Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals continue to command the support of half of Canadians, according to a new poll that projects the party would win 80 per cent of the seats if an election were held today.

Long after a governing party’s honeymoon with voters would have traditionally ended, the Forum Research survey of 1,429 people instead found the Grits are buoyant with 52 per cent of respondents, saying they would vote Liberal compared to 28 per cent for the Conservatives and 11 per cent for the NDP.

Part of the Liberal support can be attributed to the fact that the Conservative Party is without a permanent leader and NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is slated to resign from politics once his party selects a replacement. The other part is due to a bona fide connection Trudeau’s party seems to be making with the public as Parliament breaks for the summer months.

“This is a honeymoon that doesn’t seem to show any signs of abating,” said Lorne Bozinoff, president of Forum Research.

Trudeau’s Liberals had a tough fight in the House of Commons pushing controversial euthanasia legislation into law, which might have been expected to take some of the lustre from the governing party. But Trudeau has also been lauded for being the first Canadian prime minister to march in Toronto’s Pride parade while also revelling by U.S. President Barack Obama’s side during a recent visit to Ottawa.

Just like last fall’s federal election, the gains in Liberal support appears to be coming almost entirely at the expense of the New Democrats, Bozinoff said.

“The Tories are fairly unaffected by this Trudeaumania,” he said.

Forum’s seat-projection formula based on the polling numbers suggests that the Liberals would win 278 of the Commons’ 338 seats if a vote were held today. The Conservatives would win 55 seats while the NDP would be reduced to five seats and lose official party status. The Bloc Québécois and the Greens would be shut out under the seat-projection model.

That is a significant shakeup since last October, when voters gave the Liberals 184 seats, the Conservatives 99 seats and 44 for the NDP. The sovereigntist Bloc Québécois elected 10 members of Parliament while the Green Party succeeded only in getting its leader, Elizabeth May, re-elected.

“I think the Tories have got to be thinking that with these high numbers, they might be in opposition for a long time,” Bozinoff said.

Meanwhile, he said the NDP need to start asking tough, strategic questions about its raison d’être — whether and how to compete in future elections or whether to be content itself with being the social conscience of Parliament — as it turns to picking a new leader.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The Forum Research Inc. poll was based on an interactive voice response telephone survey of 2,271 randomly selected Canadians 18 or older.

The poll was conducted on July 5, 2016. Results based on the total sample are considered accurate to within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Where appropriate, the data has been statistically weighted by age, region, and other variables to ensure that the sample reflects the actual population according to the latest Census data.

Forum houses its poll results in the Data Library of the University of Toronto political science department.

Read more about: