Doug Ford's Tories are weathering jet fiasco and benefiting from Liberal infighting, poll suggests

“What we captured in the last survey was at the height of the jet story,” Abacus president David Coletto said Tuesday, referring to Ford’s purchase and abrupt sale of a $28.9 million Bombardier Challenger 650 that critics dubbed the “gravy plane.” 

“So, the worst damage, I think, has been done. The last wave (of polling) caught peak outrage; this wave is what happens when the news cycle moves on,” said Coletto.

Fortuitously for the Tories’ polling, the Queen’s Park news cycle has been dominated by internecine Liberal machinations after MP Nate Erskine-Smith (Beaches—East York), a leadership hopeful, lost a byelection nomination fight May 9 to businessman Ahsanul Hafiz and then challenged the results.

While Erskine-Smith’s allegations of “serious irregularities” were rejected by a Liberal panel of lawyers in a 17-page decision released Sunday, the imbroglio appears to have hurt the Grits.

“It signalled … controversy, a divided party,” said Coletto.

“Whether it’s the way that the nomination was handled or the way that Erskine-Smith responded to it — all of that just signals that maybe they’re not yet ready to take the reins,” he said, emphasizing “the public is looking for an alternative now” to Ford’s third-term Tories.

The provincial Liberals are still benefitting from a halo effect from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s popular federal party, the pollster added.

“There’s a lot more people out there taking a look at the Ontario Liberals,” said Coletto, noting Liberal brand that has been burnished since Carney succeeded former prime minister Justin Trudeau in March 2025.

“So this leadership race — and everything that happens around it — has not just high stakes for the party internally but for its ability to take advantage of this opportunity that exists,” he said.

“If I was the Liberals, I wouldn’t get too worried about these numbers. There’s going to be some volatility in the vote intention question, because they don’t have a permanent leader and because a lot of it is likely driven by how people feel about the federal party.”

MPP Lee Fairclough (Etobicoke—Lakeshore), former federal cabinet minister Navdeep Bains and policy adviser Dylan Marando are registered leadership candidates with MPP Rob Cerjanec (Ajax) expected to enter the race soon. Erskine-Smith’s intentions remain unclear.

Abacus surveyed 1,017 Ontarians from May 14 to May 20 using online panels based on the PureSpectrum platform. While opt-in polls cannot be assigned a margin of error, for comparison purposes, a random sample of this size would have one of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Coletto said the NDP’s Stiles, meanwhile, “continues to be hamstrung by a federal party that continues to been unable to gain any traction” nationally.

“But she has the best personal numbers in terms of net favourable. For her, the number one challenge is continuing to introduce herself, finding ways of getting herself into the conversation, and I think the jet controversy probably helped do that,” he said.

Indeed, in terms of personal popularity, Stiles had a plus seven per cent favourability rating while Ford was at minus eight per cent. Interim Liberal leader John Fraser was at plus three per cent and the Greens’ Schreiner was at plus four per cent.

Overall, 37 per cent of respondents approve of the PC government with 41 per cent disapproving and the rest neutral or unsure for a net minus four per cent.

Asked if were time for a change in government, 51 per cent of respondents said “definitely” while 19 per cent said “it would be nice but it’s not that important” and 11 per cent said “it would be nice to keep Doug Ford and the PCs in government but it’s not that important” and 19 per cent said the Tories “should definitely be re-elected.”