Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s approval rating continues to slip amid a hotel expense scandal that has dogged his government and at least one new survey now suggests that the Liberals have opened up a narrow lead over the Progressive Conservative party. A new poll of 1,000 adult Ontarians released by Liaison Strategies on Friday shows that the Liberals now have the support of 38 per cent of decided and leaning voters, followed by the Tories at 33 per cent, the NDP at 24 per cent and the Greens at two per cent. The Liberal lead grew marginally from a June survey conducted by Liaison Strategies which gave them a three-point advantage that still fell within the margin of error for the sample. Ford’s approval rating also fell two points from June, dropping to just 24 per cent in the latest survey. About 72 per cent of respondents said that they disapprove of the job Ford is doing while the remaining four per cent offered no opinion. “That is the lowest approval and highest disapproval we have measured for Ford in this Ontario tracker,” Principal at Liaison Strategies David Valentin said in a statement accompanying the poll results. “Those numbers are landing in the middle of an expense scandal, and that matters politically. The poll did not ask voters directly about hotel expenses, so I would not say the scandal caused the movement. But when an incumbent premier is already at 24 per cent approval, stories about MPPs billing taxpayers for Toronto hotel rooms are exactly the kind of thing that reinforces a bad frame.” The latest numbers arrive as Ford continues to face criticism over tens of thousands of dollars in Toronto hotel expense claims from MPP’s who live in the GTA. Ford has called the expense claims “unacceptable” and has said that he has directed the MPPs to pay back “every single penny.” However, he has continued to face criticism with Ontario Liberal Leader John Fraser telling CTV News earlier this week that members of the PC caucus are “living large” at the expense of taxpayers. The Liaison Strategies survey showed that the Liberals have a 17-point advantage over the PCs in Toronto but only a one-point lead in the 905 region surrounding the city. The NDP lead in northern Ontario, the PCs lead in eastern Ontario and the PCs and Liberals are tied in southwestern Ontario. In his analysis, Valentin said that the results point to a “fractured” race. “That means the Liberal lead is real, but the map is not uniform,” he said. The survey marks a departure from a Abacus Data poll conducted in June that showed the PCs had a nine-point lead over the Liberals among committed voters. Methodology Liaison surveyed a random sample of 1,000 Ontarians from July 20 to July 21, 2026, using Interactive Voice Recording (IVR) technology. To ensure a representative sample, participants were reached through random digit dialling (RDD) across both landline and cellular phone networks. The resulting data was weighted to match targets based on the 2021 Census. For the total sample, the margin of error is ±3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
