New Projection

EKOS released a new poll today, and its results have been incorporated into the latest projection:
CON - 124
LIB - 104
BQ - 47
NDP - 33

Overall, the Conservatives lost 3 seats, while the Liberals gained 3. This is mainly due to some changes in Ontario, where the Grits are once again approaching 40%. Accordingly, you may have noticed that the background of this page got a bit lighter - indicating that we've moved closer to a tie and farther away from a Conservative majority.

While the latest poll has the Liberals within 0.3% of the Conservatives, my numbers show the Tories ahead by roughly a dozen seats based on this poll alone. This is what I referred to in this earlier post; note that the Ontario gap in this poll is indeed only 4.2%, which is good news for the Tories.

This poll also asked Canadians what kind of government (majority/minority and Liberal/Conservative) they prefer. Canadians are roughly equally divided into 4 groups, desiring:
1. a Liberal majority
2. a Conservative majority
3. a Liberal or Conservative minority
4. none of the above.
Worryingly for the Tories, only roughly 1/3 of Ontarians and 1/4 of Quebecers want to keep the CPC in office, while about 45% in both provinces want the LPC instead. If Ignatieff can start converting that goodwill into votes, the Grits can move up pretty quickly. However, even if the Liberals manage to win Ontario by a dozen point and get back to their 36-seat apex (2000 election) in Quebec, they would still be a dozen seats short of a majority without significant gains in other regions. Perhaps this is why Ignatieff is trying to win support in the West: it may not net seats in this coming election, but without the possibility of sweeping Ontario or Quebec in the foreseeable future, the Grits need a healthy number of seats out West to even hope for a majority.

Finally, an interesting snippet: in the EKOS poll, the Greens are in the lead among voters under 25, with 27% support. The sample size for that group is small though, so this lead is far from statistically significant.