New poll finds Jagmeet Singh most favourable of all federal leaders

Earlier this month, polling firm Angus Reid published the results of a recent poll measuring voter intention in federal politics.

Their survey found that participants were more likely to rate Jagmeet Singh of the federal NDP more favourably than any other federal party leader.

The online poll ran 14–17 May 2021. Of the randomized sample of over 1,600 adults in Canada, 46% said they viewed Singh favourably. Even though this is a minority of participants, it’s higher than his unfavourable rating, which was 42%.

His favourability rating was the highest of all the federal party leaders, and his unfavourability rating the lowest of the 3 largest parties.

Here’s how the party leaders fared in the poll:

	Singh (NDP)	Trudeau (Lib)	O’Toole (CPC)	Paul (Green)
Very favourable	11	10	5	3
Favourable	35	33	22	20
Unfavourable	19	19	26	15
Very unfavourable	23	35	28	14
Don’t know	12	4	18	48
Net favourable	46	43	27	23
Net unfavourable	42	53	55	29

As we can see, Singh has the highest favourability rating of all 4 leaders, and the second lowest unfavourability rating.

Now, that being said, Annamie Paul, the leader of the federal Greens had the lowest unfavourability, but that may have been influenced by the massive number of respondents who said they weren’t sure about her as a leader.

Nearly half of the respondents (48%) said they don’t know or can’t say whether they have an overall favourable or unfavourable view of Paul.

Not only did Singh have the highest net favourability rating, he also had the highest “very favourable” rating and the highest gross “favourable” rating, beating out the currently governing Justin Trudeau of the Liberals and the CPC’s Erin O’Toole of the official opposition.

Plus, he’s the only party leader who had more respondents view him favourably than unfavourably. It was the opposite for the other 3 leaders.

Here we see how the the opposition party leaders have fared over the last 8 months.

Of the ones listed here, Singh has had the smallest swing in favourability ratings, and he’s the only one who is rated higher now than he was at the beginning of the reporting period.

Here’s how Trudeau has fared over the last 2 years:

Trudeau is up 10 points from where he was 2 years ago, but he’s down 12 points from where he was 1 year ago. Since September—the same period as the opposition party leader graph above—he’s been fairly stable, dropping only 2 points in favourability.

Singh seemed to perform well among young voters, outdoing the other party leaders with participants 18–34 and 35–54.

	Singh (NDP)	Trudeau (Lib)	O’Toole (CPC)	Paul (Green)
Very favourable (18–34)	20	8	3	6
Favourable (18–34)	43	33	13	26
Very favourable (35–54)	12	11	5	3
Favourable (35–54)	35	35	23	20
Very favourable (55+)	5	9	6	2
Favourable (55+)	29	32	26	18

He also performed best among both participants who identified as men and women:

	Singh (NDP)	Trudeau (Lib)	O’Toole (CPC)	Paul (Green)
Very favourable (Women)	13	11	4	3
Favourable (Women)	39	39	17	23
Very favourable (Men)	8	8	7	3
Favourable (Men)	30	27	28	17

Singh also performed well among voters who voted Green, Liberal, and—unsurprisingly—NDP in the 2019 election, with a solid majority of these voters seeing him in a positive light.

	BQ	CPC	Green	Lib.	NDP
Very favourable	3	2	18	11	36
Favourable	23	7	50	51	49
Net favourable	26	9	68	62	85

Finally, here are how the 4 party leaders fared among various parts of the province for net favourability:

	Singh (NDP)	Trudeau (Lib)	O’Toole (CPC)	Paul (Green)
BC	51	43	29	28
Alberta	38	27	30	13
Saskatchewan	28	22	27	14
Manitoba	49	34	34	20
Ontario	50	44	26	28
Québec	40	50	28	20
Atlantic Canada	52	48	22	25

Singh beat out every party leader in every geographic region in the country. Well, except one. Trudeau was viewed most favourable in Ontario.

Now, all that being said, this is just one poll.

For example, a poll released from Abacus Data just 4 days before this one found that Singh had the second highest positive rating—not the highest—coming in just 6 points behind Trudeau.

However, his negative rating is much lower than Trudeau’s: only 25% compared to 43% for the current prime minister.

Now whether Singh can capitalize on this popularity remains to be seen. Both polls show that voters are more likely to choose the Liberals in the next election, compared to the NDP.

The Angus Reid poll showed that 34% of respondents intend to vote Liberals in the next election, compare to just 18% for the NDP. Abacus had the same proportion for the Liberals but a slight drop for the NDP at 17%.

The NDP are going to need more than just the most popular party leader if they’re going to win the next federal election, which could be as early as this fall.

The margin of error on the Angus Reid poll was ±2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.