Premier Doug Ford is discounting public-opinion polls suggesting he is unpopular because some of those surveys appear in the Toronto Star.

Ford — who has been booed at the Raptors’ victory celebration, the Special Olympics launch, and the Toronto Caribbean Carnival, among other events — insisted Thursday that Ontarians are behind him.

“I can tell you one thing, everywhere I’m going, right across this province, people are saying the same message: keep going,” he told reporters in the Niagara community of Fonthill.

Asked about recent polls indicating his personal popularity has plummeted a year after he was elected, Ford bristled.

“Well, it’s the Toronto Star’s numbers. I don’t believe … Star readership polls. I worry about the ones at election day,” the premier said.

Veteran pollster John Corbett, whose Corbett Communications tracking polls appear monthly in the Star, said the firm “stands behind its methodology.”

“He appears to be confusing the online panel we use with the reader polls you run on your website,” he said, referring to the unscientific straw polls on many news websites, including thestar.com

Like several other polling companies, Corbett uses Maru/Blue’s Maru Voice Canada opt-in online panel for its polls.

“The Maru/Blue panel is the best in Canada right now, which is why so many firms use it,” he said, noting some of the Conservatives’ own internal party research uses the same panel.

“That aside, we’re not the only firm that is seeing similar results,” said Corbett, adding Pollara Strategic Insights, Mainstreet Research, Ipsos, and Innovative Research Group have each found similar results using differing methodologies.

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“Everyone knows he’s been getting booed in public. He knows he’s getting booed in public.”

When the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger joked at the band’s Canada Day weekend concert near Barrie that “for the next 15 minutes it’s a buck-a-beer courtesy of Doug Ford,” there were boos from the massive throng. The premier was not in attendance.

As the Star revealed Wednesday, Ford has been blaming his poor polling numbers on the Star in conversations this summer.

At a closed event in the Windsor area last week, he told local Tory activists that blame for the dismal results lay with the newspaper and its pollster.

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But privately, senior Conservative officials admit their own private polling, which they would not release, echoes the findings in the Corbett surveys.

That’s one reason why federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s campaign team wants Ford to go to ground this summer.

They fear the unpopular Tory premier will hinder their bid to unseat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in the Oct. 21 election.

Federal Conservative candidates have complained that Ford’s cronyism scandal, his problems with autism funding, and looming education challenges keep being raised as issues on doorsteps.

In last month’s Corbett Communications poll, 60 per cent of respondents said they would be “less likely” to vote for Scheer’s candidates because of the premier’s policies.

That’s up from 54 per cent in Corbett’s June tracking poll.

Ford’s personal approval rating is also low. In July, 20 per cent approved of the job he is doing while 69 per cent disapproved and 11 per cent had no opinion.

Several Tory MPPs have confided to the Star that they are also getting an earful about the premier from their constituents on the summer barbecue circuit.

“If this continues, I could be out of a job (after the 2022 election),” one worried PC member from the Greater Toronto Area confided Wednesday.

“That’s why caucus is getting nervous.”

Another GTA MPP echoed that.

“Look, if his polling stays the same we’re toast,” the member said earlier this week.

Robert Benzie is the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

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