On the eve of Ontario’s general election, the Progressive Conservatives hold a significant lead over their rivals and maintain an almost identical advantage to the one they had at the beginning of the campaign, new polling shows.
The poll, conducted exclusively for Global News by Ipsos Global Public Affairs, shows Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives are 20 points ahead of Bonnie Crombie’s Liberals, with Marit Stiles’ NDP in a distant third. The Greens are in fourth.
If the election were held tomorrow, the poll predicts the PCs would win 48 per cent of the vote, followed by the Liberals at 28 per cent. The NDP would take 16 per cent and the Greens, polled together with any other party, would be at eight per cent.
Roughly one in 11 voters remain undecided with 24 hours to go.
“The Conservatives have been picking up a little at the end of the campaign but so have the Liberals — at this point past the NDP,” Darrell Bricker, Ipsos CEO, told Global News.
“It looks pretty much like it’s going to be a Conservative majority — at 48 per cent it can’t really be anything other than that — we’ve seen a bit of a bump up for the Liberals, but also a decline for the NDP.”
If the polling translates into a similar result in Thursday’s election, the PCs would win seven per cent more support than they received when they won 83 seats in 2022.
Whether that translates into a higher seat count depends on where the increase in support is being recorded. Ipsos said its polling had the Progressive Conservatives ahead in every demographic group and every region of the province.
“It looks like a pretty stunning majority if these numbers hold up — larger than the one he won the last time,” Bricker said.
The Liberals would pull four per cent more than they did in 2022 when they failed to make official party status and the NDP would see an eight per cent dip in support.
The polling suggests the Liberals have taken a significant chunk of the NDP’s support through the election campaign, while the PCs and Greens have held onto the voters they had when the writs were issued.
That mirrors how parts of the final stretch of the campaign have played out, as Crombie and Stiles have fought over progressive voters.
Crombie has repeated a targeted pitch for NDP voters to lend their support to her Liberal Party, while the NDP has tried to argue donors to the Crombie campaign mean she would not be committed to health care or the Greenbelt.
“There’s really going to be an interesting second-place race here,” Bricker said. “I know the numbers look like they’re very much a Liberal lead, but it depends on how efficiently those votes are distributed across ridings because maybe the NDP looks a bit more competitive than these numbers suggest.”
The Progressive Conservatives have released a steady stream of past comments mainly from Liberal candidates, although a few have also been aimed at the NDP.
The Progressive Conservatives have run their campaign focused on the threat of tariffs from the United States, while the Liberals have concentrated on health care. The NDP have targeted affordability and the Greens have pushed to highlight rural issues.
The PCs’ campaign choice appears to have been rewarded — with the NDP and Liberals struggling to break through.
“What really seems to have driven what people are deciding tomorrow is their feeling about leadership and leadership for the times — not necessarily on specific issues,” Bricker said.
“It’s leadership in general in which the public is saying we need somebody for this time who is the kind of leader who can lead us through this. And that’s really where Doug Ford seemed to shine — it’s not anything really specific, it’s very general.”
While there is still some indecision among NDP voters, in particular, the polling suggests most Tory voters have made their decision.
Sixty-eight-per-cent of PC voters said they were absolutely certain they would cast a ballot fort their party, compared to 55 per cent fort the Liberals, 48 per cent for the NDP and 49 per cent for the Greens.
METHODOLOGY: This Ipsos poll was conducted between Feb. 23 and 25, 2025, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of n=1,501 eligible voters in Ontario aged 18+ was interviewed. A sample of n=1,001 Ontarians aged 18+ was interviewed online, via the Ipsos I-Say panel and non-panel sources, and respondents earn a nominal incentive for their participation. A sample of n=500 Ontarians aged 18+ was interviewed by live-interview telephone interviewers by landline and cellphone, using random-digit dialing. Quotas and weighting were employed to balance demographics to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe. The precision of Ipsos polls which include non-probability sampling is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Ontarians 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.