For the first time since 2021, Ipsos polling now shows the federal Liberal party with a slight lead over the Conservatives.
The poll, conducted exclusively for Global News by Ipsos Public Affairs, shows if a federal election were to take place tomorrow, the Liberals would get 38 per cent of decided voter support compared to the Conservatives’ 36 per cent, overturning what was a 26-point lead for the Tories just six weeks ago.
According to the polling, conducted between Feb. 21 and 24 from a sample of 1,000 voting-age Canadians, the Liberals have increased their numbers by 10 points compared to the last poll by Ipsos released earlier this month.
The polling is considered accurate within 3.8 percentage points, so the numbers are still within the margin of error.
But the results echo multiple recent polls indicating the Liberals are closing the gap between the Conservatives in the seven weeks since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation and as the country braces for damaging U.S. tariffs set to take effect next week.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, saw a five-point drop in support among decided voters, with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois seeing declines as well, dropping to 12 per cent and six per cent respectively.
“The Liberal leadership is changing, Justin Trudeau has left and there’s going to be a new leader of the Liberal party and I think people are interested in seeing who that’s going to be,” said Darrell Bricker, the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs.
“The second thing is the threat from south of the border has moved us off of litigating whatever the Liberals did over the last 10 years to the here and now, which is dealing with the United States.”
The federal Liberals haven’t seen numbers higher than the Conservatives in Ipsos polling since 2021.
Ipsos polling in early February had showed Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives with 41 per cent support among decided voters, while the Liberals sat at 28 per cent.
That was a boost from numbers in early January, when the Liberals had sat at just 20 per cent — a near-historic low just one point off from the all-time low when the party was decimated under Michael Ignatieff in the 2011 campaign.
Bricker says the biggest movement in polling has been seen in central Canada, namely Quebec and Ontario, but Atlantic Canada has also seen a jump in Liberal support.
“It’s basically everywhere east of the Ontario-Manitoba border that seems to be looking at the Liberals more, the Conservatives are still looking pretty good in Western Canada,” Bricker said.
For the past year, Poilievre and the Conservatives have been framing the upcoming federal election as hinging on voters’ feelings about the carbon price.
But the two most prominent Liberal leadership hopefuls, former central banker Mark Carney and former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, have backed away from the Liberals’ consumer carbon price.
And Trump, with his continued threat of damaging tariffs on Canadian exports, now represents a major economic danger both to individual workers and the economy writ large.
Amid this environment, Poilievre and the Conservatives have attempted to change their messaging, trying to communicate a new message of “Canada First” to turn around their prospects.
But while the party is putting forward a new message, Bricker says the instability caused by the proposed tariffs by Trump, as well as new attention on the Liberals due to the leadership race means the Conservatives will need to work harder to get their message out to stop the Liberals’ resurrection.
“They’re going to have to find a way to punch through all this and get their message back out there to Canadians or it will just continue as it is,” Bricker said.
With those tariffs still looming, and the president noting on Monday that they were planning to move forward with the March 4 date, Ipsos polling shows the urgency for an immediate federal election has also risen.
A majority, 86 per cent, of Canadians said they want a federal election immediately so Canada has a prime minister and government with a strong mandate to deal with Trump’s tariffs.
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between February 21 and 24, 2025, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians aged 18+ was interviewed online. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18+ been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
—with files from Global News’ Saba Aziz and Alex Boutillier