More Canadians pick Carney over Poilievre when asked who ran the best campaign

OTTAWA — As the federal election winds down, a large number of Canadians are telling one pollster that Liberal Leader Mark Carney has turned in the best performance of the campaign.

A Leger/Canadian Press poll suggests that 39 per cent of Canadians think Carney is leading the best campaign, while 29 per cent say Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is running the best race.

Just 5 per cent picked NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, while 21 per cent said they’re not sure.

Carney scores best on campaign performance in Atlantic Canada, at 44 per cent, closely followed by both British Columbia and Ontario, at 43 per cent. He gets his highest score from voters 55 years old and above, at 48 per cent, compared with Poilievre, who got the best campaign nod among 25 per cent of respondents in that age group.

Poilievre’s campaign, meanwhile, gets its highest ratings in Alberta, at 42 per cent, followed by Manitoba and Saskatchewan at 38 per cent. He scored 34 per cent with voters between 18 and 34 years old, while Carney’s campaign got the top mark from 32 per cent from that group.

“A lot of this is driven by your supporters, right? Obviously, if you’re supporting Liberal, you’re inclined to select that your guys are doing a better job, and there are more Liberals right now in that voter pool than Conservatives,” said Andrew Enns, Leger’s executive vice-president for Central Canada.

“The other side of this is that with the Conservative campaign … there’s been kind of a story a week of a strategist going out saying this thing’s off the rails or they lost a big lead, what’s going on? So that’ll dampen that best-campaign enthusiasm.”

Poilievre’s campaign has taken some very public shots from within the Conservative tent. Earlier this month, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s campaign manager Kory Teneycke accused Poilievre’s team of “campaign malpractice” for blowing a lead of nearly 25 points and failing to pivot to confront the threat posed by U.S. President Donald Trump and his trade war.

Asked to react to Teneycke’s comments, Ford defended him.

“Sometimes the truth hurts,” he said.

At five per cent, the share of poll respondents picking Singh as the best performer of the campaign is three points lower than the percentage of Canadians polled by Leger who say they plan to vote NDP.

“So they’re having a tough campaign,” Enns said.

Leger surveyed 1,603 Canadian adults online from April 17 to 21. The Canadian Research Insights Council says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

The poll shows Poilievre and Carney virtually tied on the question of who won the April 17 televised English leaders’ debate, with 39 per cent choosing Poilievre as the winner and 38 per cent picking Carney.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet was chosen by 31 per cent of respondents as the winner of the French debate, followed by Carney at 27 per cent — suggesting he may have surpassed expectations given his early campaign struggles with communicating in French.

“He did OK. He didn’t really exceed (expectations) by a ton, but it wasn’t terrible either. In that sense he was fine,” Enns said.

“I think the debates had a pretty marginal impact on actual voting behaviour.”

When asked which leaders performed “better than expected” in the French debate, 36 per cent chose Carney. When asked the same question about the English debate, 32 per cent picked Poilievre.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2025.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press