The Conservative Party’s volley of attack ads against new Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau may have backfired, according to a new public opinion poll.

A poll conducted by EKOS between Wednesday and Friday of this week found that 84 per cent of respondents found the ads were negative and 71 per cent said the ads didn’t affect their view of Trudeau. Among those who said the ads did affect their view of the new Liberal leader, 16 per cent said it improved their view of him while only 9 per cent said it had the negative impact the Conservatives had intended.

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“There may be some more subtle, long-term objective at play but the overall reactions from a large representative sample of English-speaking voters suggests that the ads were seen as negative, unhelpful and unfair,” wrote pollster Frank Graves. “Viewers said that for the most part they had no impact and when they did, it was more likely to be helpful.

“Moreover, the global emotional impact on most viewers was very harsh. The ads appear to have done far more damage to the authors of the ads (the Conservative party) than the intended target.”

Among the phrases respondents used the most often to describe the ads were “disgusting,” “vicious,” “unfair,” “amusing” and “stupid.”

The poll comes less than a week after Trudeau’s landslide victory in the Liberal leadership race Sunday and less than five days after the Conservatives launched a barrage of attack ads suggesting that Trudeau is in over his head and not ready to be prime minister of Canada.

One of the ads, which features Trudeau doing a mock striptease down to his undershirt to help raise money for a Canadian Liver Foundation fundraiser, has been viewed more than 227,000 times on YouTube — while a second, which contrasts Trudeau with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has been viewed more than 87,000 times.

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The attack ads also have been spotted on various television networks.

The EKOS poll found that 35 per cent of those polled had seen the ads while another 35 to 39 per cent of respondents hadn’t seen the ads but had heard about them. The poll found 67 per cent of those who had seen the ads had seen them on television while 43 per cent had viewed them online.

“The ads were near universally seen as negative. Very high majorities found them unfair and unhelpful,” Graves wrote. “Only 5, 13 and 15 per cent saw them as positive, helpful or fair (respectively). Even among Conservative supporters, most saw them as negative and did not rate them as either fair or helpful in majority terms.”

Westerners were particularly likely to see the ads as negative. The poll found that 90 per cent of respondents in Manitoba saw them as negative, followed closely by 89.6 per cent of respondents in Saskatchewan and 89 per cent of British Columbians.

The regions least critical of the ads were Alberta, where 79.4 per cent of respondents said they were negative, followed by Quebec and Atlantic Canada where 81 per cent of respondents said the ads were negative.

Only 67 per cent of Conservative voters felt the ads were negative while Liberal voters were at the other end of the spectrum at 93 per cent.

There was also a gulf between Conservative and Liberal voters when asked whether the ads were fair. While only 35.8 per cent of Conservatives said the ads were unfair, and 41 per cent felt they were fair, a resounding 90.9 per cent of Liberals judged them unfair.

New Democratic voters came in between the two, with 79.2 per cent feeling the ads were unfair.

The region where the ads appear to have had the most negative impact on Trudeau is Atlantic Canada, where a byelection is taking place in Labrador. While the poll found 63.5 per cent said the ads hadn’t changed their opinion of Trudeau, 12.4 per cent said they had a negative impact — the highest rate in the country.

The ads appear to have had their lowest impact in Quebec. The poll found 88.3 per cent of respondents said the ads hadn’t changed their opinion of Trudeau. Of those influenced by the ads, 4.4 per cent said it was negative and 6.5 per cent said it was positive.

The region most likely to say the ads left them with a more positive view of Trudeau was Saskatchewan where the Liberals hold only one seat. While 65.5 per cent said the ads had no impact, the poll found 21.5 per cent said they had a positive impact and only 9.5 per cent said they had a negative influence on their opinion of the new Liberal leader.

The poll of 1,828 English-speaking respondents was conducted April 17-19 via Ekos’s Probit online/telephone research panel. The results are considered accurate to within 2.3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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