Dangerous Polling, Death of Reason, and Drama in Canada's Election

Post 82 | My Week of Political Apathy

A strange thing happened this week.

While sinking election signs into my lawn, an unfamiliar emotion seized me. It took a moment to recognize the feeling but there it was…

Indifference to our election - bordering on apathy.

But it’s not what you think, so bear with me as I begin my explanation in an unusual spot.

Minding the Pomp

I enjoy attending theatre with my wife, preferring small productions with a tight cast, quality dialogue and intriguing storylines. Sets needn’t be extravagant as a play about monks done in an empty space and exclusively in mime, stands out as one of the most interesting.

Neither musicals nor operas are my cup of tea despite having been to plenty. And my last (truly the last) Shakespearean production was a few years ago when I remembered in the first five minutes of a torturous three-hour King Lear why I hadn’t seen The Bard in many years. I stared at my watch and would have bolted at intermission if not for attending with a good friend who is a much more patient fellow than me.

What distresses me about musicals, operas and Shakespearean drama is the lack of nuance. Aficionados may label me a man of poor taste for this assessment but I find them confusing and cacophonous, often delivered at full volume and over-acted. Happiness and laughter are grossly exaggerated, anger is at full boil, love tends toward overdone bodice-ripping and joy is displayed by cavorting wildly about. Subtlety is on rare display and the entire thing leaves me overwhelmed, often confused by the storyline and struggling to understand how it all hangs together, while pining for the end.

When the curtain drops and people leap to their feet in wild ovation I oblige from politeness, but rarely because my passion was aroused.

And so go elections.

Of Drama and Indifference

Circling back to my earlier confession - surely I’m not apathetic about our election after writing passionately for so many months, am I?

The answer is both no and yes.

I am far from sanguine about the vote outcome and our national future. And while I won’t make bug-eyed statements about this election’s importance, insist how this time is different or that results will affect the long term trajectory of our country – these statements are closer to truth than in any other time I recall. The impact on our national unity, fiscal wellbeing, social cohesion and relationship to the world will be quite different depending who we elect.

Yet I dislike the electoral spectacle itself.

To leverage my theatre analogy - the curtain has fallen on the intimate play and only an election’s grand production remains on the playbill. As others lean forward with interest and finally tune in, I find myself leaning away from the noise and confusion.

Eighteen months ago I began Pragmatic Canadian to write mostly of policy and politics – in that order. I’ve since dug in on pharmacare, productivity, EVs, energy, government structure, net zero, UN, Constitution, Covid, and much more. But policy analysis finds little home during an election.

Kim Campbell’s 1993 comment for which she was pilloried could not be more true, “An election is no time to discuss serious issues”. Not that it shouldn’t be - just that it never is. The aperture narrows to a hyper focus on each day’s events as defining issues are chosen, grand promises are made, barbs thrown, gaffes dissected and drama is plentiful.

New promises are being made that defy the past ten years of actions despite little changing to support the religious conversion, except that one leading actor has been recast and a new villain identified - while the same tired cast remains.

We have learned nothing from the folly of previously making an election about a single issue notwithstanding its importance in the moment, as we panic and rush to the safety of what we think we know, while ignoring everything else. Unaware of our own contradictions.

Woe be him who litigates the past, as we must all now be forever positive and focus exclusively on fighting the malign force south of us. That is now our entire purpose, our only reason for rising each morning. There is simply no place in this battle for recalling history or demanding accountability, and we must all look forward with a jaunt in our step and the anthem on our lips - linking arms with the very party who tattered our national pride for years but now lay claim to it.

I’m nearly expecting to hear sunny ways rejuvenated as accompaniment to the revisionist history of, “We are in a crisis, not of our own making”, as gravely intoned by Mark Carney with a straight face.

Yup, he actually said that. Several times.

What then is the value of further analyzing policy in this environment, when that of the past can be so readily swept under the rug and new ones conjured like Kreskin - despite their dissonance with past behaviour or likeliness to survive the election cycle?

Oh wait - the debates will make it all clear won’t they?

