A new poll suggests that if Mark Carney wins the Liberal leadership race, he would erase the massive lead the Conservatives have enjoyed for the past year and a half.
A Leger survey suggests a Carney-led party would boost Liberal support by six points to 37 per cent, putting them in a dead heat with the Tories.
"He's the new flavour on the menu and he definitely seems to be capturing not just Canadians' attentions but also Liberal attention," said Leger pollster Andrew Enns.
The poll says the Liberals are currently at 31 per cent support, Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives are still riding high in majority territory at 40 per cent and Jagmeet Singh's New Democrats are trailing far behind at 14 per cent.
Leger recorded a six-point bump in Liberal support since Jan. 26, after weeks of headlines about U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff threats and calls for Canada to become a U.S. state.
The pollster suggests support for a Liberal party led by Chrystia Freeland would slide three points to 28 per cent, with Conservatives at 39 per cent.
“Chrystia Freeland doesn't have the same impact on the ballot as Mark Carney would in a head-to-head race with Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh,” Enns said.
The poll suggests Freeland faces another big problem.
When asked who they trust most to defend Canada's interests from Trump, about 20 per cent of Canadians polled by Leger picked Carney and 20 per cent chose Poilievre. Freeland was the choice of just six per cent of those polled.
“Freeland predicated her leadership campaign on being the Trump fighter in hopes that it would push down and push out voter thinking that she was Trudeau's right-hand person for the last nine years in office,” Enns said.
“She hasn't been successful in that and you can see where Carney, on the other hand, is sucking the oxygen out of the room for all the other Liberal leadership candidates.”
Leger says Carney registered 68 per cent support among Liberal voters, followed by Freeland's 14 per cent. Former Liberal House leader Karina Gould polled at three per cent, just behind "someone else," which registered four per cent.
Former Liberal MPs Frank Baylis and Ruby Dhalla are also running in the race to replace Trudeau on March 9.
The online poll reached 1,590 adults between Feb. 7 and Feb. 10. The polling industry's professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
