Elections Canada estimates that roughly 5.8 million Canadians cast their ballot at advanced polls for the September 20 federal election.
The advance polls were open from September 10 to September 13.
Preliminary figures provided by Elections Canada showed that there was an 18.5 percent rise in advanced voters compared to the 4.9 million who voted in advance of the 2019 election.
The number of early voters does not include mail-in ballots received by Elections Canada so far.
Meanwhile, Liberals and Conservatives are in a dead heat in the last week of the Canadian election.
This is based on a recent survey done for Global News.
Global News reported Wednesday (Septeber 15) that Ipsos found that if the election were held tomorrow, the Liberals and Conservatives would be tied at 32 per cent of the vote.
The Conservatives are down three points since the last poll, and the Liberals remaining steady.
The poll was held between September 10 and September 13.
Ipsos CEO Darrell Bricker told Global News that the slight fall of support for the Conservatives could be due to a more aggressive Liberal campaign in the last week that has highlighted what Canadians might lose if they are not elected and the risks of an Erin O’Toole leadership.
“Liberals have really turned on the fire in their campaign,” he said. “You’re seeing some of the reaction to that.”
Bricker said the Liberals are trying to “fill in the blanks about the Conservatives in a particularly negative way.”
“[The Liberals are] really trying to push the Conservatives into a corner in which they would be painted as being more extreme,” Bricker said.
While the aggressive tone has got the Liberals tied with the Conservatives, Bricker said it “hasn’t got them growing.”
Instead, they are “fighting for their lives,” he said, which is a very different outcome than the Liberals initially hoped for when they called the election and thought it would be a quick sweep to a majority.
