Uh, how are people feeling about the leaders?

Yeah, right now, um, with, with David Eby, we're seeing a majority of British Columbians say they have an unfavorable view of him.

And that, and that's pretty consistent with the numbers that we've seen, uh, even prior to the election, where a majority said they disapproved of the job he was doing, uh, at premier.

Uh, it, I think what is more interesting, because, uh, like you said, a lot of people probably already know Eby, have had their minds made up about him, is the, is those other two leaders.

So the, Lauren Dirksen, who was, uh, very unknown kind of stepping into the campaign.

Uh, at, at the outset on September 24th, we, we had 40% saying that they, uh, did not know enough to have an opinion about him.

And now that number's down to 16%, and it's, uh, it's split between positive and negative.

They don't seem to be resonating too well there.

When we take a look at Lauren Dirksen specifically, can we infer what we've seen so far is a trend? Might it be a bump? Any thoughts?

Yeah.

I think that's a little bit of a tough one.

I feel like a lot of people in the province are probably just getting to know him.

Uh, with all the upheaval with the Conservative Party, we've had a couple leaders [laughs] over the last, uh, eight months or so, uh, nine months or so since, uh, John Rustad led the party in the 2024 election.

Then we had Carrie Lynn Finley, uh, as, uh, uh, elected earlier this year, and she left just, just less than a week ago.

And so I don't know if people really have gotten to know Lauren Dirksen well so far.

Is this poll going to be anomalous? Is it the beginning of a trend? Is it the peak, and then the Conservatives sort of fall off after this? So what are we watching for next in terms of timing?

What's the status?

Yeah, I mean, this is a, I feel like we've been hearing, I've been reading a lot of stories about how the job market is terrible.

People aren't hearing back from the jobs they're applying to.

They have to apply to hundreds of jobs to even get one interview, these kinds of things.

And we wanted to do a survey just to explore some of these issues.

So we asked Canadians, okay, are you looking for a job yourself or do you know somebody in your household or a close friend that is doing it? And what is their experience so far? And among that group of people, four or five people say that the job market right now is either bad or terrible.

And a lot of those issues are coming up.

Do we see any sectors that are particularly hit hard worse than others?

What do we take from that?

Yeah, I think what's perhaps at issue is that I think there's just a concern for how this is going to play out across the rest of the province.

So in Haida Gwaii, people were looking at that situation and said, yeah, this solution makes the most sense here, but perhaps elsewhere it doesn't make as much sense.

And I think that's kind of, I guess, the juxtaposition there where people are – are a little bit afraid, I think, of what these decisions could potentially mean as they kind of spread out across the province.

And I think once we get to this more recent polling, I think that's what we're seeing play out is that we ask Canadians or we ask people in B.C. specifically, do you think this is a serious decision because it affects private property rights and could affect private property rights across the country? Or do you think it's not that serious because the Cowichan Nation in this case is saying that, yeah, we're not looking to infringe on private property rights.

This is more about the Crown lands, the lands... belonging to the city of Richmond in those cases.

And so people are looking at it and saying, yeah, this is very serious because it could affect private properties elsewhere.

So how do we track that change over time?

Have you polled on repealing the tanker ban and whether it would be complete or an exception or anything else?

Yeah, that was included in these numbers that we released today because obviously for that project to go forward, you need to take the tanker ban out of it.

There has to be tankers coming to the coast to take oil from this theoretical pipeline.

And we asked, okay, so what should the government do? Should they repeal the tanker ban completely, allow an exception for this project? That's what Daniel Smith is maybe suggesting, that perhaps they could just do a carve-out where it's like, okay, only from this port tankers are allowed.

Or we should just leave the tanker ban in place.

23% of Canadians say repeal the tanker ban completely.

26% say allow an exception for this project.

OK, because I was curious if we have any polling on First Nations community support, because I know that that is something that the premier has mentioned, including today as being among his chief concerns, is that some folks, especially coastal First Nations, might be so opposed to a pipeline or lifting the tanker ban that it might actually result in them pulling their support for other projects in protest.

How big of a role will labor unrest or on the alternative labor peace play in British Columbia polling for EB going forward, would you think?

