Posted on 04/28/2005 2:26:49 PM PDT by fanfan
Federal Liberal support in the Greater Toronto Area has plummeted 10 percentage points since last year's election, according to a new poll.
The numbers, released yesterday by Environics Research Group, show 41 per cent of decided voters surveyed in the 44 GTA ridings support the Liberals, down from the 51-per-cent share of the vote the party received in the June, 2004, election.
Thirty-five per cent said they would vote for the Conservative Party, up seven points from the Tories' 28-per-cent showing last June, and just six points behind the Liberals. The New Democrats had 21- per-cent support, up from 15 per cent in the election.
"Going from 51 per cent to 41 per cent is a big drop," said Derek Leebosh, a senior associate with Environics.
"The GTA is basically the Liberals' strongest area in all of Canada . . . and so to only have a six-point lead. . . . Imagine if a poll showed the Conservatives only leading the Liberals by six points in Alberta."
With a 10-point slide, coupled with increases for the Conservatives and the NDP, the Liberals become vulnerable in GTA ridings that they won by narrow margins last year, he said.
Tory and NDP strategists said the results suggest that an election, if held soon, could cost the Liberals as many as a dozen seats or more in the GTA.
"That picks up a whole ton of ridings, and puts them right on the very edge," said Peter Van Loan, the Conservative MP for York-Simcoe and the party's national caucus campaign chairman.
Mr. Van Loan said the poll suggests his party could pick up six to eight seats automatically, especially in the so-called 905 belt that once provided the bedrock of support for Mike Harris's provincial Conservatives. Another half dozen, he said, would be too close to call.
Looking just at the 905 region, the poll puts the Liberals and the Conservatives in a virtual tie, with Liberal support at 41 per cent and the Conservatives at 39 per cent. The New Democrats were far behind at 16 per cent.
Mr. Van Loan said Tory sights were set on what he said were winnable 905 ridings such as Halton, Burlington, Oakville, Whitby-Oshawa and Pickering-Ajax.
And he said in an election campaign based on allegations of Liberal scandal and corruption, the Liberal vote in the GTA could only dwindle even further.
Even 416-region ridings in Scarborough and Etobicoke could "fall like dominoes" if Conservative momentum were to build, he added.
In ridings with larger NDP votes, a three-way split could produce some surprises, he said. "It's so fluid, I think, right now."
The NDP, meanwhile, expects to benefit most in Toronto proper, grabbing seats it lost by a hair in 2004, when leader Jack Layton took Toronto-Danforth from the Liberals, the only New Democrat elected in the area despite high hopes in a handful of other ridings.
In the 416 region, according to the Environics poll, the Liberals had 40 per cent, the Conservatives 31 per cent and the New Democrats 26 per cent.
That level, said NDP president Adam Giambrone -- also a Toronto city councillor -- could mean picking up several narrowly lost seats, including the downtown riding of Trinity-Spadina, where Liberal incumbent Tony Ianno beat NDP candidate Olivia Chow -- a Toronto city councillor and Mr. Layton's wife -- by fewer than 1,000 votes.
Mr. Giambrone listed other ridings where he said the boost in NDP support could put a seat "in play," most of which were singled out as possible NDP wins last year: Davenport, Parkdale-High Park and Beaches-East York.
He said the boost in Conservative fortunes in Toronto could actually help the NDP. In some downtown ridings where the Tories are a distant third, a stronger showing by the Conservatives can take away votes from the Liberals in a tight race with the New Democrats, he said.
"The minute that Conservative vote goes up in some of these ridings, you're beginning to bleed from the Liberals . . . and it makes these a lot more winnable."
Alan Tonks, Liberal MP for York South-Weston, said it is too early to tell too much from an opinion poll, with an election yet to be called: "We're into some very turbulent times."
He said he expects the Tories to make gains in the 905 region. And he acknowledged that the controversy of the Gomery inquiry is clearly going to make campaigning tough for Liberals.
"I heard a discussion the other day . . . the Liberals around the table were talking about, well, this is going to be the kind of election that there's no point in going door to door because you're going to get so much flak that it'll just hold you back," Mr. Tonks said.
"I couldn't help but engage that discussion. I said, 'Are you guys kidding?' This is not the time when you get into your bunker mentality. This is a time when you take your budget and vision and issues to the door."
The Environics survey of 868 decided voters in the 44 ridings in the 905 and 416 area codes was conducted from April 21 to 26, before Prime Minister Paul Martin and Mr. Layton finalized a $4.6-billion deal to defer tax cuts for business and boost social spending in an attempt to shore up Mr. Martin's ailing minority government. In all, 992 people were polled; 11 per cent of respondents were undecided.
