Front Burner - A pre-debate state of the race

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

With just over a week until election day, Canada's main party leaders go head to head tonight in the only English language debate. So, where does the campaign stand? Is anything shifting? How do people feel about the leaders at the moment? Where are parties drawing their biggest support and losses from? David Coletto, the CEO of the polling firm Abacus Data, joins the show today to tell us what the latest polls are saying.He will rejoin the show as just one of several special guests on our election night livestream, Monday, April 28. Watch it on the CBC News YouTube channel and CBC News on TikTok. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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We're going to have a wrap of that for you tomorrow morning. I hope you'll tune in. But before then, we thought it would be useful to take a look at where this whole campaign sits right now. What are people across the country thinking? Is anything shifting? How do they feel about the leaders at this moment? Where are the parties drawing their biggest support and losses from? David Coletto is here with me to do that. David, hey.

Hi, Jamie. How are you doing? I'm great. It's great to have you. David is, of course, the CEO of the polling firm Abacus Data. He is a regular on this show. And I should say that he will also be joining us for our live stream on election night, along with a bunch of other great people. Alameen Abdul-Mahmoud is gonna be there from commotion, Tom Power from Q, Nala Ayyad from ideas.

We are gonna talk about politics for four hours. And I actually, I actually think it's gonna be fun. I think it's gonna be fun. I can't fun. I think it's going to be fun. I can't wait. I think it's, I can't think of a better group of people to hang out with for four hours while we watch these results. So looking forward to it, Jane. Yeah, me too.

Uh, and I hope that you guys will all tune in. You can find it on the CBC News YouTube channel, on CBC News TikTok. But right now, let's talk about what the polls are telling us. Hey, David, why don't we start with the race? At the moment, what does your latest polling tell you about what the outcome is looking to be on April 28th? Yeah, so we came out with a survey yesterday

that shows the gap tightening, and a number of other polls are showing the same thing. But the conclusion is still the same, which is the liberals still have an advantage. If the election were today, I think they would be very much likely to win it. Even if their vote share nationally is in decline or tightening and there's some indication that's happening, their advantages in certain parts of the country are just so great that it means they would win most seats. So I would say today, still advantage liberal,

but there's indications that maybe some people are shifting or at least still open-minded about how they're gonna vote when they do either this weekend or as you said, on April 28th. Has anybody calculated the odds, right? Like the odds of a liberal majority or a liberal minority or the odds of the conservatives winning the most seats? Yeah, well, I mean, the CBC's poll tracker, Eric Grenier, has been doing that for a while and he suggests

that there's an 85% probability the liberals are going to win a majority government based on the polls that we have today. And there's only a 2% probability that the conservatives will win the most seats. So basically a 98% chance that the liberals are going to likely form government, whether it's a majority or minority is still, I guess, somewhat up in the air. But you know, if you're a betting person, those odds suggest that that a liberal majority is what the numbers are telling us is going to happen if again that election were today. Yeah. People are betting on Polymarket and it is similar.

The odds there. It's similar, yeah. It's pretty strong odds for Carney and the Liberals. Okay, so this projected liberal win, I just want to talk about how much of it is because of the collapse we are seeing from the NDP. How much of it is the bloc shedding votes in Quebec? And how much of it is the conservatives losing votes to the liberals?

Let me put this question another way. Of those three trends that we know are all happening, what is the most significant one? I think the most significant is the NDP decline. That for most of the last four or five years, our polling, other polling has shown them anywhere between 18 and 20 percent in national polls. And today their average is about 8 percent. So that's a 10 percentage point drop. That's more than half of their vote has gone somewhere else.

And we know from our polls, when we ask people, you know, how did you vote last time and where are you voting now? More than half has left that NDP support and it's going mostly to the liberals. And so I think a big part of that is the NDP drop. But one of the reasons why the liberals are so, why the odds are so good for them to win a majority

is because they are also doing quite well in Quebec. I mean, the poll tracker that Eric does has, you know, the liberals ahead by almost 20 percentage points on average in Quebec. They would win, you know, a substantial number of seats and pick up quite a few, significantly more than they did in the last two federal elections. And so you take that NDP drop, you take the softening of the bloc support in Quebec, and that alone is enough to give the liberals a victory. You know, and that's happening even though the conservative vote is actually higher than

it was than the last two elections. You know, a lot of the commentary out there has been, you know, and you see the conservatives fighting amongst each other, that they've run a bad campaign, that this... And there's perhaps some truth to that, because the circumstances of this election changed, and there may be some who believe that the conservatives haven't adapted to it. But Pierre Poliev personally is not, at least in abacus polling, deeply unpopular. There's 40% of Canadians who have a positive view of him, which would normally be enough for a conservative to win a majority. Stephen Harper only got 40% of Canadians have a positive view of him, which would normally be enough for a conservative to win a majority

