Though Canada’s election began in earnest only late last month, public opinion polls have captured a gripping political narrative that has been unfolding since the start of the year.
Between President Trump’s trade war, his threats of annexation and the resignation of Canada’s last prime minister, a lot happened in the run-up to this race to shape how voters are feeling.
The election will take place April 28, so there’s plenty of time for things to change, but The New York Times reviewed available public opinion polls, closely examining them for quality and consistency.
Trump continues to wield significant influence.
When Mr. Trump kicked off a trade war and began threatening the nation’s sovereignty in early February, he reversed months of polling trends: Support climbed for the Liberals and shrank for the Conservatives.
In only eight weeks, the Conservative Party’s 20-plus-point lead vanished, and now the Liberals are leading the polls by an average of six percentage points.
Canadians have consistently cited tensions with the United States as the most important issue facing the country. And among voters who had switched their intended support this year from another party to the Liberal Party, 51 percent said Mr. Trump’s actions were one of their top two reasons for doing so, according to a recent poll from the Angus Reid Institute.
A new leader brings momentum.
The Liberals are also benefiting from a fresh face. Prime Minister Mark Carney is leading the party after winning the race to replace former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who announced plans to resign in January and stepped down last month.
That same Angus Reid poll found an even larger share — 56 percent — of party-switchers saying that Mr. Carney was one of the top two reasons they were shifting their support to the Liberals.
Mr. Carney is the only national party leader whose favorability rating — the percentage of voters who like him minus those who say they don’t — is currently positive, and his popularity surpasses that of his party itself.
In an Angus Reid poll from late March, 54 percent of Canadians had a favorable view of Mr. Carney, compared with 35 percent for the Conservative Party’s leader, Pierre Poilievre, and 33 percent for Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the leftist New Democratic Party, or N.D.P. Mr. Carney was also preferred by a majority of Canadians (52 percent), when asked which leader, between him and Mr. Poilievre, they thought would make the best prime minister.
“If Trudeau had stayed on, I don’t think he would be getting the same numbers,” said Éric Grenier, a Canadian polling analyst who runs The Writ, an election analytics site. “And if Trump wasn’t there, I don’t think Carney would be getting the same numbers.”
Conservatives aren’t doing that bad; Liberals are just doing that well.
With a multiparty parliamentary system like Canada’s, any single party polling at or above 40 percent of the popular vote has a really strong chance of securing a majority government. Currently, the Liberals are polling, on average, around 44 percent, according to the CBC’s poll tracker, while the Conservatives are sitting at 38 percent. In past cycles, the Conservatives have won power with a similar share of support, but in those elections, voters on the left were split.
The Liberal Party has managed to consolidate support on the left at the expense of other parties. While the Liberals recovered in the polls, support for the N.D.P. has sunk to some of the lowest levels in decades.
“There have always been ‘A.B.C.’ voters — ‘anything but conservative’ — but the movement is marginal,” said Philippe Fournier, who runs the election analytics site 338Canada. “Not this time.”
Conservatives are losing support even among core demographics.
One notable demographic shift in the polls lately has been that Canada’s younger voters have been breaking for the Conservatives.
Polling from Leger in late March found that Canadians aged 18 to 34 preferred the Conservatives over the Liberals 39 to 37 percent, while some polls have showed young voters favoring the Conservatives by as much as 10 percentage points.
Over the past two years, Mr. Poilievre had made gains in this cohort, particularly among young men, in part because he offered change from the status quo, which many young Canadians feel isn’t working for them.
In fact, while Canadians over 50 have cited the continuing trade war as the top issue facing the country, those under 50 have been just as likely to point to other issues, such as the cost of living, as their top concern. Similarly, just as in the United States, there’s a gender gap, with men much more likely than women to back the Conservatives.
But these gaps are shrinking in almost every group, according to Angus Reid.
Support among men is now nearly evenly split, in the latest poll, with 44 percent of men saying they plan to vote Conservative compared with 42 percent who say they plan to vote Liberal.
Only one age-gender group — men aged 35 to 54 — in the latest poll had a plurality that clearly preferred the Conservative Party, but that gap has also narrowed.