Well, I think what's interesting about this labor unrest is that they've somewhat taken a hard line to the request from the union.

And typically you would say that a BCNDP government, a lot of people I think would expect them to be a little bit more sympathetic to unions.

And I think you would expect that as well from the people who support those BCNDP in the last election.

And I think what we're seeing from this approval decline is a lot of people who voted BCNDP saying, yeah, actually, I don't really like the job that EB is doing right now.

Because a lot of the people that voted Conservative were already saying, I don't like the job that David Eby is doing.

So I think that is interesting how this plays out, because that could affect people who voted BC NDP last election saying, OK, well, maybe I don't like the job that Eby is doing more so than they previous had been.

What would you expect to see going forward in terms of policy issues that the government would be focusing on?

But going into this morning, where was the national mood in terms of Pierre Paulievin, his likability and his viability?

Yeah, I think what we've seen over time is that Canadians have never really warmed up to Pierre Polyev.

We've tracked his favorability of him dating back to when he first took over as leader of the Conservative Party in September 2022.

The highest I think we've ever seen his favorable number has been just slightly over 40% of Canadians saying they had a favorable view.

Typically now it's the majority that say they have an unfavorable view.

We decided to do this poll where we looked at some statements we presented to Canadians asking questions about Pierre Polyev in December of 2023.

And we wanted to revisit them because obviously now we're talking about him again with him getting back into Parliament and with the National Convention for the Conservatives coming up in January.

But if the Conservatives want to put together a viable option to be the government in waiting, how does that change things?

Help us understand what's happening here.

Well, we wanted to take a look at the central issue that's at this dispute between Air Canada and its flight attendants, and that's the issue of ground pay.

So currently, as it stands, flight attendants don't get paid unless they're in the air.

So when they're loading people on the plane, when they're offloading people off the plane, that's all unpaid work.

And so flight attendants want, basically, they've said they want to be paid their full salary for all those hours.

Air Canada has offered them about half, I think, in the most recent offer.

And that's where they're at this impasse.

Yeah, because I'm just reading in the details of the release here, noting that hating airlines is somewhat of a societal pastime that we have here in Canada, which, of course, raises the question, how concerned should Air Canada be if people suddenly don't like it? I mean, they don't like the opposition or excuse me, the competition much either, from what I hear.

Is the issue a practice involving, say, like one person being a financial agent for many candidates? Is the practice just having a number of candidates come onto the ballot when you can't argue that they're all really trying to win? They're just there to make a point? Like, what do we mean when we say the longest ballot?

Yeah, we tried to frame it in a couple different ways.

So we first asked a question asking people how closely they had been following this issue.

We brought up the longest ballot committee and their protests.

So they're looking to bring attention to the issue of electoral reform.

They believe that politicians shouldn't be the ones deciding how our elections, the rules of our elections and how they go about, I guess, voting for people and those kind of things.

They're looking for more proportional representation, I believe.

I'm just wondering, how long is it going to take to count all of these?

Is it the Trump effect?

Yeah, I think in David Eby's case, it certainly is.

So the 46% approval that we currently have Eby at is very much in line with what we've seen from him over his time in the Premier's office.

It's very interesting.

It's very, very little up until that March 2025 data that we took.

It's been 46 percent, 48 percent, 45 percent, 48 percent and so on, kind of bouncing between those two numbers.

And then we get to March and he jumps up to 53 percent.

When we take a look at and compare and contrast, for example, what we see with Ford, Legault and EB, is there anything that stands out with any of those three or are they all similar in terms of what we're seeing?

does appear to be growing among liberal voters who have yet to definitively commit to their preferred choice in the ongoing federal election we last checked in with him a week ago joining us once again is john rowe research associate with angus reed institute with the latest john afternoon thanks for the time yeah thanks for having me on again adam uh last week when you and i spoke it was stability was the order of the day we were speculating as to whether or not that would continue what have we seen

Well, we're seeing more stability a week later.

We have the race changing slightly, but it's still within the margin of error in the changes between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

We have the Liberals about 46% of vote intention, Conservatives about 36%.

So that's a 10-point lead.

Last week, we had an 8-point lead.

But still, that's within the margin of error.

