OTTAWA — A new poll from the Angus Reid Institute suggests a growing number of Conservative voters want to replace Pierre Poilievre as the party’s leader, even though he still has the backing of a majority of party supporters.
The poll surveyed 1,646 Canadians, including 590 who voted Conservative in last year’s election.
Among the Tory voters polled, 57 per cent said Poilievre should stay on as leader into the next election, down from 68 per cent last August.
Another 30 per cent said Poilievre should be replaced — almost double the 18 per cent who said they believed the party needed a new leader in August, when he was running in a byelection to earn a new seat in the House of Commons after losing his old riding in April’s election.
Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, said the poll is “a tale of two data sets.”
Poilievre still has the support of a majority of Conservative voters, she said, but the numbers are trending in a negative direction for him.
Sam Lilly, Poilievre’s director of media relations, said in a media statement that a “record number” of Conservatives backed his continued leadership during a mandatory review at the party’s convention in January.
“Conservatives led by Pierre forced the Liberals to scrap their suffocating carbon tax and deliver some relief at the pumps and in grocery stores and will continue to fight for results while calling out the Carney Liberals’ illusions,” Lilly said.
The leadership vote came after two Conservatives had crossed the floor to the Liberals but just before most national polls started to show the Liberals pulling significantly ahead of the Conservatives.
Angus Reid’d poll was conducted in mid-April, less than a week after Sarnia MP Marilyn Gladu became the fourth Conservative MP to join the Liberals and just days after the governing party won three byelections, officially securing a majority of seats in the House of Commons. Most national polls now show the Liberals with a double-digit lead over the Conservatives.
That poll suggests most Conservative voters blame the floor crossers for Carney’s majority — 69 per cent of the Conservative supporters polled said they felt the floor crossers were “cynically looking for more job security.”
Among all survey respondents, 45 per cent said they felt a major factor in the defections was Poilievre pushing people away from his party.
Poilievre has tried to shift his approach in recent months.
The Conservatives launched ads in early April on TV and radio, including one that pulls from a speech he made in Toronto last month about Canada-U.S. relations.
Poilievre made his first two international trips this winter, travelling to the U.K., Germany and the U.S., after being criticized for having little to say about foreign policy and for failing to focus on the American trade war during the campaign last year.
He gave more interviews, including a nearly two-and-a-half hour conversation with Joe Rogan and a long-form interview with a popular podcast called “The Diary of a CEO,” in which he talked about his family and the challenges of raising a daughter with autism.
In a media release, the Conservatives said the ads and travel offer “a more complete picture of his leadership and underscores that he has a plan and is ready to serve as prime minister.”
Still, 60 per cent of those polled by Angus Reid say they have an unfavourable view of Poilievre.
“He was never able to crack the code with female voters who continue to, as I sometimes say, have ‘the ick’ for him,” Kurl said.
She said the fact that 30 per cent of Conservative supporters want a new leader “isn’t terminal” on its own, “but what it does is it opens up the space for others who if they do have ambitions to replace him, it gives them some room to start manoeuvring.”
No one inside the caucus is talking openly about replacing Poilievre.
The Tory caucus voted last spring to give itself the power to force the leader out. Signatures from 20 per cent of caucus members would force a secret ballot vote on his leadership.
If a majority of the caucus votes against the leader, the leader would be removed and another secret ballot vote would be held to elect an interim leader.
Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, argued the Conservatives are in a holding pattern.
He said no one wants to be the person to run against Carney, at least not before the “honeymoon” ends. The next election does not have to be held until 2029 and Béland pointed out a lot can happen in three years.
“It’s not just about whether Mark Carney stays popular or not. In a way, it’s about what’s happening in terms of Canada-U.S. relations and global politics because these things have helped Mark Carney,” he said.
Ginny Roth, a partner at Crestview Strategies, said Poilievre and the party should take this time to rebuild and re-engage with the voters he has brought into the party.
“I saw this week that he went to a UFC match and he was on a shop floor in Winnipeg the next day,” she said.
“That’s exactly what I want to see more of, frankly — less time in Parliament and more time out engaging with those people who still really want change.”
The Angus Reid poll was conducted online between April 15 and 17.
The Canadian Research Insights Council, an industry organization that promotes polling standards, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
Sarah Ritchie, The Canadian Press
