The Ontario Liberals lead the PCs in former minister Rod Phillips’ riding of Ajax, a new poll from Mainstreet Research shows.
Amber Bowen, the Liberals’ candidate, sits on top with 37.6 per cent, followed by the PCs’ Patrice Barnes at 29.5 per cent.
No other candidate comes close to Bowen or Barnes. The Greens and NDP are battling for third with single-digit support. New Democrat Christine Santos, at 5.7 per cent, is trailing the Greens’ Garry Reader, who is polling at 7.6 per cent.
Phillips held high-profile cabinet positions: Environment, Finance and Long-Term Care. As finance minister, Phillips took a vacation to St. Barts during the COVID lockdown of December 2020. He resigned as finance minister upon his return, at the behest of Doug Ford.
Phillips was reassigned to the difficult long-term care file in June of 2021, where he stayed until resigning in the following February.
READ MORE: Breaking: Rod Phillips announces he will resign next month, won’t seek reelection
Ajax was first created in 2018 and Phillips is the only MPP elected from the riding. Its predecessor, Ajax—Pickering, was a Liberal stronghold.
Bowen is a local elementary school teacher and member of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario. Barnes is a trustee of the Durham District School Board and a member of the Durham Regional Police Services Board.
Santos is the second candidate the NDP has put up in the riding. The first, Steve Parish, was the mayor of Ajax and removed as the New Democrat’s choice after his controversial support for naming a street after a Nazi officer became public.
READ MORE: NDP boots Ajax candidate Steve Parish over support for street named after Nazi
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This Mainstreet Research poll was conducted on May 29. A sample of 378 people was interviewed by automated telephone interviews. The poll is accurate to within ±5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The poll is weighted for age, sex, and region to be representative of the entire adult population of Canada.
Beyond the margin of error, all polls are subject to other sources of potential error, including coverage error. Riding surveys are particularly susceptible to coverage error; the smaller the population being surveyed, the greater the likelihood of coverage error.
The poll is not intended to predict what will happen in the future; it's a snapshot in time of what voter intentions were at the time of the fielding.
Mainstreet Research is part owner of iPolitics and QP Briefing.
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