New polling numbers from EKOS show the Conservative party’s popularity has dropped ten points overall since the 2011 spring election.

The random Interactive Voice Response poll, conducted from February 1st to 10th, asked 5,947 Canadians which federal party would get their vote and shows only 29.3 per cent of Canadians chose the Conservatives. That only puts Canada’s governing party three points ahead of the New Democrats, who came in at 26.3 per cent.

Both the Conservatives and NDP have lost popularity since the 2011 election, when they garnered 39.6 and 30.6 per cent of the vote, respectively.

Frank Graves, president of EKOS, told iPolitics that while the numbers don’t “tell you what would happen in the next election,” they do hint “that the government now is in a much more tenuous position with the electorate than it was at the time it gained its majority.”

The Conservative decline is significant, Graves said.

“Ten points down is a big deal. A sub-30 majority government, you’d have to go back to 1990 or that period to find another majority government that was operating below 30 points, and in that case it was Mulroney’s second term,” he said.

The numbers were not quite so bleak when EKOS examined only likely voters. Among them, the Conservatives still garnered 33.7 per cent approval, with the NDP sitting slightly behind at 30.1 per cent.

Still, while the Conservatives might not be in for the kind of electoral disaster that befell the Mulroney government, Graves said there are hints of exhaustion in the electorate.

That, he said, is more apparent when the decline for the Conservatives is coupled with what EKOS discovered about how Canadians think the government is doing. A full 51.2 per cent of those polled feel the government is moving in the wrong direction, as opposed to 35.4 per cent who feel it’s moving in the right one.

Overall, too, 44.9 per cent of Canadians feel the country as a whole is moving in the wrong direction, as opposed to 42.9 per cent who think its going the right way. At the same time, levels of economic optimism are at historical lows as well. Only 39 per cent of Canadians think that over the next five years, their personal financial situation will be better than it is today.

“It’s not just what people say about vote intention,” Graves said. “There’s a steady grind on the government when its citizens continue to feel increasingly gloomy about their long-term economic future. That weighs heavily after a while.”

At the same time, EKOS also found the Liberals are faring better now than they were after the last election, sitting currently at 24.6 per cent approval – up from 18.9 per cent in May 2011. That number falls back slightly to 21.2 per cent when only likely voters were polled.

That tight clustering of the three main parties and the apparent upward momentum of the Trudeau campaign for leadership of the Liberals has been to “ignite the fancies of discouraged… supporters,” EKOS states in its poll report. “But is this more apparent than real? It wasn’t that long ago that the Michael Ignatieff led Liberal party seemed poised to recapture power. And we all recall how that turned out.”