Can that gap be closed with only a few weeks left?

Where are we seeing that now compared to where it has been?

Yeah, right now we have just among men, so all men of all ages, the Conservatives lead by just two.

It's 44% of men said they would vote Conservative if the election was today, 42% say they would vote Liberal.

Among women, it's 51% say they would vote Liberal, and 32% would vote Conservative.

And we have typically seen that gap increase.

Between those two parties, as you mentioned, and typically dating back even to, say, the first Trudeau election in 2015, he won women by a large margin, and especially older women have always kind of consistently been Liberal supporters.

But what we are kind of seeing is that that gap is somewhat persisting and growing in some ways because we've seen a lot of voters kind of return to the Liberal Party and turn away from the Conservatives.

What would happen if those people suddenly started to try to come back to save the NDP? Or is that possible?

How solid are these votes, i.e., how committed are these voters? Because I know that's something you and I have discussed in the past, that just because one party might be ahead of the other in standings at the moment does not mean that their support is as durable as the others is.

Yeah, for sure.

We're seeing that it's a continuation of data that we've seen previously where Conservative voters are much more likely to say that they're very committed.

72% of them say that they're very likely to follow through with their vote into the election.

They're not looking elsewhere for their vote.

For the Liberals, it's only about half of them that say that.

And kind of concerningly for the NDP, it's 32% of their current voters say the same thing.

It's surprising, given how dire 2021's election seems, that you'd see so many Canadians describe this election as way more important than even that.

And that's ahead of the Conservatives.

Yeah, it's ahead of the Conservatives.

So I think part of what we're looking at here is kind of the disappearing of voters from NDP.

They're kind of fleeing to the Liberals in a lot of ways.

As well, I think perhaps it's Pierre Polyev and his general unlikeability among Canadians coming back to bite him.

Even since we first looked at how people viewed Pierre Polyev when he was first elected as CBC leader back in 2022, most people had an unfavorable view of him.

So that's continued throughout his time.

Where's the floor for them?

So what sort of a snapshot are we seeing right now?

Well, we were looking at kind of Canadians' response or how they want their government to respond to these tariffs.

We asked first in January about a range of measures, so responding with 25% tariffs across the board, much like the U.S. has, except for on energy, of course, or targeted tariffs on certain exports, or maybe even going further and embargoing and banning critical exports that Canada has to the United States.

And what we've seen is an increase of support for those measures since January.

So it was already at a majority level for each of those, but now we're seeing 66% of Canadians wanted 25% tariff on all exports, 70% say they wanted tariff on certain exports, and 65% want an embargo or ban on critical Canadian exports to the U.S.

What would be good enough for Canadians? What do we want?

Well, they want the Trump tariffs to be removed entirely.

And it's interesting to hear that that just seems to be the perspective of Doug Ford, as you're mentioning the electricity tariffs that they're putting on as soon as Monday.

Where do we stand on public opinion on these issues?

Yeah, I mean, obviously grown in significance because of these tariff threats and the numbers you outlaid at the top there, how important the U.S. is for our oil and gas industry.

So we wanted to take a look at it and see how opinion has changed.

We had surveyed about pipelines and especially these ones that we were discussing.

Some of the canceled pipelines are ones that never got built, including Energy East.

and Northern Gateway.

We haven't surveyed about them for a while because it seemed like somewhat of a dead issue in a lot of ways.

When we take public sentiment like this and we try to translate it into what policymakers should do, do we see any change on the horizon right now?

When we take a look at the prospects of moving forward under either of these two leaders, do we drill down on any issues at this point or is that still too early?

Well, what we do have is we ask kind of with most of our surveys what people consider are the top issues.

And we can kind of compare those pool of people that say that they would vote for the Liberals under Carney and the people that would say they would vote for the Liberals under Chrystia Freeland.

And we can see what issues they kind of rank highly.

And there is a bit more concern about economic issues for the people under who would vote for Carney.

So it's about 59% in that group say that the cost of living is kind of their top issue.

49% say under the Freeland voters say that's their top issue.

Is there anything else we haven't touched on yet that really stands out to you on this before we let you go? Well, I thought there was an interesting kind of split