

Chris Fox, CP24.com





The Liberals and Tories are in a virtual tie with one day to go until residents cast their ballots in the Scarborough-Rouge River byelection, two separate polls have found.

Forum Research and Mainstreet asked potential voters who they plan to support in Thursday’s byelection and both polls revealed a particularly close race in the hotly-contested riding.

The Mainstreet poll of 578 eligible voters found that 35 per cent of respondents intend to vote for PC candidate Raymond Cho while 30 per cent say they will vote for Liberal candidate Piragal Thiru and 15 per cent say they will vote for NDP candidate Neethan Shan. The margin of error in the poll is 4.08 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, meaning Cho and Thiru are very close to being in a statistical tie.

The Forum Research poll was even closer. That poll of 363 eligible voters found that Cho and Thiru both have the support of 36 per cent of respondents while Shan is a distant third with the support of 23 per cent of respondents.

The Forum Research poll also asked respondents their opinion on the province’s new sex-ed curriculum, which some believe could be a major ballot box question in the riding.

The poll found that 39 per cent of respondents approve of the curriculum while 36 disapprove and 26 per cent don’t have an opinion. Support for the curriculum was higher among Liberal voters (46 per cent) and NDP voters (55 per cent). Only 27 per cent of PC voters said they supported the curriculum.

“What we see here is a classic Mexican stand-off; the Liberal and Progressive Conservative candidates have each carved out an equal sized patch of the popular vote and the hill they’re fighting for is the vote that swings on the sex education curriculum,” Forum Research President Lorne Bozinoff said in a press release.

The Forum Research poll is considered accurate to within five percentage points, 19 times out of 20.