UPDATED with numbers from overnight Wednesday:

Jack Layton’s New Democratic Party has surged past the Gilles Duceppe’s faltering Bloc Québécois and is now in first place in Quebec, according to a poll conducted by Ekos Research and iPolitics.

The poll, conducted earlier this week, found the New Democrats have jumped 10 percentage points since the eve of the leaders debate to 31.4 per cent while the Bloc has dropped by 3.9 percentage points to 27.2 per cent.

The Liberals have dropped to 15.5 per cent while the Conservatives are holding steady at 18.4 per cent.

While the margin of error is higher at the city level due to the smaller sample size, in Montreal the NDP is at 33.7 per cent while the Bloc is at 30.3 per cent. The Liberals are in third place at 18.7 per cent while the Conservative trail in the Montreal area at 8.4 per cent.

While the The NDP surge is most dramatic in Quebec, it is certainly not contained to there. Nationally, the NDP is now tied with the Liberals at 24.7 per cent each. Both continue to lag behind the Conservatives, who were preferred by 34.4 per cent of respondents.

Frank Graves, president of Ekos Research, said the Bloc’s sharp decline “may well be the most stunning feature of this campaign.” However, he warned the Bloc’s voters have traditionally been more committed and more likely to turn out to vote than supporters of many other parties.

“The only good news for the BQ is that their residual base is very firmly committed but they also now see the LPC within the margin in Quebec. They must hope that vote that vote splitting and a fairly new ground game come to their aid.”

The development is a stunning one for the New Democrats, a party that only a few years ago was lucky to muster double digit support in any riding in Quebec. Thomas Mulcair was the first MP ever elected in a general election for the party in the province.

However, lots of work and careful positioning as the most Quebec nationalist of the three federalist parties appears to have started paying off for the NDP.

On top of that. Layton has benefitted from his appearance during the election on the influential talk show Tout le Monde en Parle – a show that Harper has shunned so far in this campaign – as well as a solid performance in the leaders debates. Jean Lapierre, an MP turned broadcaster who has been touring the province, recently referred to “Jack-ists” as he described the personal popularity Layton seems to be experiencing among young francophone voters.

Mulcair, the NDP’s Quebec lieutenant and a former Quebec cabinet minister, said Wednesday night that the poll results reflect what he has been seeing on the ground. In fact, the response he got during a swing through the traditionally sovereignist Saguenay Lac St. Jean region last week was so positive that party organizers joked he had lost his mind when he reported he thought the NDP was at 40 per cent in that area.

However, Mulcair said he expects the NDP will now become a target for other parties and he is also warning NDP organizers not to be overconfident.

“For the last 10 days of the campaign, the most important thing for us is going to make our followers understand that you can’t put a poll in a ballot box.”

The poll is based on telephone interviews, on landlines and cellphones, using Interactive Voice Response technology between April 18-20 with 2,156 respondents and is considered accurate to within 2.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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