OT
"Tories steady in polls despite income trust uproar"
Norma Greenaway, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, November 04, 2006
OTTAWA -- Public support for the Harper government is holding at the strength it scored on election day nine months ago, despite the political storm this week over its flip-flop on taxing income trusts, a new poll has found.
Indeed, the national survey by Ipsos-Reid conducted for CanWest News Service paints a picture of an electorate that is virtually unmoved since voters gave Stephen Harper's Conservatives a slim minority last January.
If an election were held today, the Conservatives would garner 37 per cent of the vote, up one point from the election. The Liberals would score 29 per cent, down one point, and the New Democratic Party would get 19 per cent, up two points.
The Bloc Quebecois would get nine per cent, down two points, and the Green party five per cent, exactly the same percentage as on voting day.
In Quebec, the Bloc stood at 38 per cent, down five points from the last poll in August, whereas Tory support was almost unchanged at 21 per cent, and the Liberals were down three points to 19 per cent.
"It (the survey) shows there is a lot of sound and fury out there about a number of issues," said pollster Darrell Bricker. "But it doesn't really seem to have percolated down into affecting partisan choice."
The survey, conducted amid the furor over Tuesday's surprise tax announcement, suggests Canadians are not rushing to punish the government. "It's a fairly elite issue," Bricker, president of Ipsos-Reid, said in an interview. "This is a stock market story. People know markets go up and down."
Given the massive coverage of Harper's reversal in income trusts, anger over the issue would have shown up in the survey if it were there, he argued.
Bricker said polling over the years has shown "stock market stories" have very little impact on how Canadians view political parties, or the health of the economy.
In this case, he said, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty managed to cushion the impact by balancing the new taxes on income trusts with significant new tax breaks for seniors.
The poll of 1,002 adults was conducted Tuesday through Thursday. In a sample this size, the margin of error is 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
In other findings, it said a slim majority, 54 per cent, agreed with the statement that "Canada is better off today than it was one year ago." Fifteen per cent of those surveyed agreed strongly with the statement.
Those living in Ontario (51 per cent) and Quebec (43 per cent) were less supportive of the statement than their counterparts elsewhere.
Despite the relatively upbeat mood, the findings show the Conservatives are still not in majority territory, and the Liberals, despite being leaderless, are still in the game.
"We've locked ourselves into this kind of minority scenario," Bricker said. "The good news for the Liberals is that they haven't dropped off the face of the planet. And the bad news for the Tories is that they haven't been able to break out of this."
Bricker predicted that once the Liberals have a leader on December, voters will start waking up and looking more seriously at the federal political choices.
Ottawa Citizen
© CanWest News Service 2006 |
