Duffy’s Revenge: The Fallout of the Trial Harper (31%, -7) Now Last as Best Choice for PM, Mulcair (37%, +6) Stands First with Trudeau (32%, +2) Following One in Ten (13%) Have Changed Their Vote as a Result of Trial 

Toronto, ON, 31st August 2015 – While the Mike Duffy trial doesn’t appear to have had a significant direct impact on votes as of yet, it does appear to be impacting voters’ perceptions of the party leaders, according to a new Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of Global News.

Thinking about who would make the best Prime Minister of Canada, Thomas Mulcair (37%, +6 since April) now has a significant lead over both Justin Trudeau (32%, +2) and Stephen Harper (31%, -7), who has declined significantly since a similar poll conducted in April of 2015, well before the beginning of the trial.

On the topic of which of the leaders would best provide an open, responsible and ethical government, Mulcair’s lead (40%, +6) over Trudeau (33%, unchanged) and especially Harper (27%, -5) has grown substantially since the question was last asked in April. In April, Mulcair lead the Prime Minister by just two points on this metric. The lead is now 13 points.

In terms of the direct impact on votes, however, only 13% of voters have been strongly impacted by news from the trial. Most (68%) voters ‘agree’ (36% strongly/31% somewhat) that they ‘haven’t changed the party they plan to vote for in this election due to the testimony they’ve heard about at the trial of Senator Mike Duffy’. Although one in three (32%) disagree that they haven’t been impacted by the trial, only 13% of Canadians ‘strongly disagree’ with this premise – suggesting that the proportion of voters who have actually changed their vote is quite low, and consistent with the relative stability of the national popular vote figures among decided voters: 33% NDP, 30% Liberal, 29% Conservative.

NDP supporters are most likely to indicate that the trial has impacted their vote (16%) followed by current supporters of the Liberal Party (13%). However, one in ten (10%) current Tory voters also say the trial has changed their mind about who to vote for, meaning that as a result of what they’ve heard in the trial they have a stronger desire to vote Conservative. The net impact of all of this movement is therefore quite minimal and reinforcing of previously developed opinions.

These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between August 24 to 26, 2015 on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians eligible to vote was interviewed online via the Ipsos I-Say Panel. Weighting was then 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 online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within +/ – 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all eligible voters 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.

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