The results are considered representative of voter intentions at large within plus or minus 3.3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. For results broken down by area code, the margin of error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
Voter views
868 residents of the Toronto area were asked which party they would support should an election be held today. June, 2004 election results April 21-25, 2005 Liberal 51% 41% Conservative 28% 35% NDP 15% 21% Other 6% 3%
SOURCE: ENVIRONICS RESEARCH GROUP
Sounds as though your tourist experience was a pleasant one. :-)
Hey, we had an applicant for a position in our department (History) who is from Toronto. She seemed pleasant, but you could sense that below the surface she harboured some, shall we say, rather left-leaning views. It was not blatant, but the subtle hints were there. Oddly, her specialty was the British Imperial era from the late 19th Century to roughly the mid-twentieth Century.
Not surprising to myself. There is a strain of intellectual thought in the Anglosphere that glorifies the achievements of the British Empire and then denigrate the current United States from a very left-leaning perspective. Plenty of such types here in New Zealand and Canada (both countries have Tory/anti-American-conservative roots, but in current manifestions is leftist). Most of the Oxbridge lefturers and professors in history also belong to this category.
To add to post 22, heck, we even have some of these types here on FR. Just type British FRer cooper72 read his posts. ;-)
The chairman of my Ph.D. committee is married to a Kiwi! He met her whean he was in the Navy (US). He was on a ship bound for Antarctica and met her when the ship came to port in NZ. His wife is VERY conservative and voices her opinion when the topic of conversation is politics.
Many New Zealanders who have moved overseas are very conservative politically - probably because they are fed up with domestic politics.
You said it! Do not get her started on the current liberal bent in NZ; she will mount a soapbox and deliver her opinion with both barrels. I say this only for instances where you only have time for a breif converstaion. If you have the time, then she will deliver a dissertation on the evils of the liberals in NZ.
They would lose? If they lost Toronto, they would get virtually wiped off the political map...that is where the Fiberal BEDROCK is!!!
The NDP would gain some seats there too, since there is NO WAY that ridings like Trinity-Spadina and Parkdale-High Park are going Conservative. That would be like Bush winning in San Francisco!
That's correct. If you move away from the Toronto-Windsor axis, it is quite conservative until you hit Northern Ontario (and who knows what C-38 and C-68 will do up there, although the CPC would have to contend with 3-way splits in the North as the NDP are strong there)...
The Libs KNOW that if the Conservatives get in, there could be all KINDS of investigations into their basic, fundamental, corruption and they'll pull all the stops to prevent that from happening.
My tagline says it all
Godspeed
| ONTARIO | ||||
| Party | Elected | Leading | Vote Count | Vote Share |
| LIB | 75 | 0 | 2259987 | 44.67% |
| CON | 24 | 0 | 1592368 | 31.47% |
| NDP | 7 | 0 | 915291 | 18.09% |
| Last Update: June 29, 3:05:32 AM EDT | 106 seats | |||
It's good you have met a Kiwi "true blue" conservative. They are rarer than San Francisco Bush supporters and most (even many New Zealand registered FRers) would be considered moderates by your standards. I could well be among the 10 most right-wing New Zealand citizens outside the paleocon rednecks.
Soldier on, Mate! The last sentence in you post was funny. Who knows, matbe you and other NZ conservatives will help get your message across and steer NZ back to a more conservative path. Maybe the liberals in NZ well become embroiled in a scandal much like the one that is causing Canada's liberals to implode. One can dream, can't one?
I think that 51% is for the entire GTA, including some outlying ridings on the rural fringe that don't really count. For the urban and suburban ridings, it was probably more like 56%, and for the City of Toronto, about 60%.
Well, she was paid to be polite. She worked behind the counter for the Quebec tourism industry. Nevertheless she was very engaging...in a very correct sort of way. The whole trip was entertaining not the least of which was unwittingly getting involved in a demonstration in downtown Montreal between anglophiles and francophiles. In short while talking to an anglophile (english-speaking Montreal resident), a francophile came up to us and started berating us in French (of course). He was telling us to quit speaking English. Since I don't speak French, I don't know what language I could have used. Pig latin?
I have constant (though goodnatured) battles between my wife, who was raised in England, and myself over which country has the best culture. While an American citizen, she still defends Britain and denigrates certain American societal and cultural manifestations (well, so do I). Some times shes right, and some times shes wrong (she certainly knows far more than me about tea). But she will cheerfully add that she much prefers living in the U.S. to Britain.
"Since I don't speak French, I don't know what language I could have used. Pig latin?"
France's second language - German. :-)
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