First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

TOP STORY

At a Wednesday rally for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in Brampton, Ont., reporters noted a curious coterie of attendees wearing white sweatshirts bearing the slogan, “Do you believe the polls?”

The group has not previously appeared at any kind of political gathering, and their only official web presence is an Instagram page with just 12 followers as of press time.

Outside the Poilievre rally: pic.twitter.com/vWA7epeKP8

— Laura Stone (@l_stone) April 10, 2025

This election has featured particularly volatile polls, and skeptics wouldn’t be wrong to note there are elections that are harder to track than others.

Still, a handful of people questioning public opinion surveys ended up inspiring a press question as to whether Poilievre himself was a poll skeptic and, by extension, likely to question the integrity of the election if it doesn’t go his way.

At a press conference on Thursday, Poilievre was asked if he believed the polls and would respect the results of the 2025 election.

“Yes, and that decision will be based on whether after a lost Liberal decade of rising costs and crime, and a falling economy, under America’s thumb, we can afford a fourth Liberal term,” he said.

Poll skepticism has cropped up before, as Conservatives experience the dissonance of witnessing the most enthusiastic campaign of their history, only to keep reading polls in which they’re destined to lose.

“Don’t believe the polls — just look at this crowd in Edmonton,” reads an X post this week by B.C. Conservative MLA Harman Bhangu. He was highlighting a Poilievre rally near the Edmonton International Airport that attracted 15,000 people, one of the largest Canadian partisan gatherings since the 1970s.

Early in the campaign, the conservative-leaning National Citizens Coalition also posted an image of a packed Poilievre rally with the caption, “Don’t believe the (Liberal) polls.”

One reason for the dissonance might be that the Conservatives are actually doing better in the polls than at any time in the 22-year history of the modern Conservative Party.

The problem for the Tories is that they’re hitting all-time highs in public support just in time for the Liberals to do the same thing.

In 2011, then Conservative leader Stephen Harper needed only 39.62 per cent of the popular vote to secure a majority government. Throughout the 2025 campaign, by contrast, there have been 16 polls in which the Conservatives charted higher than 40 per cent.

In any conventional election, they’d be well on their way to a majority win. But support for both the Bloc Québécois and the NDP has cratered, leading to a consolidation of the progressive vote around the Liberals unlike anything seen in the last 50 years.

Not since 1968 have the Liberals scored a share of the popular vote higher than 45 per cent. Throughout the 2025 campaign, the Liberals under Mark Carney have consistently charted at 45 per cent or higher.

Only four months ago, there wasn’t a single poll in Canada that wasn’t projecting a Conservative supermajority.

However, there hasn’t been a single poll conducted since the beginning of the campaign that hasn’t projected a vote share likely to result in a Liberal victory.

But polls are only projections of what might happen, and the Conservatives can at least take heart the polling in the 2025 election has been unusually volatile, leaving the door open to unexpected swings.

Even minor rebounds in support for the NDP or the Bloc could change the dynamic overnight. So could an unexpected surge in voter turnout.

And the polls aren’t always right. In October, the Saskatchewan provincial election yielded one of the largest polling gaps in the history of Canadian public opinion surveys: The Saskatchewan Party secured a 12-point victory, despite multiple polls showing them likely to lose by three points.

The aforementioned 2011 federal election is a leading example of why polls are not always representative of electoral outcomes.

Only hours before that election, one EKOS poll put the Conservatives at 33.9 per cent — barely enough for the party to win re-election as a minority government. It ended up being off by six points, and they won a majority with 11 seats to spare.

LET’S POLL

Speaking of polls, Abacus Data is now tracking a six point lead for the Liberals (42 per cent, to 36 per cent for the Conservatives). This is notable because Abacus has been one of the pollsters more favourable to the Tories. Their survey from last week showed a clean 38/38 tie between the two main parties. This is in part because Abacus has been weighting their results to reflect the fact that the Conservatives are likely to attract outsized numbers of non-voters to the polls.

But their latest 42/36 poll is being driven in part by eye-watering Liberal gains in Ontario and Atlantic Canada. Ontario was polling 47/37 for the Liberals, while the Atlantic provinces had them at 63/26.

POLICY CORNER

Most of this campaign has featured rehashes of policies that Canada has pursued before. Home-building schemes, tax cuts, apprenticeship incentives, pledges to expand energy production; all of them have appeared in prior elections to some degree.

What no leading Canadian politician has ever seriously proposed is a “three strikes” law for recidivist offenders. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre proposed such a law on Wednesday, albeit with a notable difference from the “three strikes” laws that have existed in the U.S. Whereas the Americans usually jailed someone for life after three criminal convictions, Canada would do it for 10 years.

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