OTTAWA — Partisan divides trump regional ones among Canadians,
from Leger Marketing and the Association of Canadian Studies.
Two-thirds of Canadians said they viewed relations between Liberal and Conservative supporters as either somewhat or very bad, with responses holding steady across all regions of the country.
This was significantly higher than the proportion who said the same of either Quebec-Canada or Alberta-Canada relations (33 per cent and 25 per cent, respectively).
The heat of the federal election campaign could be widening the partisan divide, said Jack Jedwab, the president and CEO of the Association for Canadian Studies.
“(People) are getting the impression from the coverage of the campaign that the parties are at each other’s throats,” said Jedwab.
Just under two in 10 respondents said that they thought Liberal-Conservative relations were either somewhat or very good.
This ranged from a low of 15 per cent in B.C. to a high of 21 per cent in Ontario.
Jedwab added that the “two-horse race” dynamic of this campaign, with the NDP, Bloc Québécois and Green Party struggling to gain any traction whatsoever, could be contributing to the polarization.
“This is the first time in a long time we’ve seen the top two parties get almost all of the media coverage, that could be contributing to the sort of ‘us-versus-them’ framing people are picking up on,” said Jedwab.
Respondents aged 55 and older had the dimmest view of Liberal-Conservative relations, with seven in 10 saying they were bad or very bad. Sixty-three per cent of 35 to 54 year-olds and 59 per cent of those under 35 said the same.
Jedwab said that one encouraging trend is that there’s little evidence that so-called “culture wars” issues like guns, abortion and multiculturalism are driving the division, has been the case in the U.S. in recent years.
“There’s more overlap and far less polarization when it comes to the issues themselves,” said Jedwab.
The Liberal and Conservative campaigns both recently released big-spending platforms, each promising to add more than $100 billion to the national debt over the next four years.
The platforms also include similar tax cuts for working Canadians and home buyers, as well as similar supports for Canadian workers affected by U.S. tariffs.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said
restricting access to abortion if he becomes prime minister.
Jedwab said that this convergence isn’t surprising as the perceived uptick in ill-will between Liberals and Conservatives doesn’t change the fundamentals of campaign strategy in Canada.
“We’ve historically been governed from the centre-left or centre-right, not from ideological extremes,” said Jedwab.
He added that much of where Liberal-Conservative relations go from here will depend on whether the NDP and Bloc rebound from what’s almost certain to be a disappointing election result.
“People do tend to dig in their heels a bit more in a two-party system and start to see partisanship as more a part of their identity.”
The poll also found that Albertans and Quebecers, respectively, had a sunnier view of their provinces’ relations with the rest of Canada than respondents in other provinces.
Sixty-five per cent of Quebecers said Quebec-Canada relations were either somewhat or very good, versus 53 per cent of all respondents.
For Albertans, this spread was 56 per cent to 51 per cent.
Jedwab says that this disconnect stemmed, in part, from the national visibility of sovereigntist figures like Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet and
Reform party founder Preston Manning.
“Both (Blanchet and Manning) like to give the impression they are speaking for most Albertans and Quebecers, respectively, when in effect they’re speaking for an important minority that are most aggrieved.”
The survey was taken between April 17 and 19, using a sample of 1,603 adults recruited from a Leger-founded panel. Online polls are not considered representative samples and thus don’t carry a margin of error. However, the poll document provides an estimated margin, for comparison purposes, of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com
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