Poilievre’s popularity helps Ford, poll finds
At the same time, displeasure with PM is dragging down Liberal Leader Crombie
Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s current popularity appears to be having a halo effect on Premier Doug Ford, a new Abacus Data poll suggests.
At the same time, embattled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is proving to be a drag on provincial Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie.
In the Abacus monthly tracking survey for the Star, Ford’s Tories were at 41 per cent to 27 per cent for Crombie’s Liberals, 21 per cent for Marit Stiles’s New Democrats and seven per cent for Mike Schreiner’s Greens.
By comparison, Poilievre’s Tories were at 44 per cent in Ontario to 28 per cent for Trudeau’s Liberals, 19 per cent for Jagmeet Singh’s NDP and four per cent for the Greens led by Elizabeth May.
Despite their private differences — Ford skipped a recent Poilievre rally in Etobicoke that was a nineminute drive from his home — the federal Tory leader appears to be giving the provincial Progressive Conservative premier a boost.
“Poilievre currently gets more attention in Ontario than the premier of Ontario does, so that’s probably a factor,” Abacus president David Coletto said Friday.
“A big part of the Poilievre halo is among younger voters in Ontario. They are very motivated,” noted Coletto.
Abacus surveyed 1,500 Ontarians from March 14 until Thursday using online panels based on the Lucid exchange platform. While optin polls cannot be assigned a margin of error, for comparison purposes, a random sample of this size would have one of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
The poll found the honeymoon for Crombie, a former Mississauga mayor who was elected party leader on Dec. 2, seems to have been brief.
“There’s no question it is a very hard thing to be a Liberal leader anywhere in the country now and Ontario is no exception,” said Coletto.
“As long as Trudeau is around — and the federal Liberal brand is as weak as it is — it’s bad news for Bonnie Crombie,” he said.
“Justin Trudeau’s unpopularity is the best thing that could happen to the PCs.”
But the pollster said if there is any silver lining for Crombie, it’s that “it gives her an excuse until she faces voters” in the June 2026 Ontario election.
Coletto said the survey’s findings are why it was politically “smart for her to go against the carbon tax.”
That’s a reference to Crombie on Monday announcing there would be no provincial carbon levy if her Liberals win the next Ontario election.
Abacus, meanwhile, found 44 per cent of the Tory respondents identified themselves as a “Poilievre Conservative.”
Just 20 per cent considered themselves a “Ford Conservative” while 33 per cent said they were “equally both” Poilievre and Ford Tories and two per cent were neither.
“They’re more likely to identify as a ‘Poilievre Conservative’ than a ‘Ford Conservative,’ but Doug Ford is not as unpopular as he was in the 2019 election when the federal Conservatives asked him to disappear,” said Coletto.
“So I don’t think Ford is depressing federal Conservative support,” he said.
In that 2019 campaign, the Tory leader Andrew Scheer refused to even mention the premier by name, while Trudeau sometimes cited Ford more than a dozen times in a single stump speech.
Although the Liberal prime minister and the Tory premier have since mended fences — and work closely on a range of issues, including massive subsidies for electric vehicle battery factories in Windsor and St. Thomas — 56 per cent of respondents believed Ford wants Poilievre to win a federal election expected by October 2025.
Only 17 per cent felt the premier wants Trudeau to win a fourth term and 27 per cent didn’t know.
But Coletto noted if a newly elected federal Tory government in the fall of 2025 begins making deep spending cuts, including reducing transfer payments to provinces, that could have an impact on the provincial PCs’ popularity.