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The leaderless Ontario Liberals have nudged in front of the Progressive Conservatives, according to a new poll released in the aftermath of the premier’s private jet reversal and changes to freedom-of-information laws.
The Liaison Strategies survey put Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives at 36 per cent, just behind the Liberals, who were at 38 per cent. The distance between the two is within the margin of error.
The Ontario NDP, which sits as the official Opposition, were at 20 per cent and the Greens at four per cent.
David Valentin, principal at Liaison Strategies, suggested the Progressive Conservatives have seen their support dropping for some time.
“While the decay may have been slowed down by government advertising, the jet fiasco has pushed the PCs down even lower and they now find themselves in second place,” he wrote in a statement.
“To say that coverage has been negative for the past two weeks is an understatement. On file after file the PCs have been getting hammered.”
Ford has suffered a bruising few weeks since MPPs returned to the legislature at the end of March, facing criticism for clamping down on transparency rules and briefly buying a private jet.
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The latter only lasted a few days. The government confirmed it had taken possession of a $28.9-million Challenger 650 on April 17 and by April 19, Ford had announced he would sell it back to Bombardier.
The premier apologized for how he communicated his plan to buy a jet — but showed little regret over his decision to buy the plane in the first place.
After announcing he would sell the plane, the premier said it wasn’t a mistake to buy it, suggesting the media had inaccurately framed it as his own private jet.
“I’m not complaining,” he insisted.
“The purpose of my plane was not my private plane. And I understand it just gets more clicks, but it just wasn’t accurate. I’ll take responsibility, I won’t blame you, folks.”
The Liaison poll suggested the mixed apology hadn’t helped the premier’s cause.
Sixty-two per cent of people asked said they thought Ford had only sold the plane “because he was caught in a political controversy,” while just 29 per cent said he had sold it because he “sincerely respects the feedback of taxpayers.”
The poll also comes on the heels of changes the government has made to freedom -of-information laws.
As part of its budget, the government brought in retroactive changes to exclude the premier, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants and their staff from transparency and privacy oversight entirely.
The retroactive nature of the plan likely nullifies a legal defeat Ford suffered over his personal phone.
Both the information and privacy commissioner and a panel of three judges sided with Global News in a years-long battle to get access to the government calls Ford makes on his personal device.
After losing in court, the government said it would bring forward a law to essentially void the defeat.
Methodology: Liaison surveyed a random sample of 1,000 Ontarians from April 25 to 26, 2026, using interactive voice recording (IVR) technology. To ensure a representative stratified sample, participants were reached through random digit dialling (RDD) across both landline and cellular phone networks. For the total sample, the margin of error is ±3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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