Alas, debates will feature too many players to be of value. Some voters will tune in claiming to learn of policy, the gullible sods. But in truth, they will mostly watch for the entertainment value or to confirm bias. They will eye the performance of each leader as though soothing speech or gentlemanly composure has bearing on his vision, intentions and capacity to execute on policy, or ability to navigate the vicissitudes of governing - while forgetting what oozing oratory and riddle speaking begat us for a decade.

Viewers will await pundit analysis of who delivered the knockout punch, and rely on their preferred news source to tell them who won and lost. Surely some of the columns have been already written.

Few will download and read the full policy platforms - far too much effort - relying instead on cherry-picked summaries floated online.

Mostly, it will be a popularity contest based on gut feeling absurdities married with who will best satisfy our self-interest. Some will vote against one guy because he seems scary and angry while imprinting sainthood on the other who reputedly sports a steady hand, notwithstanding what that hand has done or will yet do.

We will fall back on the age-old habit of voting for who we like, who we ostensibly trust and which leader seems most Prime Ministerial. Maybe even who we most want to share a beer with.

This is all overshadowed by the US tariff circus that foolishly dominates this election, just as Covid distracted us last time. It will turn on the esoteric question of who will better deal with or manage Trump, as though that should either be our long term fixation or one where anyone has a bloody clue. And it will pretend that Canadian politics will forever revolve on this single problem while ignoring all the fundamentals that made us so vulnerable and ill-prepared.

Looming atop it all will be the ominous cloud of Carney’s net zero plans, though handily downplayed so far. But if he swans into office on the boomer and Toronto vote, his green religion will grow heavy around our neck, dragging us into the depths of energy, fiscal, social and trade disrepair as he remakes Canada in his desired image.

Most voters will ignore history, forget the derelict governance from which we’ve barely escaped and look little further than the tip of their nose. An unholy union of amnesia and myopia.

And it is in this messy and bonkers context that indifference has briefly taken hold of me.

As everyone gets caught up in the electoral spectacle, the latest outrage, the big reveals, the scandals, the tsk-tsking over American style politics, the Trumpian and Trudeauian comparisons and a media overflowing with opinions emphatically written or screamed at the camera – I am sitting back. My homework is done.

My engagement and interest have been heavy in the lead up - focused on the issues, the ideas, the policies, the potential solutions and the vision of what could be. I’ve analyzed and written to the best of my ability in this small corner of the digital world. The rest is now a big theatre production that has a limited amount to teach us if we have been previously attuned - but much by which to confuse us if we’ve not. A damnable state of affairs.

How I wish everyone had been awake to our issues a long time ago, cared more and developed a frame of thinking before the noise began. Many will now just get swept up in it all - mired in the mire, distracted by the distractions, and confused by the confusion – a perfect recipe for fleeing to status quo.

Without context, perspective, history or critical thinking forefront – the new narrative is taking hold. The past ten years apparently didn’t happen and, if per chance they did it’s all now connected to tariffs, and certainly not because the incumbent government so badly buggered us.

The media and mainstream societal push toward consensus opinion is currently so strong we might just as well ask our next door neighbour how he'll vote and mimic that.

Oh wait, isn’t that what polls make us do already?

The Scourge of Opinion Polls

We are now hit with daily results telling us who will win, how we apparently feel about the parties, leaders, issues and policies. We are gobbling it up despite the lack of utility being glaringly self-evident in their massive swings over the past months.

Harkening back 37 years to third year Poli Sci, I appreciate the science and art of the political poll. They are useful for political parties, and modestly measure lagging sentiment. But they are miserable predictors of the future and the trend is worsening.

And I simply don’t see their value to the voting public, while clearly seeing their dangers.

Choosing which topics to address, what questions to ask and how to frame them has major impact on responses. I can easily distort your view and muddy your perspective by choosing what topics to include and nudge your responses by choice wording.

My article on the topic last year digs in.

Political Polls More Harm Than Help

This week I took a whirl through the Vote Compass poll by CBC and Vox Pop Labs.

