OTTAWA—A new poll says Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives are leading in support among decided and leaning voters as the SNC-Lavalin controversy continues to buffet Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government.

The automated telephone survey by Forum Research found that 42 per cent of decided and leaning voters would support the Conservative Party in a federal election. The Liberals followed with 33 per cent of respondents indicating they would support the party, while 12 per cent said they intend or would likely vote for the New Democratic Party.

The survey was conducted Feb. 27 and 28 and included 1,301 randomly selected Canadian voters. It has a margin of error of three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

“When you look at our polling numbers, we still have the Tories ahead basically,” said Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff, whose firm’s polls have put the Conservatives ahead since Sept. 2017.

A majority of respondents to the latest poll—60 per cent—also indicated they disapprove of the job Trudeau is doing as prime minister, versus 30 per cent who approve of his job performance and 10 per cent who said they don’t know. Thirty per cent of respondents approved of Trudeau’s job performance, compared with 34 per cent for Scheer as leader of the opposition.

“This is bad but it’s not terrible,” said Bozinoff.

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The poll was conducted on the day and day after Jody Wilson-Raybould testified at the House of Commons justice committee. The former attorney general detailed what she said was a months-long campaign of pressure by the prime minister, the clerk of the privy council and high-ranking staff from Trudeau’s office to convince Wilson-Raybould to overrule Canada’s director of public prosecutions and agree to a plea deal—called a deferred prosecution agreement—with the Montreal-based global engineering firm SNC-Lavalin.

Such a deal would allow the company to admit wrongdoing in the face of fraud and corruption charges relating to operations in Libya when the dictator Moammar Gadhafi was in power. Instead of a criminal conviction that could bar SNC-Lavalin from federal contracts for 10 years, the company would pay a fine and agree to a series of compliance measures.

Trudeau and Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick have acknowledged the government’s concern for the jobs of almost 9,000 Canadians employed by SNC-Lavalin, as well as the company’s warning that it could be forced to relocate to another country in the event of a conviction. But the prime minister has denied he or anyone in his office did anything inappropriate in discussing the SNC-Lavalin case with Wilson-Raybould when she was attorney general.

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On Monday, Trudeau acknowledged “more questions need to be answered” after Jane Philpott, a prominent MP who held several key portfolios in the Liberal cabinet, resigned as president of the treasury board. In a public letter, Philpott echoed Wilson-Raybould’s concerns about public prosecutions being free from partisan influence, and said she lost confidence in the government over its handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts, who resigned despite denying that any inappropriate pressure had been brought to bear on Wilson-Raybould, is set to testifying at the justice committee on Wednesday morning.

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