For the first time since Justin Trudeau became Canadian prime minister in the 2015, his Liberal Party is trailing the opposition Conservatives.
An Ipsos poll commissioned by Global News released Friday shows the Conservatives with 38 percent of the vote and the Liberals with 33 percent.
That would translate into at least a minority government for the Conservative Party. The quasi-socialist New Democratic Party stood at 21 percent in the poll and the Green Party received five percent.
The poll was taken immediately after Trudeau’s widely-lampooned trip to India that featured daily photo ops, bogus trade deals and the presence of a convicted terrorist in Trudeau’s entourage.
The CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs said the drop of five percentage points for the Liberals is definitely a result of Trudeau’s extended negative media coverage.
“It’s the first time we’ve shown, since before the election, any time the Liberals have been behind. They’ve been consistently four or five points ahead of their nearest competitor; sometimes more than that for the last two years and a bit,” Darrell Bricker told Global News.
“The remarkable thing about it is very little of it has to do with any of the qualities of the opposition parties. This is really people evaluating the government on its own terms and the Liberal Party on its own terms.”