Olympic gold medals for Canada do not translate into votes for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, according to a new national opinion poll.
Indeed, there is no so-called gold medal bounce for the Tories as Nik Nanos’s new “Nanos Tracking Poll” has the Conservatives in a statistical tie with Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals - Conservatives are polling at 34.7 per cent compared to 34.6 per cent for the Liberals.
The NDP are at 17.8 per cent, the Bloc is at 7.7 per cent with the Green Party showing 5.2 per cent. There are 19.6 per cent undecided.
“In the case of the Olympics, it was a bit of wishful thinking that if Canada wins gold that would translate into a warm feeling for the Conservative Party of Canada,” said Mr. Nanos today.
He added that the fact that the recent budget was a “stay-the-course” document meant that there was “not a lot there to propel Conservative numbers.”
His poll of 1,000 Canadians was conducted between March 6 and March 12. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, plus or minus 19 times out of 20.
Sometimes budgets that put more in the window than this one - tax cuts, home renovation tax credits and other goodies - can move the numbers, he said.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s budget did none of that, promising instead to freeze public service salaries and spending.
And so what is clear now, says Mr. Nanos, is that there will be no election soon. The budget and Throne Speech were not a “launching pad” for a general election campaign.
He is predicting an election in the fall or spring of 2011 before the next budget, which is expected to be tougher with deeper cuts.
(File photo: Cris Bournoncle/AFP/Getty Images)
