What’s supposed to be a beacon of light in a cluttered campaign has turned into a Tower of Babble. Pollsters and the media agencies that feed off them are sowing confusion, not the clarity that comes from a thorough, searching and substantive debate.
How, for example, can two solid polling professionals like Frank Graves and Nik Nanos — both stars in the business — come up with polar-opposite results while sampling during the same time period? At one point, Nanos had the Liberals five points up on the Conservatives nationally; Graves had it the other way around.
Just this week, Graves had the Tories taking the lead in Quebec over the niqab issue, while Lorne Bozinoff of Forum Research had the Liberals ahead in the same province followed by the NDP, with the Conservatives third. For good measure, Bozinoff also predicted that the niqab wouldn’t figure prominently in most respondents’ voting choices.
Bottom line? They all can’t be right.
That doesn’t mean there’s no common ground. Everyone can agree on three things: a massive (75 per cent) appetite for change in the country, no majority in sight for any party, and an unexpected collapse in the NDP vote. But where that vote might go is, for the polling industry, apparently a matter of pure conjecture.
EKOS sees it breaking Blue, particularly in Quebec. Nanos has reported consistently that the Red Team is gaining the most from the NDP’s slide. And Lorne Bozinoff’s numbers defy the conventional view that the whole country is being stampeded toward Harper over the veiled threat of the niqab.
My own test? I keep it simple. If an NDP voter decides to move, which is the shorter journey — to the Conservatives or the Liberals?
There are procedural matters that can partly explain some of the variance between the poll results. There are many different ways of conducting a poll, from robots doing the auto-dialing to human beings questioning other human beings directly. There are also online surveys and “rolling” polls. There are good questionnaires (the place where polling comes closest to an art form) and there are bad ones.
There are also different ways of modeling the data, and decisions to be made about publishing methodology, questionnaires, and even weighted and unweighted numbers used to ensure the sample represents the real population. Some pollsters publish, some keep their “secret sauce” to themselves and their clients.
Without getting weighted and unweighted numbers applied against the backdrop of census information, the reader of any poll is in the dark on one critical question: did the pollster over-sample any single demographic? If it did, that will distort the results, creating the impression that something is happening when it isn’t happening at all. Sort of like Stephen Harper’s communications strategy — nine parts spin, one part grasping at straws.
And this is not just a problem for pollsters. As Ipsos-Reid VP John Wright told me, it’s also a problem for the news agencies that broadcast or publish polls without knowing exactly how the pollster proceeded. That’s why Wright and others have just set up an association for pollsters to set some minimum standards for the industry. As it is, polls are quick hits that sell newspapers, drive traffic online and make for dramatic TV graphics. They are the fast food of the information business. But during an election, they can take the public down some bumpy detours if the information being disseminated is not solid. They can affect the result, rather than predicting it based on the moment in time frozen by the poll — and they can do so with skewed results.
Confusing, misleading polling is only part of the problem. The other problem with obsessing over the horse race is that it sucks the oxygen away from the real debate this country could and should be having — about the Harper record and the opposition platforms.
Death by dumbing-down is an ugly sight. No one has yet conducted an interview with Harper that directly deals with his dishonesty, his dictatorial ways, his contempt for democracy. He is still wrapped in the aura of office, smelling like a dead flounder. Everyone is pretending it’s perfume.
Where are the feature newspaper articles or long-form television interviews on that subject? They simply aren’t there. What are we getting instead? Questionable passages on candidates’ Facebook pages. Exposes on MPs’ (possibly underage) drinking companions. An unkind remark Tom Mulcair made about Newfoundlanders 20 years ago. Grocery store check-out journalism. And, oh yes, applause for the play (the TPP) before the curtain is even raised. All that has allowed the Tories to lead the elephant — their record — out of the room.
So it’s a little more than ironic that the niqab, one of the pop-tart issues designed to distract the electorate from the government’s record, is in danger of blowing up in Harper’s face.
Here’s some human intelligence gathered by yours truly on a trip this week to Vancouver. It’s not a poll. It’s just a hunch.
Shortly before I arrived, Jason Kenney had been at an event put on by the city’s large South Asian community. One prominent member of the local Sikh community approached the minister and told him that if the government’s inflammatory statements about the niqab resulted in attacks against Muslims in Canada, the Conservatives would bear the responsibility. Three attacks later, his words took on new meaning.
Why wouldn’t they? It is not just that the Sikh community has been through the business of turbans and daggers and breathless ignorance about their religion. It took a courageous battle against the commissioner of the RCMP before Baltej Singh Dhillon became the first officer in the Mounties to wear a turban — and that other familiar form of face-covering, a beard. Dhillon’s turban doesn’t seem to have destroyed RCMP tradition; rather, it has enriched it.
But the warning delivered to Kenney — that the Conservatives would wear it if Muslims found themselves under attack over the niqab — has much deeper implications for ordinary Canadians.
There isn’t a Sikh on the West Coast who doesn’t know the story of the Komagata Maru. That was the ship that brought 376 South Asians all the way from British India — British subjects all — only to be turned away from Canada. Ironically, many of them were veterans of the British Army in India who had fought to expand the British Empire. But Canada saw them as undesirables … i.e., not white.
And that is the storm gathering around Stephen Harper. He has always courted the immigrant vote, and rather successfully. But the niqab offensive is reminding a lot of Canadians of the immigrants in their own past. With Harper’s racist attack on Muslims (not ‘borderline’ racist, as former Newfoundland premier Danny Williams suggested) and new legislation giving the government several ways of stripping Canadians of their citizenship, there is a restlessness rippling through an important part of the Harper base.
And it’s not just Sikhs. It’s Jews who remember their grandparents being turned away from Canadian shores. It’s Irish who remember hearing stories about how their relatives were treated like dirt here after they fled the potato famine in their native land to come here. It’s Japanese who recall the internment camps where they were sent for the crime of their ethnicity. It’s the Italians who will never quite forget being called ‘wops’ and ‘dagos’ as they tried to make their way in this country.
In a nutshell, everyone who has ever tried to make a fresh start in Canada has reason to worry about Stephen Harper’s war on the niqab. Could it be that they’re thinking we’re all Muslims now?
And now that we know the PMO directly secretly interfered in the immigration process for Syrian refugees, suspicion of the government in the immigrant community can only grow.
On what basis, for example, could the PMO claim the expertise to “vet” some of the most vulnerable people trying to flee the Syrian civil war? Stephen Harper never told Canadians that he had stopped the processing of refugees from Syria — probably because there was no way to explain why he took the matter out of the hands of the professionals in Immigration and gave it to the crowd in short pants that runs his office. Perhaps a few may believe the government’s stated defense — that this was all about protecting the “integrity” of the system.
But there is a sense out there now the niqab issue isn’t the cynical slam-dunk that Harper thought it would be. Not even the Great Manipulator can know what kind of dark genie he has released from Lynton’s Lamp. At least one Conservative candidate, Damian Konstaninakos, is on the record saying he doesn’t want the government to impose a ban on the niqab in the public service. In fact, the candidate says the idea of banning the veil in the workplace “offends” him.
You don’t always need a pollster to know which way the wind is blowing.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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