Peter MacKay, Kevin O'Leary out to Early Lead among Canadians
as Potential Leader for Conservative Party

Toronto, ON - Peter MacKay and Kevin O'Leary have the early lead as the potential candidates who Canadians would choose to lead the federal Conservative Party, according to a new Ipsos Poll conducted on behalf of Global News. While both MacKay and O'Leary lead the field of nine potential candidates on awareness and potential vote choice among Canadians, positive impressions among those aware of MacKay are significantly higher than impressions of O'Leary, who appears more divisive.

Name Recognition and Impressions Key in Early Stages

At the early stages of the race, name recognition is particularly important for declared and prospective candidates, and there is a big difference in awareness among the nine names tested. Six in ten Canadians say that they have heard of Peter MacKay (60%) and Kevin O'Leary (57%), but fewer have heard of Tony Clement (45%), Maxime Bernier (37%), Candice Bergen (35%), Lisa Raitt (26%), Michael Chong (16%), Kellie Leitch (14%) and Erin O'Toole (9%). Within Quebec, Maxime Bernier (69%) naturally has the most name recognition, followed by Peter MacKay (56%) with the next most recognized name being Tony Clement (23%), who is well behind.

Among those who know each respective name, some are liked more than others. When asked to assess whether they had a mostly positive or negative view of each potential candidate, this is what those familiar had to say:

The data reveal some interesting findings about the candidates:

• The only candidate with both relatively high levels of familiarity and positive impressions among those familiar is Peter MacKay.
• While Kevin O'Leary is well known, he is more divisive. The same can be said about Tony Clement.
• While in Quebec Maxime Bernier is well known (69% know the name), among Quebecers who know him, only 61% are generally favourable towards him, with 39% not favourable.
• Some candidates are well-liked among those familiar with them, but not well known among Canadians, such as Erin O'Toole and Candice Bergen.
• Kellie Leitch, despite being in the news a lot recently, is still not terribly well known among Canadians, and those who know her are almost evenly divided on whether they have positive or negative impressions. While she might appeal more to the party's base, at this stage she doesn't appear to be the candidate to win over non-Conservative voters.160

If Canadians Could Vote for Conservative Party Leader...

If all Canadians aged 18+ could vote for the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, at this stage it would be a horserace between Peter MacKay (26%) and Kevin O'Leary (25%). Other candidates or potential candidates are well behind, including: Maxime Bernier (15%), Candice Bergen (10%), Tony Clement (8%), Lisa Raitt (7%), Michael Chong (5%), Kellie Leitch (2%), and Erin O'Toole (2%).

• Among Quebecers, the runaway winner is Maxime Bernier (49%), with Peter MacKay (18%) in a distant second and all other candidates in the single digits.
• The only significant difference by gender is that women (14%) are more likely to choose Candice Bergen than men (6%).
• By age:
  • Peter MacKay has more support among Boomers (34%) than Gen Xers (24%) or Millennials (19%).
  • Kevin O'Leary is a more popular choice among Millennials (30%) and Gen Xers (29%) than Boomers (17%).
  • Maxime Bernier is more popular among Boomers (19%) than Gen X (14%) or Millennials (11%).
  • Candice Bergen has more support among Gen Xers (13%) than Boomers (9%) or Millennials (8%).160

These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between September 6 and 8, 2016, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians from Ipsos' online panel was interviewed online. Weighting was then employed to balance demographics to ensure that the sample's composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within +/ - 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.

For more information on this news release, please contact:

Darrell Bricker, PhD
CEO
Ipsos Public Affairs
416.324.2001
[email protected]

About Ipsos

Ipsos ranks third in the global research industry. With a strong presence in 87 countries, Ipsos employs more than 16,000 people and has the ability to conduct research programs in more than 100 countries. Founded in France in 1975, Ipsos is controlled and managed by research professionals. They have built a solid Group around a multi-specialist positioning--Media and advertising research; Marketing research; Client and employee relationship management; Opinion & social research; Mobile, Online, Offline data collection and delivery. Ipsos has been listed on the Paris Stock Exchange since 1999. www.ipsos.com