338 Sunday Update: Conservatives Slide as the Gap Widens

Federal polling stabilizes at unusually high levels for Mark Carney’s Liberals, while Conservative support continues to erode.

🍁Happy Sunday, dear 338Canada readers,

As we stated in last week’s update, federal numbers appear to have hit a plateau of late — and it’s an especially high one for the Liberals. The Conservatives, however, appear to have kept losing ground in the aggregate and are now hitting new lows, just as government approval continues to reach new highs.

Eric and I discussed the latest numbers — with a particular focus on age breakdowns — in last week’s episode of The Numbers.

Much has been said and written in recent weeks about Pierre Poilievre’s leadership and the state of the Conservatives in Canadian public opinion. We won’t dive into editorials here, but the data speak for themselves: this may be the lowest point for Poilievre’s CPC since 2022.

Let’s summarize the past week in the polls.

Abacus Data: Liberals Lead by 10 points

The newest federal numbers from Abacus were released this morning, and they were grim for the Conservatives: Mark Carney’s Liberals stand at 46% — tied for their highest level of support in Abacus polling since at least 2019. The Conservatives take 36% and the NDP 8%.

Regionally, the Liberals hold a 13-point advantage over the Conservatives in Ontario and a 22-point lead over the Bloc Québécois in Quebec. In British Columbia, Abacus also places the Liberals comfortably ahead: LPC 47%, CPC 35%.

Has Abacus followed the broader trends measured by other Canadian pollsters since the new year? While topline numbers still differ somewhat from firm to firm, the simple answer is yes. In January, Abacus measured a statistical tie between the main parties (see chart below). Since then, the Liberals have climbed into the mid-40s, while the Conservatives now sit closer to the mid-30s than the high-30s.

This movement in the polls matters enormously in the national picture. In the April 2025 election, 47 seats were won by either the Liberals or Conservatives by margins smaller than five points against one another (25 won by the Conservatives, 22 by the Liberals). Although movement inside these ridings would not necessarily be uniform, many of those Conservative-held seats would now fall within Liberal reach — while comparatively few of the Liberals’ narrow 2025 gains would become accessible to the Conservatives.

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