A new Postmedia-Leger poll has found that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is popular only with an ever-dwindling coterie of hardcore Liberal voters, with every other voter demographic wanting him gone.
“While this partisan split is not unusual, it is particularly marked at the moment,” said Sébastien Dallaire, an executive president at Leger, in an email to National Post.
“Supporters of the NDP, the Bloc or the Greens, were not as sour about the Liberal government until 2023. Since then, this partisan split has held steady,” he added.
Virtually every voter cohort covered by the poll disapproved of Trudeau’s performance as prime minister, often by huge margins.
Disapproval of Trudeau was the one issue that united every conceivable demographic in roughly equal margins; women and men (64 vs. 65 per cent), rural and urban (71 vs. 64 per cent) and even under-35s and senior citizens (66 vs. 64 per cent).
The only exception was those who identified as Liberal supporters. In that group, the approval rate was a whopping 83 per cent, against just 15 per cent who disapproved.
Among the other parties, the numbers were reversed. Even among NDPers, 57 per cent disapproved of Trudeau, against just 37 per cent who approved.
Meanwhile, the share of Liberal supporters just keeps getting smaller.
Only 24 per cent of those surveyed expressed an intention to vote Liberal in the next election. While this isn’t quite the lowest the Liberals have ranked in an opinion poll, it still puts them in line for a gutting defeat at the hands of the Conservatives in the next election.
The Tories enjoyed 44 per cent voter support in this latest Leger poll — a 20 point lead over the Liberals.
“They are in clear majority territory,” said Dallaire.
Liberal supporters were also the only respondents who didn’t immediately want Trudeau to resign in favour of a new Liberal leader.
Among NDP and Bloc voters, 61 and 64 per cent wanted Trudeau to immediately step aside, with 81 per cent of Conservatives wanting a new leader to take the Liberal helm. But Liberal voters still generally thought Trudeau was the best to lead their party into the next election, with only 33 per cent favouring his early resignation.
As to who constitutes Canada’s shrinking pro-Trudeau constituency, it’s hard to tell given that Liberal support has plummeted virtually everywhere.
The Conservative Party now dominates across every age demographic, and in every province except Quebec, where the Bloc Québécois has emerged as the favourite in recent months.
Young people are actually among the most likely to favour the Conservatives, with 47 per cent expressing an intention to vote Tory – a six point lead over the 41 per cent of seniors leaning Tory.
As to who should replace Trudeau if he decided to resign early, there was no obvious favourite, although Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney were tied for first choice among poll respondents, with just eight per cent favouring either of them.
The online poll surveyed 1,521 Canadians between Sept. 6 and 8, and results were weighted to reflect Canada’s demographic makeup. For comparison purposes, a similar random sample would produce a margin of error of plus or minus 2.51 per cent, 19 times out of 20.