Majority (61%) Agree With PM To Wait For Gomery Report And Call An Election 30 Days Later, Only 34% Indicate Spring Election Is Best For Country

Toronto, ON - According to a new Ipsos-Reid poll launched the day after Prime Minister Paul Martin's nationally televised address last Thursday and provided exclusively to CanWest/Global, the majority of Canadians (61%) are in agreement with Paul Martin and believe that it would be best to wait for the Gomery Report and call an election 30 days later - only 34% indicate the Liberals have lost the moral authority to govern and feel Canada should have a spring election.

This despite the fact that half of Canadians (49%) would describe Paul Martin's statement to the Canadian public on Thursday night as a "cynical attempt to hang on to power that has come too late to be sincere". Forty-four percent believe he "sincerely regrets what happened with the sponsorship scandal, and is serious about cleaning up corruption in Ottawa".

As for the vote, if an election were held today, 34% of the decided vote would be go to the Conservative Party (-1 point), 31% would go to the Liberals (+1 point), 18% would go to the NDP (unchanged), and 5% would go to the Green Party (unchanged). None of these changes represents a statistically significant movement in voter support.

And finally, when Canadians were asked whether their opinions of the various major parties and their leaders has improved, stayed the same, or worsened over the last few weeks: Jack Layton and the NDP (+12 points) are the only one that have a positive "momentum score", while Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have neither positive nor negative momentum. Meanwhile, Paul Martin and the Liberal Party (-40 points) currently has very negative momentum among the Canadian public.

These are the findings of an Ipsos-Reid poll provided exclusively to CanWest/Global and conducted from April 22nd to April 24th, 2005. For the survey, a representative randomly selected sample of 1000 adult Canadians were interviewed by telephone. With a sample of this size, the aggregate results are considered accurate to within 1773.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire adult Canadian population been polled. The margin of error will be larger within each sub-grouping of the survey population. These data were weighted to ensure the sample's regional and age/sex composition reflects that of the actual Canadian population according to the 2001 Census data.

Please open the attached PDF to view the full factum including graphical presentations and detailed tables.

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For more information on this news release, please contact:

Dr. Darrell Bricker
President & COO
Ipsos-Reid Public Affairs
(416) 324-2900