VANCOUVER—Six months out from the fall election, Canadians are abandoning their support of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ruling party leaving Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives ahead in the polls for every province, with the exception of Quebec.

Still, Canadians aren’t so much embracing the Conservatives but instead deserting the Liberal party in droves, according to a new Angus Reid Institute poll.

That’s a benefit to other parties — including the New Democrats, Green Party and the newly-minted People’s Party of Canada — who are seeing their fortunes rise as the governing party falls out of public favour.

“The Liberals are just seeing quicksand. The floor is no longer stable,” said Shachi Kurl, Angus Reid executive director. “Trudeaumania was very, very real but Canadian voters are no longer feeling very manic.”

In 2015, “Trudeaumania” convinced first-time voters, youth and non-regular voters to come out and cast a ballot. But it’s unclear whether the party will be able to retain that youth base this time around.

Kurl pointed to Pierre Trudeau’s rise to power in the late 1960s noting he enjoyed “Trudeaumania” before ending his last term as prime minister in 1984 as a polarizing politician.

And if an election were held tomorrow, it is unlikely the Liberals would hold onto a majority: Fewer than 60 per cent of 2015 Liberals would vote for the party again.

In contrast, the Conservatives are holding 90 per cent of their 2015 base. Levels of Conservative support remain essentially unchanged from last month — where they captured 37 per cent of the decided and leaning vote.

Noting the Liberal Party’s relatively low retention of 2015 supporters, Kurl said it’s interesting to see where those voters are going. As the party bleeds votes, one in eight 2015 Liberals say they would support the Conservatives; one in 10 say the same of the NDP. Kurl added a handful have drifted to the Greens, while a significant portion remain undecided.

Demographics are a huge driver of partisanship: Men and older Canadians slant Conservative, while women and younger voters stick with the Liberals or other left-of-centre parties.

Meanwhile, nearly half of all Canadians said they “strongly disapprove” of Trudeau in comparison to less than 10 per cent who “strongly approve.”

“We’ve seen those stratospheric approval numbers that were in the 60s come down to the 30s over the last three years,” Kurl said. “Trudeau’s personal star is dimming. Not just the campaign, the party, the government, an entire international brand is built around a single person.”

That’s where the Liberals are running into “massive” trouble across the country, she added.

Now, Canadians have a more favourable view of Scheer (44 per cent) and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh (39 per cent) than Trudeau (36 per cent). And while the Liberals lead by a wide margin in the city of Toronto, they are neck-and-neck with the NDP in the city of Vancouver, and trailing in the rest of B.C. and Ontario.

In B.C. — where the NDP and Greens support is strongest — Scheer’s Conservatives hold a wide lead over the Liberals. The survey noted this likely helped to split left-of-centre respondents. Meanwhile, the Conservative party is leading by wide margins in Prairie provinces and by smaller four-point margins in Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

Quebec, the one outlier, is seeing a four-way split in support between the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP and Greens.

Still, a lot can change during election campaigns. For instance, in 2015, each of the three main parties held the lead in Angus Reid Institute polling between the time the writ dropped and election day.

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Kurl said there is enough time and space for the Liberals to bounce back and coalesce the left-of-centre vote.

And it doesn’t mean that Trudeau should step down, she argued. Instead, it would require a pivot to focus less on the man and instead, more on the party, its policies and mission.

“We’ve seen leaders do this in the past,” Kurl said, pointing to Jean Chretien’s 1993 campaign which was fraught with leadership critiques. “So what did the Liberal party do? They effectively built a team. It wasn’t Team Chrétien, it was Team Liberal.”

Kurl said Trudeau can do the same thing. But, there isn’t evidence of that — yet.

“The vote bleed, where it is going, and just how devastating it is for the Liberals today as people abandon the party based on a visceral reaction to Justin Trudeau says to me that the Liberals maybe need to take the weekend and go have a very deep think about what’s next,” Kurl said.

Poll results were based on an online survey conducted from March 11-25 among a randomized sample of 5,807 Canadian adults who are members of the Angus Reid Forum. It carried a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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