Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fit of temper and flying elbow last month did no damage to his buoyant popularity across Canada, but the NDP might be in danger of disappearing, according to a new poll conducted by Forum Research Inc.

With the backing of just 10 per cent of Canadians, which would cut the NDP to nine seats and cost them official party status, and with an unpopular interim leader in Thomas Mulcair doing his party no good by hanging around until a successor is chosen, they “run the risk of becoming a marginal party in some of their strongest garrisons,” said Forum president Lorne Bozinoff.

“A party that can’t break double digits in the popular vote or in seats in Parliament is in dire need of refreshing, or winding up,” he said.

The poll found that among those who voted NDP in the 2015 election, as many as four in 10 say they will now vote Liberal. In Quebec, where gains in 2011 vaulted the NDP into official Opposition status and on which its hopes of forming government were based, only 9 per cent of those surveyed now support the party.

The survey, taken since Trudeau’s flying elbow incident in the House of Commons, said half of Canadians (49 per cent) would vote Liberal if an election were held today, and the PM himself retains the approval of more than half the electorate (57 per cent).

The levels of approval are exactly the same as those noted in May, Bozinoff said, “before he supposedly squandered his goodwill in the scuffle which has become known as ‘Elbowgate’.”

It occurred May 18 when the prime minister strode purposefully across the Commons floor and grabbed a Conservative whip to pull him through a throng of New Democrats for a procedural vote on the government’s controversial assisted-dying legislation. In the process, with Trudeau also allegedly spewing profanity, he inadvertently elbowed New Democrat MP Ruth-Ellen Brosseau in the breast and generated howls of indignation from the NDP benches.

Given the global attention Trudeau has enjoyed in his first months in power, the Elbowgate episode quickly made international headlines. Trudeau repeatedly and profusely apologized.

“That intervention was not appropriate,” he said. “It is not my role and it should not have happened.”

Even so, his ill-considered intervention had pundits predicting that, after a remarkable honeymoon, Trudeau’s bubble was about to burst. They were wrong.

In fact, 68 per cent of those surveyed by Forum view Trudeau more favourably or as favourably as they did at the time of his federal election victory in October last year.

The Liberals continue to dominate in all regions of the country except Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the poll found.

With the support they enjoy, the Liberals would take a super-majority of 230 Commons seats if an election were held now, Forum said.

The opposition Conservatives were supported by 32 per cent of those surveyed, which would produce about 98 seats. And Interim Tory Leader Rona Ambrose saw her personal approval rise slightly since May.

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“What we are seeing here, in the middle of relative stasis for the two leading parties, is the slow evisceration of the NDP,” said Bozinoff.

The Forum Research Inc. poll was based on an interactive voice response telephone survey of 2,271 randomly selected Canadians 18 or older. It was conducted on June 7, 2016. Results based on the total sample are considered accurate to within two percentage points, 19 times in 20.

Where appropriate, the data has been statistically weighted by age, region, and other variables to ensure that the sample reflects the actual population according to the latest Census data. Forum houses its poll results in the Data Library of the University of Toronto political science department.

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