Ontarians are increasingly unsatisfied with Premier Doug Ford’s handling of Omicron, a new poll suggests.
Ipsos released its January 2022 approval ratings of the premiers responses to Omicron, which revealed that Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford dropped six points, to 46 per cent.
“That’s got to be quite concerning for Doug Ford given that we’re just months away from an election,” said Sean Simpson, the vice-president of Ipsos Public Affairs.
Simpson said the main issue for Ford is on again, off again school closures. “That’s really been a hot-button issue throughout the pandemic in Ontario,” Simpson said.
It’s a frustration that Sam Iskander, the principal at Silverthorn Collegiate Institute, knows well. “No one likes schools being closed. It is hard on students but we completely understand why it’s happening,” Iskander said.
“But, by far, the majority learns best when they are in school.”
Fifty six per cent of Ontarians support lockdowns for as long as it takes to get Omicron under control. This is up from another Ipsos poll conducted in July, which found 53 per cent of Ontarians agreed that there should be another lockdown to prevent the spread of the Omicron variant.
“Everyone genuinely believes our premiers are doing their best, just some appear to be doing better than others. In response, Doug Ford is a little bit behind the rest of the premiers,” Simpson said.
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of Global News, between Jan. 14 and 17, 2022. A total of 1,001 Canadians aged 18 and up were surveyed online using the Ipsos I-Say Panel and non-panel sources for this study. To ensure that the sample’s composition represents that of the Canadian population according to census specifications, quotas and weighting were used. A credibility interval is used to assess the precision of Ipsos online surveys. If all Canadians aged 18 and over were polled, the poll would be accurate to within ± 3.5 percentage points 19 times out of 20. Subsets of the population will have a greater credibility interval. Other sources of error may exist in all sample surveys and polls, including but not limited to coverage error and measurement error.