points.

The Conservative slide has ranged between two and five points, with the NDP down one to six points (or up one point, according to Nanos). That’s a lot of movement for what had been, up to Chrystia Freeland’s resignation in December, a relatively staid polling landscape. There was incremental movement throughout 2023 and 2024 and it represented an inexorable slide for the Liberals, but rarely did we ever see swings from poll to poll of this magnitude.

Undoubtedly, the combined impact of Donald Trump’s fixation on tariffs (and annexation) and the ongoing Liberal leadership race has shifted the landscape in Canada. The U.S. president has jolted the political debate here away from a referendum on Trudeau’s last nine years in office and toward the next four years of the Trump Administration, a change in perspective to which the Liberal leadership race has also contributed. Polling by Léger in Quebec and Pallas nationwide that suggests the Liberals would enjoy a big boost if Mark Carney became party leader hint at how the Liberals have gotten a new lease on life with the prospect of a change at the top.

But it’s important to note that most of the new polls out this week would deliver a comfortable majority government to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives if their numbers were replicated at the ballot box. Both IRG and Ipsos put the Conservative lead at 13 points. Nanos pegged it at 15. Only Pallas Data, with a six-point lead, had the potential to produce a Conservative minority — and that was the worst poll for the Conservatives. Though the Liberals have staved off catastrophe (for now), they are not yet in a position to seriously contend for re-election, according to my latest update to the CBC’s Poll Tracker.

The Conservatives lead with 42.4%, representing a drop of two points over the last two weeks. The Liberals are up two points since last week (and three since the week before that) to 25.5%, their highest point in the Poll Tracker since January 2024.

That puts the margin at just under 17 points, higher than the polls that have been published in the last week. But the model is designed to move cautiously, particularly outside of a writ period. A net three-point swing in a single week is, by the model’s standards, enormous.

The NDP is having a bad go of things, dropping again to 16.5%. Each tick downward puts them at a new low since before the 2021 election.

The Conservatives are now projected to win 205 seats, down five from last week. Their floor has dipped from 187 to 178, putting it only a few seats above the majority threshold. The odds that the Conservatives win the most seats but not a majority has increased to 10%, when just a few weeks ago it was nearly 0%.

The Liberals are up nine seats to 79 while the NDP has dropped two to just 18 seats. The Bloc is projected to win 39 seats and the Greens two.

There’s been a lot of movement at the regional level. The Liberals have nearly caught the NDP in British Columbia, though both parties are way behind the Conservatives. The Conservative lead is just over 14 points in Ontario and is nearly seven points in Atlantic Canada, but those margins were 24 and 17 points, respectively, on January 6.

Most notable, however, is that the Liberals have moved back into second place in Quebec. Much of the movement is driven by last week’s Léger poll that put the Liberals and Bloc tied for first with 29% apiece in the province. In the Poll Tracker, the Bloc still leads by about eight points. But that lead is now over the Liberals, not the Conservatives.

CBC Poll Tracker averages in Quebec.

Since last week, the Liberals have picked up nearly four points in Quebec. That has come almost equally from both the Conservatives and Bloc. The net effect is that the Liberals are back in second place in the province. It’s by less than a point, but the Conservatives had held second spot since the end of November.

Things are certainly in flux and we could see some wild polls over the next few weeks, especially in ones where Mark Carney (and, to a lesser extent, Chrystia Freeland) is substituted for Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberals. But Carney is not a fully-formed figure in Canadians’ minds just yet, which means that opinions of him could shift dramatically as he and his policies come under greater scrutiny. And, if he loses the contest, the Carney bubble the Liberals appear to be benefiting from could pop. But what seems clear enough is that, perhaps for the first time in nearly a year, there is no longer any inevitability to the next election.

You can see all the findings from the Poll Tracker here and seat-by-seat projections here.