A new poll suggests one third of Canadian voters think federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair should step aside as leader.
The Forum Research poll, which reached 1,455 voters across Canada on Monday and Tuesday, found that 32 per cent of respondents agree Mulcair should step down as leader, while 36 per cent said they think he should stay on and 32 per cent said they did not know.
Mulcair will face a leadership review vote by party members during the party’s annual convention in Edmonton on Friday.
He has not said what level of support he wants to receive in order to stay on, but some have said it would be difficult for him to retain the post with less than 70 per cent support from the rank and file.
The poll also found that even among committed NDP supporters, 22 per cent said they think Mulcair should no longer be leader, while 56 per cent said they disagree and 22 per cent said they had no opinion.
“Just more than half of the party supporting your leadership is hardly the ringing endorsement Tom Mulcair needs to win at the convention on April 8,” Forum Research President Lorne Bozinoff said in a news release.
Last October, Mulcair saw the party’s seat share fall by more than half, from 95 to 44 seats, and its vote share fall by more than one million votes, during the federal election.
But early on in the election campaign, numerous polls heralded Mulcair as the frontrunner.
Support for Mulcair to remain leader is strongest in Quebec, where 51 per cent of poll respondents say they’d like Mulcair to stay.
In Ontario, 33 per cent of respondents said they want Mulcair to stay, while 37 per cent said they want him to step down, and 30 per cent said they did not know.
More than 40 per cent of respondents in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Atlantic Canada said they wanted Mulcair to step down.
The poll used interactive robocall and has a margin of error of +/- 3 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
