A Toronto Star EKOS has pretty much the opposite results to the Ipsos-Reid one below. (h/t Sinister Thoughts)
Do pollsters only ask subscribers of the paper that commissions the poll?
Liberals: 38.7%
Conservatives: 29.4%
New Democrats: 16.9%
Bloc Quebecois: 10.6%
The key takeaways of this poll are that the Bloc Quebecois support has gone down, primarily to the CPC and NDP (huh?) and the CPC is down 15% in BC from the last election (right!)
Update: CTV has a story about the EKOS poll from the Toronto Star. Funny that. As you know CTV is owned by the same company that owns the Globe and Mail. So it seems they don't have a problem publishing an article referencing a competitor's poll. Unless it is the National Post (part of CanWest who owns Global). They do not reference the Ipsos-Reid poll. How can you talk about one and ignore the other? Anyways, buried in the article is this gem. (you can check out my analysis of this consensus wisdom here)
...But CTV's Roger Smith warns that the Liberals are by no means in the clear.
"The tendency is for government (support) to fall during a campaign, their support goes down," Smith reported, appearing on CTV Newsnet.
"I would say what all politicians are telling us ... it's going to be a close and dirty race."
First of all I don't trust the EKOS poll. Check out this link. More often than not they tend to be the outlier.
Second, the Conservatives don't have to get the lead to win the election. The national numbers will always make things worse than they are due to the Quebec effect. The Liberals have somewhere between 3-4x more support in Quebec than the Conservatives which puts them in the lead nationally. This greater support is good for only about ten seats this time around. Breaking out Quebec they are tied. Futhermore, a small shift in the vote in Ontario will make an incredible amount of difference.
Which leads me to the last point - the campaign will matter. Call me deluded but I don't think the Conservatives will run such a poor campaign this time around. The polls before the 2004 election has the Liberals with a similar (if not larger) lead than now. 3/4 of the way into the campaign the polls pointed to a Conservative victory. I think this can happen again. And this time they won't blow it.
Update II: The actual report on CTV Newsnet references both polls.
