Latest EKOS Poll Shows Conservatives Ahead

Tom Mulcair’s NDP is well behind, at 22 per cent of the decided and leaning vote.

The federal election is October. 19.

“The resiliency of the Conservative vote continues to surprise”, Mainstreet Research president Quito Maggi said.

To be fair to Mulcair, he has been cautious about the whole thing and hasn’t embraced it. In fact, the manifesto and those involved could very well become anti-NDP and spawn a new, hard-left leaning political movement in this country. Both Forum and Ipsos also placed the NDP in third.

Harper’s stand on Syrian refugees and the niqab issue (the Conservative Government wants Muslim women to remove their niqab during the citizenship oath-swearing though the courts disagree) seem to have given his party a boost for now, especially in Quebec.

Tight regional races are emerging between the Liberals and Conservatives in the battle for Ontario, a new poll finds.

The Ontario Progressive Conservatives are significantly more popular right now than the governing Liberals, who find themselves bogged down in a fight with teacher unions and are stickhandling the controversial sale of a provincial power utility.

The poll, conducted on September 17, included a sample size of about 650 in each of the three ridings with a margin of error of just under four percentage points.

Results were weighted by age and gender based on the 2011 Canadian census.

Respondents to the survey were asked: “If the federal election were today, which party would you support?” As of Thursday morning, the Liberals are nine points back with 26.3 per cent support, and just barely ahead of the third-place NDP.

– In Eastern Ontario, the Conservatives are first (32 per cent), followed closely by the Liberals (31 per cent), then the NDP (16 per cent). That’s a full seven points ahead of the Liberals and 18 points ahead of the NDP.

The Green leader says other conditions for her support would be repeal of the Conservative anti-terrorism bill C-51, genuine action on climate change and a much smaller role for the Prime Minister’s Office in federal affairs.