The polls are surely causing the federal Liberals some sleepless nights.
The Conservatives have been consistently in the lead since October of last year. 338Canada, a poll aggregator, predicts a 50 per cent chance of a Conservative minority, and a 40 per cent chance of a Conservative majority.
Now, there are structural factors in Canadian politics that make Liberal votes more efficiently distributed than Conservative ones, but there are also trends that will worry them, like eroding support in Atlantic Canada, which has long been both a reliable bulwark of support for the party and has a disproportionate number of seats in relation to its population.
It isn't as if Canadian party leaders haven't won four consecutive elections in the past, but it isn't common.
Still, if a week is a long time in politics, a great deal can and will change, for good or ill, in the 26 months between now and October of 2025, the date the next federal election must be held by.
It's been suggested that the federal Liberals might do well to use that time to select a new leader. Chrystia Freeland's name comes up a lot, as does Mark Carney's and Anita Anand's. Trudeau, for his part, has said he plans to lead the party into the next federal election.
In an online poll this week, Village Media readers overwhelmingly thought that the Liberals would be better off if they went into the next election with a new leader.
The wording of the poll is worth a look - we asked people whether Trudeau leading the Liberals into the next election would be good or bad for the Liberals, regardless of their own political views.
So, pretty overwhelming. As we've said before, though, a poll of Village Media readers skews well older than the mainstream public, and outside Ontario's largest cities.
For what it's worth, a recent national poll showed 53 per cent support for Trudeau leaving before the next election (and 51 per cent for Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre doing the same), though asking people what they think should happen and what they think is in the interests of the federal Liberals to happen is of course different.
Men, in a pattern we've seen before, were more negative about Trudeau than women:
People of all educational backgrounds thought Trudeau should go, though university-educated respondents were less negative about him:
The younger the respondent, the more likely they were to say Trudeau should go:
There wasn't a very clear regional pattern in the responses:
