| Blair. Bush. Howard. Sharon. Koizumi. And now Harper. |
Two new polls gave the Conservative Party a strong lead in the run-up to the January 23 federal election, and a projection based on several surveys said they could be within three seats of a majority. A Strategic Counsel poll for The Globe and Mail and CTV News said support for the Conservatives held steady at 39 percent, while support for the ruling Liberal Party slipped by one point to 27 percent.An EKOS poll for The Toronto Star and La Presse put the Conservatives at 37.6 percent and the Liberals at 28.3 percent. A previous EKOS survey put the Conservatives at 39.1 percent and the Liberals at 26.8 percent. "The race is now the Tories' (Conservatives') to lose, and their game looks pretty sound," EKOS President Frank Graves told the Toronto Star. "If (Prime Minister) Paul Martin and the Liberals are not able to disrupt this pattern in the next few days, the only remaining question will be whether it is a Conservative minority or a Conservative majority on election night."
The Globe and Mail said number crunching from several Strategic Counsel polls projected that the Conservatives would win 152 seats in the new Canadian Parliament, more than twice the 74 seats projected for the Liberals. There are 308 seats in Parliament, so a party needs 155 seats to win a majority.
The anti-Liberal backlash was especially strong in French-speaking Quebec, where they trailed behind the Bloc Quebecois, a party that backs Quebec independence and campaigns only in the province. But the Conservative resurgence has affected voting intentions in Quebec as well, and the Strategic Counsel survey put support for the Conservatives in Quebec at 23 percent, compared with 48 percent for the Bloc and 18 percent for the Liberals. The Conservatives have no seats in Quebec at present. "If they are going to have a breakthrough, it will be outside of Montreal and at the expense of the Bloc," pollster Allan Gregg told the Globe and Mail. Another key electoral battleground is Ontario, Canada's most populous province, and both pollsters said the Conservatives appeared poised for big gains there.