B.C. NDP and Conservatives neck-and-neck ahead of 2nd campaign week, polls find

As the provincial election campaign nears the end of its first week. the latest opinion polls suggest the B.C. NDP and B.C. Conservatives are in a dead heat.

A Leger survey released Wednesday put the Conservatives two points ahead of the NDP – marking the first time John Rustad’s party has taken a polling lead.

An Angus Reid Institute survey released the same day put the two parties in a statistical tie, with 45 per cent of decided or leaning voters backing the NDP and 44 per cent backing the Conservatives. The Greens were a distant third, with 10 per cent voting intention among that group.

“A very close race,” said Angus Reid’s Dave Korzinski. “A lot of really close ridings … are going to decide this thing.”

Overall, one-in-five respondents in the survey remained undecided.

Both polls found NDP Leader David Eby has an edge on favourability over Rustad and Green leader Sonia Furstenau.

A significant number of respondents in the Angus Reid poll expressed concerns about Rustad's views on issues like climate change – something he acknowledges is real, but doesn’t call a crisis.

More than half (51 per cent) of those surveyed said they considered Rustad's views too extreme, while 34 per cent did not agree with that statement.

The data for the survey was collected through Monday morning, before the NDP launched an attack campaign that included videos showing Rustad expressing misgivings about the province’s handling of COVID-19 and regrets about getting the vaccine – something he later explained as a result of having a bad reaction to the shot.

“I think that the B.C. NDP is trying to take this exreme narrative – the conspiracy narrative – and cast it at him and the party as a whole,” said Korzinski.

But it’s not clear cut. The Leger poll found that less than 40 per cent of B.C. residents think the province is moving in the right direction, while more than half believe they are not.

The Angus Reid Institute survey was conducted online from Sept. 20 to 22, among a representative randomized sample of 1,215 Canadian adults who are members of the Angus Reid Forum.

Probability samples of that size would carry a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, 19 times out of 20, the company said.

The Leger poll was conducted from Sept. 20 to 23 among 1,001 B.C. adults “randomly recruited from LEO’s online panel,” according to the firm.

“A margin of error cannot be associated with a non-probability sample in a panel survey,” Leger said in a news release. “For comparison, a probability sample of 1,001 respondents would have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.”