Quebec Liberals lose support in Montreal as CAQ’s popularity stabilizes: survey

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Behind the Liberals’ two-point drop in support hides a five-point drop in the Montreal area and 13 points among non-francophones.

Publishing date:

Mar 11, 2022 • 27 minutes ago • 2 minute read • Join the conversation

Quebec Liberal Leader Dominique Anglade speaks with the media as David Birnbaum, MNA for D'Arcy-McGee, looks on, at Dawson College in Montreal, on Feb. 24, 2022.
Quebec Liberal Leader Dominique Anglade speaks with the media as David Birnbaum, MNA for D’Arcy-McGee, looks on, at Dawson College in Montreal, on Feb. 24, 2022. Photo by Allen McInnis /Montreal Gazette

After seeing its popular support drop by four points in January, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir du Québec seems to have stabilized in March. It polled at 41 per cent, a staggering 23 points ahead of the second-place Quebec Liberals, a survey conducted for the Journal de Montréal suggests.

The results of the Léger Marketing online survey of 1,013 adult Quebecers, conducted March 4-6, delivers an overall message of bad news for Dominque Anglade’s Liberals and gets worse when the details are examined.

The Liberals seemed to have been stuck at 20 per cent in popular support in several polls conducted over the past few months and the latest survey suggests support has dropped further, to 18 points provincially. And while the Liberals have been able to presume that the Montreal area is its power base and non-francophone voters a reliable source of support, the survey suggests party support has dropped by 13 points among non-francophones over the past month. Support in the greater Montreal area dropped by five points, according to the survey.

Liberals scored dead last among francophone voters.

A Leger cock published in January suggested the CAQ had dropped four points in popularity to 42 per cent. Pollsters attributed the drop to growing public fatigue over COVID-19 health regulations. That number climbed to 41 per cent in February and remained unchanged in March.

The Quebec Conservative Party appeared to profit from that apparent discontent in January, seeing its support climb to 11 per cent from five per cent in December, and March’s survey sees Èric Duhaime’s right-of-centre party continue its steady, if slow, ascent. The Conservatives polled at 14 per cent in March, the same level of support as in February and shares third place in popularity with Québec solidaire, which climbed two points in March to reach 14 per cent.

With a provincial election less than seven months away, the Parti Québécois’s downward spiral continued, polling at 10 per cent in March, a drop of one point since February and three points since December.


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