Polls suggest Poilievre is losing edge on affordability.
It wasn’t so long ago that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had shot to the top of the polls by promising to make life more affordable for everyday Canadians. But two recent surveys suggest he’s losing his edge on all-important pocketbook issues, just as the campaign kicks in to full gear.
A Leger/National Post poll released shortly before Sunday’s election call showed Poilievre trailing Liberal Leader Mark Carney by five points on the question of who’d do a better job of making life more affordable for everyday Canadians.
Andrew Enns, Leger’s executive vice-president for Central Canada, told the National Post that Carney’s decision to cut the consumer carbon tax to zero per cent has helped him to close the gap.
“The Liberals are probably getting a boost from Carney cancelling the carbon tax as his first order of business,” said Enns.
“I gather Canadians are going to see a fairly significant drop in the price of gasoline at the pump come Tuesday (Apr. 1) and Mr. Carney will get some credit for that happening under his watch.”
The Leger poll showed Poilievre leading Carney on just two of eight key issues, with voters saying he’d do the best job of strengthening Canada’s armed forces and managing the federal budget.
(The firm’s monthly opinion poll was conducted, on this occasion, between March 14 and 16 using a sample of 1,599 adults recruited from a Leger-founded panel. Online polls are not proper representative samples and thus don’t carry a margin of error. However, the poll document provides an estimated margin, for comparison purposes, of plus-or-minus 2.45 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)
Leger found in a separate week one federal election report, released Monday, that inflation is the top issue of the campaign for one in five Canadians, putting it second behind U.S. aggression and tariffs, which 32 per cent said was the election’s biggest issue.
nationalpost.com |