Stephen Harper only got 40% of the vote in 2011 But when those other two circumstances we talked about a collapsing NDP vote and to some extent a Green Party That that's only going to run candidates at just over 200 seats and saws have seen their support drop as well as the block. Most of that going to the liberals gives them a place where, you know, they're, they're in their low forties and that's going to be enough for them to win a majority if it doesn't change. David, I remember doing an episode about the polls with you right before the U.S. election, and I know you were not sure who was going to win. You said the polls were too close to say with any confidence, but I think I made you do it. And you came to the conclusion

that you were leaning Kamala, right? I'm not trying to rub it in here. I'm not trying to rub it in. Yeah, yeah, rub it in. It's okay. But one thing I have heard repeatedly through this election is that when it comes to predicting outcomes, Canadian polling does a better job than American polling. And I wonder if you could explain that to me.

Is that about the way that we do our polling or is that about the way that our elections work? Well, I think it's a bit of both. In the US election, historically anyways, turnout's been lower. I mean, Canada has actually, even though our turnout's gone down in the last few elections, it still has been higher.

In the US election, the opposite's true. They've had a real surge in voter turnout because the stakes for many Americans became higher. That was a very close elections, the last number of them. And so people really got engaged. And so I think for pollsters in the US, and I can't speak for them, but I think it's harder. And it's so close that literally 100,000 votes out of hundreds of millions cast could

be the difference between one person winning the presidency and one person not. Now in Canada, I mean, at the federal level, the polls have been actually very good over the entire time I've been doing polling. You can go back to 2004 when I started doing some polling for Nick Nanos. And I don't know if it's because it's easier to do here or we're doing anything differently, but I think that for whatever reason, we have the ability to kind of better estimate how people are going to vote and whether they come out

and vote at all. And I think that's really important. And it's going to be an important factor in this election, right? If the polls are wrong on the 28th, it's because we probably underestimated either the conservatives in terms of their motivation, we miss them. And the polls in the past have generally underestimated conservatives, even in Canada. I went back and I looked at all the polls in the last two elections. And for many pollsters, we underestimated conservative vote share by two to three points.

I still think that could happen here, which is why I think, you know, you look at advocacy polls versus some of the others, we have a smaller liberal lead. There's a cautiousness built into my methodology that says, I think we're under-representing conservatives. They just are less likely to participate in surveys. But we know they're just as motivated to vote. In fact, in some cases, maybe more so. So those are the kinds of things I'm looking for.

But I, you know, Ontario election, Nova Scotia elections we just had provincially, the polls did very well. So I'm confident that, you know, the methodologies that we are using are capturing things. But you know, voters, as I like to say, people are unpredictable, because until they actually go and vote, and we know that about a third of people sometimes say they're not making up their mind until they actually step into that voting place. They could always do something they didn't tell us they were going to do.

So with that in mind, though, I want to dig a bit deeper into intentions. Why don't we start with a geographic survey, right? You mentioned before Quebec, but what else are you seeing across the country? Any big surprises? Yeah, I think there are some, right? I mean, in British Columbia is one I watch carefully because it's a province that not that long ago was overwhelmingly conservative,

had supported the Reform Party in the 90s and continued to support the alliances that changed. For listeners who need a little bit of a history lesson of the evolution of the conservative movement in Canada. But in December of 2024, just a few weeks before Justin Trudeau announced his resignation, the Liberal Party was polling at like 12% in British Columbia in our survey in that month. And today they're at on average 42.

So almost a four times increase in their support in British Columbia is really interesting, right? And I think one of the, we'll talk demographics a little bit, but one of the sub stories that's tied to region is that because the liberals are doing particularly well among baby boomers, parts of the country where there are higher concentrations of seniors, for example, think of places like Kelowna,

British Columbia, or Victoria. Because they have strength among that demographic, I think there are parts of this country that are now in play that wouldn't have been. And BC is one of them. I'll just say, we talked about Quebec. Ontario is often where, to the annoyance of every other Canadian outside of Ontario, where this thing will turn.

And as of right now, the Liberals are ahead by seven in our poll, 10 on average, and that's better than they did in 2021. So the Conservatives cannot win if the Liberals are winning by 10 points in Ontario. Very seat-rich, GTA region is essentially what we're... Well, when we do the live stream we're really going to be watching that as it comes in. Do demographics for me a little bit more here. So boomers, why are they gravitating so much to the liberals and then other demographics that you groups that you find you're finding really interesting. Yeah so boomers have been again

we talked about this before but I think it's the most interesting demographic in terms of how rapidly they shifted towards the liberals, both because they think of Trump and them being the most angry and feeling betrayed by what Trump has done and said, whether it's tariffs or whether it's 51st state rhetoric, all of that has basically galvanized boomers to embrace the liberals and particularly Mark Carney. I think Mark Carney is very appealing to baby boomers who gives them a sense of security and safety and competence that I think they're really looking for, right? If this election is often being framed around stability versus change or stability versus

