Most Canadians Want Their Leaders To Try And Make Minority Government Work

Toronto, ON - According to a new Ipsos Reid survey conducted on behalf of CanWest News Service/Global News, most Canadians feel the minority-governing Conservatives and the opposition parties have a responsibility to try, as best as possible, to make the current government functional.

In particular when it comes to the governing Conservatives, strong majorities agree that they:

• "Have a responsibility to listen to the opposition parties and amend their policies to prevent being defeated"(78%, 39% "strongly agree"); and that they
• "Were elected on a clear platform and should implement these policies even if they risk being defeated by the opposition parties" (75%, 36% "strongly agree").

Further, most Canadians (57%) disagree with the statement "the Conservatives are too stubborn and unreasonable for the opposition parties to support" (24% "strongly disagree").

And as for the opposition, 86% feel that they "have a responsibility to work with the new Conservative government and should only defeat them as a last resort" (57% strongly feel this way).

But most agree (62%) agree that the "opposition parties aren't really interested in working with the Conservatives and will defeat them when it's to their political advantage".

These are the findings of an Ipsos Reid poll conducted for CanWest News Service/Global News and fielded from March 28-30th, 2006. For this survey, a representative randomly selected sample of 1000 adult Canadians was 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 Census data.

Please open the attached PDF to view the factum 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