The Conservatives and Liberals continue their see-saw battle for top spot in this week’s polling. The Liberals are now at their lowest point since July 2013 — but they’re only slightly off their average showing over the past few months and they’re just two points shy of the lead.

Regionally, the results are quite stable. While there have been movements in Canada’s smaller provinces, the shifts are not statistically significant due to the small sample sizes. The Liberals lead in the Atlantic Provinces and are statistically tied with the Conservatives in Ontario. The Conservatives utterly dominate the Prairies, except for Manitoba where the Liberals are showing signs of life. Quebec and British Columbia are still very much anyone’s game, with four parties vying for control in each province.

The Conservatives still lead with men, although they continue to struggle with women. The Conservatives do very well with seniors, while the Liberals do comparatively better with baby boomers. The Conservatives continue to lead with the high school and college-educated cohorts, while university graduates still lean Liberal.

On the anti-Islamic State coalition mission in Iraq, the government remains clearly in tune with the public. Most Canadians support the mission in its current form — and there is evidence that support is growing. There’s also clear (although muted) support for extending the mission by an additional six months.

As with most military interventions, however, this support is not likely to last. The Afghanistan mission, for example, was greeted with widespread enthusiasm. By 2010, half of Canadians opposed the mission and there was little appetite for extending the mission any further. Last year, half of Canadians polled said the mission had been a failure.

Given the pattern we see developing, however, support for the Iraq mission isn’t likely to evaporate in the short-term and may very well hold through the next election. It’s surprising how strong public support has remained, given past experiences.

Bill C-51 is another area where Canadians approve of the direction of the federal government — but support is not nearly as unanimous as some have suggested. Awareness of the bill is quite high; fully 71 per cent of Canadians are at least vaguely familiar with the details.

Support is deeply divided along party lines. Liberal supporters are evenly split on the issue, while NDP and Green Party supporters are staunchly opposed to the bill. Bloc Québécois supporters are on board with the bill — likely a reflection of security and culture concerns, which have been particularly salient for Bloc voters lately.

Despite widespread support for the Iraq mission and broad public opposition to niqabs at citizenship ceremonies, the federal government’s preoccupation with culture and security issues is markedly out of tune with the priorities of Canadians.

While the government has been fixating on what women should wear to a citizenship ceremony, we’re now looking at our worst-ever poll numbers on personal economic outlooks. Just one in five Canadians believe they’ll be better off a year from now and just over one in four believe they’ll be better off in five years’ time. These figures decline sharply as we move down the socio-economic ladder.

Values and security are still important issues for Canadians; one in five rate security and terrorism as the most important issue. However, these issues are seen by voters as far less important than the problem of restarting middle class progress. And economic issues have displaced social issues as the leading concern over the past four months.

Finally, it’s worth noting that despite the worst personal economic outlook we’ve ever recorded, job confidence is at its highest levels in decades. How do we square this circle?

We first remarked upon this apparent paradox in January. Job growth over the past few years has largely been isolated to lousy, non-standard employment. Even good jobs are failing to produce progress or security. Therefore, job confidence does not carry the same meaning as it did before and there are acute concerns about declining job quality.

On the other hand, in an uncertain environment, people will ‘minimax’, to borrow a term from game theory. What’s the maximum loss Canadians want to minimize? The answer is the loss of job — even a crappy job. This desperation may be what’s driving some of the hidden incumbent premium we’ve been seeing in recent provincial elections and certainly warrants further study.

Frank Graves is founder and president of EKOS Polling.

Methodology:

This study was conducted using High Definition Interactive Voice Response (HD-IVR™) technology, which allows respondents to enter their preferences by punching the keypad on their phone, rather than telling them to an operator. In an effort to reduce the coverage bias of landline only RDD, we created a dual landline/cell phone RDD sampling frame for this research. As a result, we are able to reach those with a landline and cell phone, as well as cell phone only households and landline only households.

The field dates for this survey are March 4-10, 2015. A random sample of 2,950 Canadian adults aged 18 and over responded to the survey. The margin of error associated with the total sample is +/-1.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Please note that the margin of error increases when the results are sub-divided (i.e., error margins for sub-categories such as region, sex, age, education). All the data have been statistically weighted by age, gender, region, and educational attainment to ensure the sample’s composition reflects that of the actual population of Canada according to Census data.