WhatFinger


Most Canadians don’t subscribe to any ideologically consistent set of principles, either of the right or the left.

Poll doesn’t necessarily reflect left wing trend



Canadians are decidedly tilting to the left which is good news for the New Democrats and bad news for the Conservatives.
So says a recent Forum Research poll. That’s quite a change from just a year ago, when Canadians elected a Conservative majority. Yet before we break out red flags and start adorning our national buildings with hammers and sickles, it’s worth remembering that public opinion polls should be taken with a pretty large grain of salt.

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Recall, for instance, how public polls uniformly got the Alberta provincial election wrong. So let’s examine the Forum poll a little more closely. First, the poll says more than one third of Canadians now support the NDP. According to Forum president Lorne Bozinoff, this would translate into a NDP minority government. Surely this is something for socialist to cheer about, except for one teeny detail: the election is still three years off. That means Canadians are not really focusing on federal politics right now. In fact, voters don’t really start to focus on politics, until about a week before they actually vote. And so, when voters tell a pollster they would support the NDP, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are buying into the party’s left-wing agenda. It might just mean they like NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, because he’s the new kid on the block. Or maybe they liked the recent positive TV ads the NDP ran a few months ago, which were designed to make Mulcair look all warm and fuzzy. On the other hand, they might be supporting the NDP not because of anything the party is doing but simply because of all the bad press the ruling Conservatives have received lately such as the F-35 fiasco. The good news for the Tories is they have plenty of time to change public attitudes. They can do it either by adopting policies that win public favour or by running attack ads to degrade the NDP’s brand name. Indeed, I suspect as we get closer to an election, the Conservatives will do their darndest to portray Mulcair as a scary, left-wing radical who will unleash all sorts of “dangerous economic experiments” and “job-killing” taxes. It will be interesting to see how popular Mulcair is after such a barrage. Of course, the Forum Poll does more than just rate the popularity of political parties. It also suggests that a strong majority of Canadians believe in the “income gap”, which suggests the rich are getting too rich and the poor are getting too poor. In other words, Canadians seem to be buying the “Occupy movement’s” class warfare propaganda. As Bozinoff put it, “I think this suggests a long term trend and the Conservatives are at the wrong end of that long-term trend.” But hang on here just a minute. Is this really an indication Canadians are moving to the left? Perhaps, part of what this poll is picking is anger with the government for bailing out big corporations, which is more of a conservative than a socialist reflex. Besides, just because Canadians are worried about a so-called income gap doesn’t mean they support the left’s solutions to fix the problem. Yes, they will likely support a plan that entails taxing “someone else” ie, the “super-rich”; but they might be less inclined to support socialist policies that could adversely impact on their standard of living or on their pocketbooks. My point is most Canadians don’t subscribe to any ideologically consistent set of principles, either of the right or the left. Canadians care more about values than political dogma. And sometimes those values are not accurately reflected in a public opinion poll.


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Gerry Nicholls -- Bio and Archives

Gerry Nicholls is a Toronto writer and a senior fellow with the Democracy Institute. His web site is Making sense with Nicholls


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