Ipsos polling puts the federal Liberals at 44 percent, exactly the share they won on election day April 28, 2025, even as the party swept three federal by-elections. Pollsters say the flat number reflects voters who approve of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s handling of U.S. President Donald Trump without converting that approval into partisan support.
The stall matters because much of what has happened since the election would ordinarily be expected to lift the governing party. Trump has continued taunting Canada, including a move to rename Lake Ontario, while U.S. negotiators have bargained in bad faith on trade, and the Conservatives have endured a steady stream of floor crossings and resignations. The Liberals have meanwhile secured a working majority in the House of Commons, and Carney has built an international profile as a spokesman for middle powers since his speech in Davos.
Darrell Bricker, the chairman of Ipsos Canada, argued that the absence of movement is itself the central finding. “The most important thing this polling tells us is not why voters are moving, but why they aren’t,” he wrote. Bricker noted that the Conservatives are down eight points from the election and have likely lost some of their 2025 supporters to the Liberals, but the Liberals have in turn bled support to the NDP, which has gained more than any other federal party since the vote. The result is churn beneath the surface that leaves the Liberal topline unchanged.
Only 37 percent of Canadians believe Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives would do a better job managing the Trump administration, Bricker observed, four points higher than the share who say they would vote Conservative if an election were held tomorrow. He explained that with no election pending, Canadians face no forced choice: they can endorse Carney’s confrontation with Washington without becoming more Liberal, and can fret about their own finances without becoming more Conservative. Voters made their decision in 2025, he wrote, and are now watching and judging rather than re-voting.
The trade numbers expose a generational fault line. Ipsos found 63 percent of Canadians agree the country was right to stand firm against Trump even at the cost of higher tariffs and significant job losses. Agreement reaches 80 percent among Boomers but falls to 47 percent among Gen Z, a divide Bricker traced to economic circumstance rather than ideology. “Younger Canadians are living in an endurance economy that continues to punish them on affordability and diminish their hopes for the future,” he wrote. Older, more affluent Canadians who own their homes can regard modest economic pain as an acceptable price for national resolve, Bricker explained, while younger renters worried about their jobs see the prospect of more hardship as far more threatening. The same pattern, he noted, shaped the 2025 election.
Statistics Canada data show the pressures behind that split. Youth unemployment has climbed 57 percent in three years, and millennials aged 25 to 39 are twice as likely to live with their parents as Boomers were at the same age, 16.3 per cent in 2021 versus 8.2 per cent in 1991. The World Happiness Report ranked Canadians under 30 58th globally for life satisfaction, while Canadians over 65 placed among the top eight.
Bricker warned the calculus changes once an election is called. The question will then shift from whether Carney has stood up for Canada to whether Canadians believe their own lives have improved because of his government, he argued, a tougher test for younger voters with less room to absorb the economic cost of the standoff. Until then, he wrote, treating every floor crossing, by-election or diplomatic win as electoral arithmetic risks drawing connections the public has not made. Ipsos currently has the Conservatives at roughly 33 percent support, eight points below their election-day result.
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