OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government has paid a large price in popularity for shutting down Parliament, with his Conservatives effectively tied with Liberals in a new poll by The Strategic Counsel.

Conservatives are at 31 per cent, compared to 30 per cent for Liberals, in the poll conducted by Strategic Counsel late last week, as controversy was starting to build over Harper's prorogation of Parliament until March 3.

That's the lowest the Conservatives have been since last June in Strategic Counsel polling.

"Proroguing of Parliament has hurt the Tory brand," said Tim Woolstencroft, the managing partner at Strategic Counsel, who believes that Harper's Conservatives must be seeing the same kind of numbers, because the government has appeared to be in a defensive posture all week. "I think the government is worried about it," Woolstencroft said.

The poll, conducted in online and telephone surveys with 1,860 Canadians, shows the Conservatives have dropped a full 10 percentage points since last October, with the Liberals and New Democrats getting only a slight bump in support.

Last October, Strategic Counsel found 41 per cent support for Conservatives, 28 per cent for the Liberals and 14 per cent for the New Democrats. The newest numbers show 31 per cent for the Conservatives, 30 per cent for the Liberals and 18 per cent for the NDP. The poll is deemed accurate within 2.27 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

What the new numbers mean, says Woolstencroft, is that the prorogation has hurt the Conservatives but not overly helped the Liberals or New Democrats — at least not yet.

The poll, for instance, was conducted before the Liberals unleashed their ad campaign this week against the prorogation, featuring pictures of Parliament behind a chain-link fence and radio ads talking about a Conservative "cover-up."

Woolstencroft says the poll shows that "a tremendous amount of work still has to be done" by the Liberals if they want to climb and stay in a position of effective challenge to Harper and the Conservatives. (Strategic Counsel is where Peter Donolo worked before he became chief of staff to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff late last fall.)

Ignatieff has been pushing the anti-prorogation message hard on his campus tour this week; he's in Mississauga and Hamilton today. But Woolstencroft says that should be seen as a very preliminary step in any effort to rebuild the Liberal brand.

"The leader of the Liberals is still a relatively unknown character on the landscape," Woolstencroft said. Similarly, there's no sign yet that any opposition party is reaping any real benefit of the Conservative slump — these new numbers tell a story of a misplayed gambit and botched communications, says the pollster.

"(The Conservatives) really didn't have a strong message about why (Harper) was proroguing the House and Parliament. That's led to questions," he said.

"If this was an isolated event, I think proroguing Parliament would have been a non-issue. But there is a sense that this is kind of a pattern of behaviour."

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