Poll shows Liberals can no longer save themselves by ditching Trudeau

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Despite a fresh round of calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign, a new poll shows that the Liberal Party is already too far gone to be saved by his departure.

In a survey published Monday, the Angus Reid Institute found that a clear plurality of respondents were already disillusioned with the Liberals regardless of who was the helm.

“Jettisoning the unpopular prime minister may not do much to improve the party’s electoral fortunes,” concluded an analysis.

According to any number of polls, a huge majority of Canadians are already planning to vote against the Liberals. An Abacus Data poll from earlier this month found Liberal support at such historic lows that the party could be consigned to an unprecedented fourth place in a future House of Commons.

An Ipsos poll from the same period showed that 68 per cent of respondents wanted Trudeau to resign as prime minister.

But Angus Reid pollsters zeroed in on the 37 per cent of Canadians who were still “mulling” a vote for the Liberals in the next election. When asked what was most likely to dissuade them from marking a ballot for the Liberals, only 31 per cent said it was due to dislike of Trudeau.

The most popular reason for Liberal hesitancy — at 48 per cent — was the party’s “lack of progress on issues I find important.”

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What’s more, the poll found that the Liberal Party’s fortunes would probably do even worse if the party was handed to one of Trudeau’s likely successors.

The survey laid out 12 potential successors as Liberal leader, ranging from the likely (Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland) to the not-so-likely (Caroline Mulroney, a cabinet minister under Ontario Premier Doug Ford).

Even among Liberal-leaning voters, only two names were found to be slightly more attractive than Trudeau: Freeland and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. Everyone else — including serving cabinet ministers Dominic LeBlanc, Mark Miller and Mélanie Joly — were found to be more likely to scare aware Liberal votes than not.

“Overall, it appears that even a replacement leader would not in the near-term sway the general voting public to the Liberals,” wrote the institute.

While Trudeau’s personal popularity was instrumental in securing Liberal victory in 2015, it’s been more than a year now that he’s represented a net drain on the party’s poll results.

Trudeau’s personal approval is at an all-time low; the Angus Reid Institute’s Trudeau Tracker last pegged him with a rock-bottom 28 per cent approval rating, versus a 66 disapproval rating. He’s also consistently losing popularity polls to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — a phenomenon that didn’t really happen with prior Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole.

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But what the Angus Reid Institute poll seems to show is that the Liberals have passed the point of no return on warding off electoral disaster by adopting a new leader.

Notably, the poll was conducted before the shock results of the Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection were known. On Monday, a virtually unknown Conservative candidate was able to flip a Toronto riding that had stood for 31 years as one of the Liberals’ safest seats.

In the words of one observer, the results proved that there is no riding left in the country where the Liberals don’t face the possibility of defeat in the next general election.

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