After years of maintaining a consistent but mediocre lead over the Liberals, this summer has suddenly yielded a string of polls showing that the Conservative party could be on track for a commanding majority in the next federal election.
Recent polls from Leger, Nanos and Abacus Data show the Conservatives with a nearly double-digit lead over the Liberals. A July Leger poll, for instance, had 37 per cent of respondents backing the Tories against 28 per cent supporting the Liberals.
When these numbers are plugged into a riding-by-riding projection of seat counts, they show a solid chance of a Conservative victory in the next federal election, if not an outright majority.
The latest seat projections by the polling website 338Canada have the Conservatives capturing 165 seats against just 115 for the Liberals.
While 165 is still five seats short of the 170 needed to form a majority, a 165-seat caucus would still be large enough to defeat any new attempts at a Liberal-NDP coalition. With the NDP only expected to capture 22 seats, a combined Liberal-NDP caucus would come to just 137.
If Conservative fortunes continue to improve, they could well be on course for a record-breaking triumph by October 2025, the absolute latest a federal election could be called.
Although, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is still falling well short of the numbers that were showing themselves the last time the Tories stood on the eve of a blowout landslide.
In 1983, just after Brian Mulroney took the helm of the Progressive Conservatives, his party boasted an incredible 55 per cent share of voter support against 27 per cent for the Liberals, which were then still led by Pierre Trudeau. A year later, these poll numbers manifested in Mulroney capturing what is still one of the biggest landslides in Canadian history, with Mulroney winning 211 seats to the Liberals’ 40.
The Conservatives have been besting the Liberals in the popular vote intention for a significant portion of Justin Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister.
As early as the spring of 2018 — just two-and-a-half years after Trudeau’s swearing-in — polls began to regularly show Canadians favouring the Conservatives over the Liberals.
In March 2018, in the wake of Trudeau’s much-criticized official visit to India, an Angus Reid Institute survey found that 40 per cent of respondents wanted a Conservative government, against just 31 per cent who wanted to stick with a Liberal one.
“If an election were held tomorrow, the CPC — led by Andrew Scheer, would be in range to form a majority government,” they wrote at the time.
The last two federal elections, in fact, featured more ballots going for the Tories than for the Liberals, even though Scheer, and Poilievre’s predecessor Erin O’Toole, lost the elections. In 2019, the Tories received 6.3 million votes to six million for the Liberals. In 2021, it was 5.7 million Conservative votes against 5.5 million Liberal.
But the Liberals continued to dominate seat counts by virtue of what their strategists call “vote efficiency”: Focusing on ridings with neat three-way ties in which a seat can be captured with a plurality of less than 40 per cent. The current minister of employment, workforce development and official languages, for instance, represents a riding he captured with barely one-third of the popular vote; Randy Boissonnault won Edmonton Centre in 2021 with just 33.7 per cent.
While Conservative sentiment has been on the upswing for years, it’s mostly occurred in regions that were already committed to voting Tory.
The extremely Conservative riding of Banff-Airdrie, for instance, managed to marshal 13,000 extra Tory voters in 2019 than they did in 2015. But since the riding was already held by a Conservative MP, it had no effect on the parliamentary balance of power. In that same election, meanwhile, the Liberals captured more than a dozen seats by margins of fewer than 1,000 votes.
What’s changed in recent months is that the Tories are starting to break through in regions outside Canada’s usual Conservative heartland.
Abacus Data, for one, now has the Conservatives leading the Liberals in both Ontario and Atlantic Canada. And while Quebec hasn’t gone Tory, they have abandoned the Liberals in droves for the Bloc Québécois.
As Abacus’ David Coletto noted on Monday, the Trudeau government could now expect only two out of three of their 2021 voter base to once again cast a vote for the Liberals.
As for the voters suddenly flocking to the Conservatives, Coletto noted that the single largest bloc of voters going Tory were Canadians who hadn’t bothered to vote in previous elections. Considering that voter turnout was a mere 62 per cent in 2021, it’s a particularly rich demographic to be pulling from.
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