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FIRST READING: Why the massive Liberal poll leads might be an illusion

Veteran pollsters says survey are chronically undercounting Conservatives by up to seven points

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FIRST READING: Why the massive Liberal poll leads might be an illusion Back to video

As the Liberals enjoy some of the most explosive polling leads in Canadian history, a leading pollster is suggesting that it’s mostly a product of mathematical error.

This week, Abacus Data CEO David Coletto suggested that many of his peers are chronically undercounting Conservative voters, presenting a “distorted version” of the electorate to the public.

“I do not believe that other pollsters are purposively doing anything wrong,” he wrote in an online post. He then suggested that Canadian surveys were routinely showing “a larger Liberal advantage than may actually exist in the electorate.”

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Abacus Data’s own surveys have indeed been showing a Liberal lead for the last few months, but not at the same margins as other polls.

One of their most recent surveys, published on March 24, showed the Liberals with a seven-point lead over the Conservatives (44 per cent Liberal to 37 per cent Conservative).

This is way out of step with other Canadian pollsters, all of whom are reporting a Liberal lead of at least 10 points.

An Ipsos poll on April 7 tracked a lead of 12 points (45 per cent Liberal, 33 per cent Conservative). A Leger poll on March 30 recorded a lead of 14 points (48 per cent to 34 per cent).

And a particularly dramatic mid-March poll by Ekos recorded a lead of more than 20 points; 47.5 per cent Liberal to 27 per cent Conservative. This particular survey represents one of the largest Liberal poll leads ever recorded in the history of Canadian opinion polling.

“I don’t believe the Liberals are leading by double digits,” wrote Coletto in an April 11 social media post. He added that the disparity was arising due to “under representation of conservative voters.”

I don’t believe the Liberals are leading by double digits and I’ll have a new analysis of 10+ years of Abacus Data and the under representation of conservative voters in samples coming out next week. The 2025 election is also an interesting case study.If you aren’t trying to… https://t.co/BtVeXEXj2j— David Coletto 🇨🇦 (@DavidColetto) April 11, 2026

I don’t believe the Liberals are leading by double digits and I’ll have a new analysis of 10+ years of Abacus Data and the under representation of conservative voters in samples coming out next week. The 2025 election is also an interesting case study.If you aren’t trying to… https://t.co/BtVeXEXj2j

In a follow-up analysis published on the official Abacus Data website, Coletto suggested that the problem lay in how surveys were being weighted.

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Even a poll with a sample size of a few thousand people isn’t going to be an accurate reflection of the Canadian electorate. The way pollsters traditionally get around this is by tweaking the results based on demographics such as region or age.

As an example, Manitobans represent about four per cent of the Canadian population. So if a pollster has a sample that’s only two per cent Manitobans, they might decide to give those responses extra weight in order to more accurately reflect Manitoba’s share of overall Canadian public opinion.

Coletto’s claim is that demographic weighting, on its own, is consistently misrepresenting the share of the Conservative vote, and blowing out the Liberal lead.

The blog post was motivated in part because Abacus Data keeps delivering numbers that are way more favourable to the Conservatives than any other pollster.

As recently as January, Abacus Data had the Conservatives and Liberals tied at 40 per cent, when everybody else was tracking a Liberal lead of between three and five points.

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For the entire latter half of 2025, in fact, Abacus Data was one of only two Canadian pollsters (along with the Angus Reid Institute) that was consistently tracking a mild Conservative lead.

Almost everywhere else during this same period, the Liberals were shown as being well ahead of the Tories.

As to why Abacus Data’s numbers are consistently tighter than his competitors, Coletto said this is because they employ “past-vote weighting,” which also weighs the answers of poll respondents based on how they voted in the most recent federal election.

“It remains imperfect. But it is, in our view, a better option than relying only on region, demographics, and education,” he wrote.

As evidence, Coletto reviewed Abacus Data’s poll results from the last five federal elections, and found that when subjected exclusively to demographic weighting they all undercounted the Conservative results.

“In every single wave, across every single election cycle, Conservative voters are underrepresented in our demographically weighted sample relative to their actual share of the vote,” he wrote.

What’s more, the scale of the misrepresentation got worse with each subsequent election. In 2011, Coletto found that if their numbers were only weighted demographically they undercounted the final Conservative vote share by 1.8 points.

By 2025, if Abacus had only been using demographic weighting, they would have missed the mark by 7.6 points.

“Looking at our final polls in the last three federal elections, applying past vote weighting increased Conservative vote estimates, reduced Liberal vote estimates, and brought our numbers closer to the actual result,” wrote Coletto.

A new report by RBC has estimated that Canada lost $1 trillion in investment between 2015 and 2024.

RBC called it “the largest capital exodus in Canadian history” and an “unprecedented capital recession.” The total amount of capital flight is the equivalent of losing $300 million per day for nine consecutive years.

“Canada now ranks last among G7 nations in investment in both machinery and equipment (M&E) and intellectual property (IP),” it reads.

It’s also a big part of the reason that Canadian productivity — and thus Canadian wages and living standards — have effectively flatlined during that time, even as they continued to rise unabated in the United States.

But the report is generally optimistic that all this capital flight could reverse itself, provided that Canada stops scaring away investment with “burdensome regulatory, permitting and project delivery barriers.”

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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