disruption, Mark Carney is the ultimate stability, calm focal point for people and boomers are particularly looking for that. On the flip side, I think younger Canadians, whether they're, you know, we talk about Gen Z or millennials, I think they are looking at this in a different lens. They are not happy with the state of the world. No one's really happy with it,

but they're still focused on the here and now. I can't pay my rent or mortgage. My kids, the cost of food continues to go up, as we heard this week from Stats Canada, and they're looking for more immediate relief. They're less concerned about the existential crisis that Canada might be under. Not to say that those things aren't creating more insecurities, but they are still, I think, a little bit bruised by the Trudeau government and so have been less open to embracing Mark Carney. And there's still a lot of affinity, particularly among younger men, but generally among younger people towards Pierre Pauli and the Conservatives. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition

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of young men feeling disenfranchised in some way and lurching to the right. And just what extent has that happened here compared to what we've seen elsewhere? I think it's happened almost to the same extent. How does it actually articulate, play itself out into political behavior, I think we'll see, but you know, there is evidence in surveys

that we've been doing going back a number of years now that young men are kind of deviating from where the rest of the country is. And in fact, the biggest gender gaps we see on a lot of attitudinal questions, how they feel about the economy, social structures and politics, that gender gap is the widest among Canadians under 30.

You can almost say that like young men are moving in one direction and young women are moving in one direction and young women are moving in the other. And that is similar to what we saw in Germany. It's similar to what we've seen in the United States around Trump. That young men, I think in particular, particularly white young men, are looking for disruptors. They have this feeling that the systems in place have completely left them behind and

made it hard for them to achieve things they thought they could. And so if someone like Pierre Polyov, I think, is speaking directly to it, breaking down, you know, getting rid of gatekeepers, smashing institutions that they think are just working against them. And we see that a lot in the data. But look, I'm looking at a chart right now from Angus Reid, the polling from Angus Reid, the polling from Angus Reid released late March.

And it has males aged 18 to 34 at 33% conservative and 42% liberals. So they're leading by almost 10 points. How would you explain that? Yeah, I mean, different pollsters are seeing different things. And when you get into, you know, if we're getting technical, your sample sizes, there might be some differences. I see in my data consistent difference though, where the number one predictor of someone voting conservative for much of the last few months is being a male under 30.

So in my data, I'm seeing it consistently. And then the piece that your colleague Jonathan Montpetit did for the national went back to Canadian election studies, right? Big academic studies going back to the early 2000s. And they have shown a divergence in some key attitudes between young men and young women over time as well. So I wouldn't get caught up on one poll being slightly different,

and instead look at the trends that are happening. And why is it that a lot of young men are saying, I like Pierre Polyov, he's engaging and connecting with me in a way that young women are not saying about him in fact are kind of repelled by Pierre Polyov. Any other interesting demographic data you think is worth us discussing? Education maybe? Education is a really interesting one, right? For much of the last two years when the conservatives were ahead by 20 points, the level of education you have, you know, university, college, lower levels of formal education, almost disappeared as a variable because

the conservative lead was so big. But I think today we're seeing it reemerge as one of the key predictors or separators of the electorate. So if you're if you have a university education in Canada right now, you are the most likely to be voting liberal of those of those three education groups. And if you have a if

you have lower levels of formal education, say high school, you are the least likely to vote liberal. So this whole boots, not suits framing that Pierre Poliev has been using is showing up in the data. And there's an interesting, I think, it's professional and education and class all built into one. And we're seeing evidence of it. So Mark Carney, the guy with the PhD, you know, went to Harvard, went to Oxford.

He is right now the leader for those with a university degree. Peer polyvism is still far more appealing to people who, you know, work with their hands for a living or don't sit at a desk all day. Before we move on to the debates, I do want to ask you a little bit more about the leaders themselves, particularly the two frontrunners, Carney and Poliev. I've heard people talk about how Carney is polling ahead of his party and Poliev is polling behind it. And just explain that to me. Yeah, what that basically means is when you look at how people say they would vote

and then you ask them questions like, how do you feel about the leaders? You are seeing some deviation that there are people who say, I like Mark Carney more than I might like the Liberal Party and I like the Conservative Party maybe more than I like Pierre Poliev. And these are these internal tensions that pull people to their decision on who they might vote for. In the case of Mark Carney, there is clear evidence, although perhaps in our most recent survey, that might

be somewhat shifting, but he's still the most popular federal party leader. More than 45% or so of Canadians have a positive view of him. So there are more people who say, I like Mark Carney than are willing right now to vote liberal. And so I think not enough credit is actually given to Mr. Carney and how well he's helped the liberal party get to where it is in a position of strength right now. For Mr. Poliev, it's somewhat of the reverse, although props not as big a factor,

