OTTAWA—The Conservatives have been warned they’re losing the edge with Canadians on issues like the economy and support for the party is in marked decline.

The findings of a national survey conducted in December for the Manning Centre should be alarming for Conservatives, pollster André Turcotte told a room of party activists Friday.

“For the first time, Liberals have re-emerged as the party that a plurality of Canadians identify with,” Turcotte told the audience, who sat rather glumly as he delivered his surprising and depressing news to them.

“Now the Liberals and the Conservatives are tied almost as the party perceived to be the best to deal with the economy. This is a big change from previous years.”

Turcotte said his survey asked people to say which party they most identified with, regardless of their voting intentions, and 31 per cent of Canadians identified with the Liberals, 26 per cent with the Conservatives, 18 per cent with the NDP, and six per cent with the Green party. Another five per cent said “none” and nine per cent said they didn’t know which party they identify with.

Audience members challenged Turcotte, with one asking him if he polled before Trudeau began making his verbal gaffes.

Turcotte said the shift in attitudes is a trend that actually began to show up two years ago, has now taken hold, and cannot be attributed simply to “the Trudeau effect” with the election last spring of Justin Trudeau as the new federal Liberal party leader.

In Ontario, people who identified with the Conservative party dropped by 10 percentage points, from 35 to 25 per cent.

Asked why, Turcotte said “it’s been a bad year” for the Conservative brand, alluding to municipal and federal problems such as the Senate spending scandal.

But just as he declined to credit Justin Trudeau with the Liberal surge, he refused to put Conservative decline on the shoulders of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, saying only that “Conservatives have failed to capitalize on the opportunity of being in power” to persuade more beyond the Conservative base to embrace the party’s brand.

Turcotte, who’s been doing this “barometer” of conservative fates for five years, says that Conservatives have long been used to being seen as the sole, good stewards of the economy — but things have changed in the past year in a significant way. “Control over that particular issue has been lost to the Liberals,” he said.

Health care is the second-most important issue, his poll found, right after the economy, but on that issue, Conservatives were third behind the Liberals and even the NDP in the public’s judgment on who was best placed to handle it.

On unemployment and poverty, Conservatives rated poorly, too.

Turcotte’s polling also gave him a glimpse into the type of people deserting the Conservatives — the 16 per cent, he called it.

For the most part, this 16 per cent is made up of male voters, between the ages of 45 and 64, university-educated and most likely to live in Ontario.

“They are concerned with health care, lower taxes, aging population, more accountability and full disclosure of spending of public funds,” he said. “These are the people who at this point should be in the tent, should be supporting the Conservative party, but are not for some reason.”

He told reporters later that crime wasn’t an issue he probed in any depth, as it largely shows up only as a concern for the Conservatives’ base. He said it does not broaden support. He added the Conservative party should not bother focusing so much energy and attention on Justin Trudeau’s musings about legalizing marijuana as it is not an issue of concern for people.

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Several people here, such as former Harper campaign director Tom Flanagan, believe Trudeau is the biggest political problem for the Conservatives now, and that his gaffes and the attacks against him are not hurting him politically.

(Turcotte conducted 1,000 on-line interviews as well as what he called an “oversample of 500 self-defined Conservatives.” The survey was done Dec 16-18, and the margin of error for a representative sample of this size is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.)

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