More from Paul Adams available More fromavailable here

The EKOS poll released the other day is like a snowfall in August. It has the ability to shock even as it melts quickly away.

It shocks because it challenges so many of our assumptions.

Shock #1 — The Conservatives may be in third place

It isn’t just that the EKOS poll shows the Harper Conservatives at a mere 26 per cent in popular support, barely ahead of the NDP. The Conservatives could be headed for third place in Parliament, behind the NDP as well as the Liberals, according to this seat projection by Paul Barber, who is the best at what he does:

The projection, based on the EKOS poll, puts the NDP at 95 seats and leaves 86 for the Conservatives. (The Liberals, at 156, would win the election but fall well short of a majority.)

In other words, the Conservatives may be closer to an Ignatieff-style implosion than they are to another majority government.

Shock #2 — The NDP is very much alive

The media consensus has been that this hasn’t been a great summer for Thomas Mulcair. Au contraire, according to the EKOS poll. Despite the media swoon for Justin Trudeau, Mulcair has the best leadership numbers among Canadians.

More significantly, perhaps, the seat projection suggests that even if Mulcair doesn’t win the next election, he could land in a very powerful position: kingmaker in a minority Parliament.

Shock #3 — The Conservative core is drifting to the Liberals

Remember when the Conservative party had a lock on men and senior citizens? Remember when it made up for its losses among the university-educated with a big lead among voters who had attended community colleges? Remember when Harper’s party was breaking into into immigrant communities?

Look again.

The Liberals are no longer clinging to their “gender gap”. In fact, they are even more popular among men these days than they are among women. They have an eight-point lead among those over 65 years of age. They are ahead of the other parties in every educational category, including the college-educated.

And the Liberals have more supporters among immigrants than the two other major parties combined.

Shock #4 — It isn’t just Trudeau, stupid

The Liberals are a leader-centric party and the media generally share the weakness for personality over party or policy. And there is no doubting Justin Trudeau’s role in reawakening interest in the Liberals and putting them at the centre of the national debate.

But the relentless focus on Trudeau as the propulsive force behind the Liberals’ rise in the polls blinds us to so much else:

The Liberal party brand has an unanticipated resiliency among voters that both supports and magnifies Trudeau’s appeal;

The NDP faces a challenge, particularly in Ontario, in convincing voters it is ready to govern, undercutting the impact of Mulcair’s personal popularity;

The Harper Conservatives obviously will use their burgeoning war chest to claw Trudeau’s numbers down towards to where Harper’s now languish, but the Conservatives don’t just have a Trudeau problem — they have a Mulcair problem, too.

Shock #5 Redistribution is not the Conservatives’ ace-in-the-hole

A great deal has been made in recent years about how the redistribution of parliamentary seats was going to favour the Conservatives because many of the new seats were springing up in the suburban and Western areas they have dominated in the past few elections.

But guess what? When voters desert you, you also lose where you were previously strong. Paul Barber was kind enough to run a seat projection for me on the old boundaries, also based on the EKOS poll. Result: At these levels of support, redistribution makes practically no difference.

It may be that the startling results of this week’s EKOS poll are not replicated by other polls in the weeks to come, or that some of these trends reveal themselves less brightly. Not everyone is thinking hard about politics in the summertime and many people are away from home when the pollster calls, so who knows?

But this poll should crack apart the unexamined assumptions many of us have had about the way our politics are going.

This is getting interesting.

Detailed Tables:

Click any chart to expand.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is associate professor of journalism at Carleton and has taught political science at the University of Manitoba. He is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.