in that there are people who are probably gonna vote conservative who aren't thrilled that Mr. Poliev is the leader, but are doing it because they still want a change in government. But I think in both cases, one of the so far interesting features of this campaign is just how among the voters that are going to vote for these parties feel about the leaders. I went back and looked at previous elections that we've done polling in and both Mr. Poliev and Mr. Carney are more well-liked by more people than any of the other leaders going back to

the Trudeau era beginning. And I think that's an interesting dynamic about the times we're in and the importance of leadership in this election. This isn't really a policy debate election. But I think what Canadians are looking for is the kind of leader they want. And again, I mentioned earlier, like disruption versus stability, change versus strength to stand up to Trump.

And I think both of these leaders are offering something very different to different segments of the electorate. And that's why it's still a relatively close election, even if the liberals structurally have an advantage. [♪ Piano Music Playing in the Background, with a light, light piano melody and a light piano melody. Now that we have a better sense of where the parties are weak and where they are strong, let's talk about how that all might map onto the issues that we're going to hear them talk about. The French debate will have already happened

by the time that people listen to this, but these are the topics for the English debate tonight. They're pretty similar. Affordability and the cost of living, energy and climate, leading in a crisis, public safety and security, tariffs and threats to Canada. And so what do the frontrunners especially need to do on these topics given what you and I have just been talking about? Let's start with Carney. Yeah, I think Mark Carney's biggest vulnerability is Justin Trudeau. And so I think he will be under attack by all the party leaders, frankly, about how similar he is to Trudeau

in terms of a lot of the policy. And so for him, I think affordability is going to be the one that Mr. Poliev in particular, but also Mr. Singh are really gonna try to hammer him on and to make the case that yes, while he's getting credit for getting rid of the carbon tax, that fundamentally under the past liberal government, life just became so unaffordable to people,

housing became so far out of reach, and that you can't really trust the liberals to do anything on that going forward. So for Mr. Carney, that's his liability. His strength, though, is any conversation around Trump and the economy more broadly. And so he will hope to lean in on that for sure. any conversation around Trump and the economy more broadly. And so he will hope to lean in on that for sure. Pauli? I think Pauli is the reverse, frankly.

His strengths are affordability, housing. He's still seen as best able to do those in our polling than Mark Carney. But when it comes to dealing with Trump, among people who care about that issue, he's trailing by a significant barge in over Mark Carney I think the biggest thing that people are gonna be watching for also is You know, is he is he is he Trumpy or not?

right Does he does he reflect the kind of language that that so many particularly baby boomers as we discussed earlier are not interested in hearing And can he can he appear? To be that be that safe harbor that about half the country's looking for while at the same time still appealing to those who want disruption and change? And so that's a very challenging balance,

I think, for Mr. Poliev to be able to do, but I think he has to do it if he wants to win this election. David, we've talked about how the vote has been shifting somewhat in these final weeks, but I'm just curious, like, we're heading into a long weekend here. We're going to come out of the long weekend, and then it's less than a week before people vote on April 28th. Normally, at this point in a campaign, how locked in is the vote?

And have you ever seen a debate move the vote as much as it would need to be moved in this kind of scenario? So first I think I think there's a softness still there but it's hardening every day and I think as you know after this debate too not only are lots of family and friends getting together but advanced polls open up so there's gonna be millions of people who may actually go and cast their ballot this weekend. So it's a really important moment. Yeah. I think I think it's still up for grabs to some extent. But what has to happen for that

to occur is is people are going to tune in tonight with some some first, second, third impressions that are either going to get confirmed or they're going to get kind of shaken up. And then what happens next, if you shake up that person who's like, I haven't made up my mind, I'm still weighing my options, but I have an inclination of what I might do, the conversations that come after, that's why this weekend is actually so important,

could be the thing that solidifies people, right? Because oftentimes you're either going to get in a fight with your family over politics or the conversation is going to confirm the things that you all are thinking about. So in the past, debates have mattered, but not to the extent that I think they need to if the conservatives are going to put themselves in a place where they can win this election. Like keep in mind that the conservatives are behind about on average five points right now nationally to the liberals in all the polls that we've seen to win an election, to win a majority,

they're going to have to beat the liberals by five or six points. So that's a like a 10 point swing in the polls that I don't think has happened in Canadian elections. So I'm still skeptical that unless something, again, catastrophic happens to one of the leaders tonight, I don't suspect that it's going to have a huge effect on the vote enough to fundamentally shift things. Right, right. Although I hadn't thought about what you just said about the long weekend

and how everybody's going to go see their families. You're right, like that will be a significant thing that's going to be happening across the country, whether people go and fight with their families or not about politics. Okay, thank you so much. Really appreciate it as always. My pleasure. We'll see you at election night. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you all tomorrow.