Canadians comfortable at the centre of the political spectrum: poll

It wasn't too long ago that right-leaning politicos were proclaiming that Canada is becoming more conservative.

A new poll, presented at the right-leaning Manning Centre's annual conference, suggests otherwise.

In fact, it looks like Canadians are reverting towards the centre of the political spectrum.

For the past five years, pollster Andre Turcotte has been asking Canadians the following question: "People often talk about a left and right in politics. Using a 1 to 7 scale where 1 is extreme left, 4 is centre and 7 is extreme right, where do you position yourself on this political ideology scale?"

Here are the response rates for the past two years:

Turcotte notes that this isn't a new trend: he told convention delegates that, since 2012, the ideological mean score has been shifting downward (ie: to the left).

"There hasn't been a lot of movement on this but unfortunately all the movement we've seen is...not in the direction that the conservative movement would have liked to see," he said on Friday at the Ottawa Convention Centre.

[ Related: Right-leaning Canadians descend upon Ottawa to discuss state of conservatism ]

When it comes to party politics, Turcotte highlighted some more bad news for the federal Conservatives.

When asked "which of the party affiliations do you most identify with" the Conservatives finished five points behind the Liberals with a score of 26 per cent.

When asked which party is best able to deal with the economy, they also finished second — again to the Liberals. And, maybe more surprisingly, when asked which party could best deal with 'unemployment' the Tories finished in third place.

Turcotte noted that the negative trends can't just be attributed to the new Liberal leader.

"This trend upward on party identification (for the Liberals) started two [years] ago," Turcotte said.

"It's easy to say, we had a bad year it's the Trudeau effect.

"There's a resilience to the Liberal brand that is frustrating for a lot of people. But there's that resilience and people are comfortable with that."

[ More Politics: Most Canadians don’t understand importance of Fair Elections Act: poll ]

Preston Manning — founder and former leader of the Reform Party — tried to put a positive spin on the numbers during an end-of-day media scrum.

"I've never been deterred by bad polls. Reform never had a majority poll and never had plurality poll," he said.

"What we use those types of polls to [do is] to show what's the work that has to be done. Where is the public's head?What can you do to get their confidence? I think that's the way to approach this poll."

A not so politically seasoned delegate put it a little more bluntly.

"There a constituency in this country that's Liberal. They'll lend their vote to the Conservatives from time to time as they lent their vote to Jack Layton in Quebec. But they'll go back Liberal" he said.

"We really have a big job to get those people to stick to a Conservative brand.

"We get them on good guys when the Ignatieff's and Dion'sare falling and flailing. But we got business to conduct. We've got a lot of work to do."

The poll was conducted online with 1,000 adult Canadians along with an oversample of 500 self-defined Conservatives. The interviews were conducted between December 16th to 18th, 2013. The margin of error for a representative sample of this size is 3.1 percentage points within a 95% confidence interval.

(Photo courtesy of the Canadian Press)

Are you a politics junkie?
Follow @politicalpoints on Twitter!