MONTREAL—Quebec Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard headed into Thursday night’s election debate with wind in his sails, a surging approval rating and the potential to form a majority government in Quebec, according to a new poll.

The Forum Research poll for the Toronto Star, which was conducted Wednesday, is in line with a string of surveys this week showing that the federalist Liberals are pulling out ahead of the incumbent Parti Québécois after a rocky campaign launch that was dominated by unpopular talk of a third referendum on Quebec independence.

Of the 1,650 respondents, 45 per cent said they intended to vote for the provincial Liberals compared to just 32 per cent for Pauline Marois’ PQ.

The Coalition Avenir Québec was in a distant third place with 13 per cent of the potential voters and the left-wing sovereigntist part Québec Solidaire garnered 7 per cent support. The results are considered accurate to within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

When the pollster translated the voting intentions into potential seats in the Quebec legislature, it projected the Liberals could win 78 of the province’s 125 ridings when the votes are counted on April 7. The sovereigntist PQ, which had 54 seats when Marois called the election earlier this month, would win only 43 ridings. The poll projects that the CAQ and Québec Solidaire would win just two seats each on election day.

“The Liberals are in a very promising position, aided immeasurably by missteps made by the PQ, including, it appears, recruiting Pierre Karl Péladeau,” Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff said in a written analysis of the poll results.

Péladeau, former president of the Quebecor media empire, was announced as a PQ candidate in the first week of the campaign and his passionate appeal for independence from Canada turned the PQ campaign strategy on its head.

Instead of talking about policy, her 18-month record in power or the popular, but divisive, charter of values, Marois spent days musing about the contours of an independent Quebec, suggesting it would continue to use Canadian currency and passports, and have open borders with the rest of Canada, operating much like the European Union.

With Quebecers’ attention so tightly focused on an issue that, according to the Forum Research poll, only one-third of respondents support, the tides started shifting in the Liberal party’s favour.

Couillard’s approval rating has jumped 10 points since March 5, to 44 per cent from 34 per cent. Only CAQ Leader François Legault had a more impressive jump, with his personal approval numbers rising to 48 per cent from 32 per cent earlier this month.

Like most pollsters, Forum uses a proprietary weighting formula, which has been shared with the Star, to more accurately reflect the broader electorate. Raw data from this poll will be housed in the Political Science Data Library at the University of Toronto.

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