By Janet Guttsman TORONTO, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Canada's two main parties are neck and neck in an opinion poll published on Saturday, leaving the outcome of the next federal election up in the air. The Ipsos-Reid poll of 1,004 Canadian voters, published in the National Post newspaper, gave the opposition Liberal Party 36 percent voter support, compared with 34 percent for the ruling Conservative Party. Taking the poll's 3.1 percent margin of error into account, that is almost a dead heat. "I couldn't say who would win," pollster Darrell Bricker told the paper, describing the race as "very, very competitive." "The campaign would very much matter. It would be a dogfight." The Conservatives ousted the Liberals in a federal election in January. But they hold only a minority of the seats in the Canadian parliament, so they need the support of other parties to stay in power. The Liberals and the separatist Bloc Quebecois have already hinted they they might try to bring the government down early next year, making a spring election likely. The new poll showed that support for the Liberals was down by 2 percentage points from the level reached in early December after party members elected former environment minister Stephane Dion as new Liberal leader. Dion has pushed an environmental agenda and played down the need for tax cuts in his early comments as party leader, and Bricker said that could be alienating some Conservative voters. "The soft Tories are taking a look at Mr. Dion, and some of them are coming back to the Conservative Party," he said. Bricker said the left-wing New Democrats were the likely losers in the latest poll, as many of their supporters could switch to the Liberals. The New Democrats had the support of 13 percent of voters in the latest poll, unchanged from levels at the start of the month, but down from the 17 percent they won in the January election. The pro-independence Bloc Quebecois campaigns only in French-speaking Quebec and the poll put support for the party in the province at 44 percent, compared to 31 percent for the Liberals and 13 percent for the Conservatives. A Quebec election is also likely in early 2007. The key question there is whether the separatist Parti Quebecois, the Bloc's provincial allies, will oust the ruling Quebec Liberals, raising the prospect of another referendum on whether Quebec should break away from the rest of Canada. Quebecers voted against independence by the narrowest of margins in the last referendum, which took place in 1995.
