With dozens of MPs in the Liberal caucus now calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a new Angus Reid Institute poll finds that the party’s public support has dropped to a new historic low.
Among decided voters, just 16 per cent expressed an intention to vote Liberal in the next election, according to a survey published Monday.
The figure “represents a low in vote intention for the Liberals since Trudeau became leader, but quite possibly the lowest support the party has received in modern times,” read an accompanying analysis.
The usual benchmark for Liberal ignominy are the opinion polls preceding the 2011 federal election. Under the leadership of Michael Ignatieff, the party scored its worst-ever electoral result, winning just 34 seats and becoming the third-ranked party in the House of Commons for the first time since Confederation.
Even then, Ignatieff never once suffered a poll that put him as low as 16 per cent. His worst recorded showing was an April 29, 2011 COMPAS poll which put the Liberals at 17 per cent.
Another Ipsos Reid poll released that same day put the Liberals at 18 per cent. At the time, Ipsos Reid called it “one of the worst showings in memory,” but it would end up being one of the more accurate predictions of the 2011 election. The Liberals ended up securing just 18.9 per cent of the electorate on election day.
If 16 per cent holds until election day, the Liberals could end up beating the usually cited record for catastrophic electoral defeat: The 1993 immolation of the Progressive Conservatives under Kim Campbell.
In that election, the PCs garnered just 16.04 per cent of the popular vote, a result that yielded just two seats in the House of Commons, and ultimately doomed the party as a viable electoral force.
A projection by election modeller Raymond Liu found that if the latest Angus Reid Institute results hold up on election day, the Liberals could well enter the next Parliament with just six seats. Five of those would be in Atlantic Canada, with only one — the Montreal riding of Saint-Léonard-Saint-Michel — remaining in Quebec.
With the party completely blown out in Ontario and Western Canada, this would make Liberal backbencher Patricia Lattanzio the westernmost Liberal MP in the entire country.
The Liberals were already scraping new lows in popular support before the snap resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland triggered a legitimacy crisis within the party.
Over the weekend, the party’s Atlantic caucus released a letter publicly calling for Trudeau to step down — joining more than a dozen fellow Liberals who have already said the same.
Circulated by New Brunswick MP Wayne Long, the letter repeatedly praises Trudeau’s leadership and stresses the caucus’s “deep personal affection” for him, but suggests that “it is not tenable for you to remain as the Leader.”
Prior to the crisis, the Angus Reid Institute had the Liberals at 21 per cent in an October poll. The five points they’ve lost in the interim two months seems to have been shared evenly by the Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois, who all saw slight upticks in their own poll numbers.
Nevertheless, the NDP are still in markedly poor shape given the utter collapse of the Liberals.
Historically, the New Democrats have been the direct beneficiaries of Liberal disillusionment; the Liberals’ worst-ever showing in 2011 coincided with the best-ever showing for the NDP.
But even as Liberal support has entered steady decline since the 2021 federal election, the NDP has stubbornly hovered at around 20 per cent, hitting just 21 per cent in the most recent survey.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, are on track for a blowout victory. The new poll has them at 45 per cent. That’s 24 points higher than the next closest contender (the NDP), and eight points higher than the combined vote share of both the NDP and the Liberals.
Liu’s projection has them winning a supermajority of 241 seats — roughly 70 per cent of all the seats in the House of Commons. It’s a victory that would best anything the Liberals have ever done, but it would still fall in third place behind Progressive Conservative landslides won in both 1958 and 1984.