Poll: Dip in support for Liberals
Backing for McNeil government dropped seven points since January
Support for Nova Scotia’s Liberal government has dipped in the past three months, according to a poll released Friday.
The poll conducted with 600 Nova Scotians from April 17 to May 5 indicated a drop of seven percentage points among decided or leaning voters compared to a similar survey in January.
On the other hand, the NDP went up six percentage points to 23 per cent of popular support. That could be a measure of the labour sector’s disaffection with the Stephen McNeil government, according to an analyst with the firm that did the poll.
“When I see numbers that are going up or coming down, whether it’s marginal or significant, I always look at where they’re going,” MQO Research counsel Rick Emberley said in an interview Friday. “What I find frankly most interesting about these very current numbers is the fact that the support for the Liberals clearly has dropped, no question about that, but virtually the entire proportion of it has moved off to the NDP.
“I think there is a message in that. I think, as you know, a number of the issues and challenges and even controversies that have
been associated with government and with the current administration in recent times has been around areas associated with unions and challenges on the labour front in the province. I don’t think it would come as any surprise that that’s a relevant aspect of the deterioration (in Liberal support).”
The Liberal government has clashed with the Nova Scotia Teachers Union and health-care unions over its time in office since 2013.
The Atlantic Matters Spring 2018 poll results would leave the Liberals with the support of 40 per cent of decided or leaning voters.
That likely would still be enough for a majority government win on election day, Emberley said.
“Forty per cent of the vote in a competitive three-party environment can comfortably deliver a majority government. It’s no guarantee of a majority government but it’s certainly well within the margins, shall we say, of a majority government.”
One surprising result for Emberley was the unchanged range of support for the Progressive Conservatives, given the departure of former leader Jaimie Baillie amid sexual harassment allegations in January.
“I was surprised to see that number pretty well steady around the 30 percentile range,” he said.
But he added that the base support for the PCs in Nova Scotia does hover in that range, meaning that number would vote Conservative regardless of the political circumstances. This also applies to the roughly 15 to 18 per cent of people who vote NDP no matter what, and about 33 per cent for the Liberals.
Ratings for the leadership of Premier Stephen McNeil dropped “marginally” this quarter with a mean score of 4.8 on a 10-point scale, MQO said in a news release on the poll Friday.
In other results, support for the Green Party exhibited little change this quarter, at four per cent, and the undecide/no vote group held steady at 42 per cent.
The margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus four percentage points 19 times out of 20.
The poll also found more pessimism about Nova Scotia’s economy. In January, 26 per cent of Nova Scotians said they believed the economic outlook had worsened. That jumped to 36 per cent in the latest poll.
On the federal level, party support held relatively steady across the spectrum compared to October 2017. Among decided and leaning voters:
• Liberal support held steady at 53 per cent
• Conservative support was also relatively unchanged at 27 per cent
• NDP support held steady at 14 per cent
• Support for the Green Party exhibited little change at five per cent
• Nova Scotians’ support of Justin Trudeau’s leadership continued to trend downward in May. The mean rating dipping to 5.2 (down from 5.6 in October and 5.9 in April of last year).