Oh my.

Most kindly put, there are gaping holes I could drive a truck through.

Polls are a tricky business where unintentional bias can easily slip through and intentional bias can be craftily employed. Whichever - it is on full display here.

You might think the focus would be on topics like productivity, regulations, small business growth, infrastructure, national security, trade, biodiversity, military rebuilding, impact assessment act, energy development and debt.

You’d be very wrong.

Nope, the questions feature such things as abortion, residential schools, the monarchy, Quebec separation (but not Alberta), two questions on each of transgender and carbon emissions, daycare, wearing of religious symbols and pharmacare. Mostly hot button social values and touchy-feely stuff, but very little meat. And here I thought we were prepared to again become a serious country.

This poll widely misses the mark if intended to address the broad array of real issues facing Canadians and ones that substantively distinguish the parties. So, what were its intentions?

There is then the issue of question structure. As examples, the lack of nuance in a question about hate speech and one about federal influence in provincial matters left me unable to reasonably respond. The hate speech issue is more complicated than the question wording suggests, while the federal/provincial question is confounded by constitutional realities, rendering the question pointless.

More than a handful of the thirty questions left me unable to offer a decent response given the approach, inherent assumptions or wording. Indeed, that is the nature of many surveys where breaking down complex issues can result in overly simplistic questions - but I could eerily feel partisan fingerprints on this.

Problems continued in the results reporting.

I was plotted on a 3D graph against presumptive party positions measuring Economic attributes (ranging from left to right), Social factors (ranging conservative to progressive) and Identity (spanning regionalist to centralist). How the latter was determined is quite mysterious, particularly with only one question about Quebec and nothing about other provinces.

My overall results planted me somewhere near Genghis Khan though I would have been considered a slight right centrist only a decade ago – with my positions little changed as the spectrum slid left beneath my feet. I was also informed by what percentage my answers either agreed or disagreed with each Party’s official platform. But how was this magically done?

The official party platforms have not yet been released, yet my responses to questions on complex issues were algorithmically reduced to align with each party’s apparent positions. I would love to know the assumptions used to make those leaps.

Mostly, I was left wondering if this poll used Liberal policies from the past decade as they cohabitated on the left with the NDP, or from the past few weeks of promissory statements during their religious conversion - thus allowing them to be plotted as perfect centrists. The Liberal lipstick is not yet dry on the quick makeover, but you’d never know it from this poll.

On one hand, polls are an interesting tool by which voters can be forced to think on matters. But topic and question choices are wide open to skewing and bias - unintended or not. In this case, the presumptuous declaration of which party I align with is practically an exercise in ballot stuffing.

For fun, I retook the survey with a few intentional response changes and found myself now in the big mushy middle where they have conveniently plopped the Liberal Party and where the vast majority of respondents will likely land.

Go figure - the natural governing party in all its glory.

But an even greater danger of polls is in the relentless publishing of results - now daily.

My principle challenge is reflected in these questions

• What value is derived from knowing what your neighbour thinks?

• Of what does it inform you?

• What will you do with that information?

Ponder that for a moment.

Information asymmetry bias is a powerful social phenomenon. It assumes others have more knowledge, experience, or expertise than you. Thus you often follow the group's lead or defer to others' decisions. More directly stated, this can be blind leading the blind rather than people developing their own positions.

How Betty might vote (though that may change tomorrow, because she is watching how Suzie votes) matters for naught unless you know, implicitly trust and are precisely aligned with Betty as your proxy.

Let’s also be brutally candid. Others are often grossly uninformed so if we watch and parrot what they’re doing, it’s little more than an ever-distorting game of telephone. This sounds harsh but there is plenty to support it - not least evidenced by the massive polling swings over just a few weeks based on nothing more than swapping in a new guy and ephemeral momentum.

If we’re convinced everyone else knows something we don’t - we tend to safely join the leading group rather than think independently and risk standing naked and alone.

But ask yourself this.

Would you take health advice from a poll of strangers declaring celery juicing was the best remedy for a heart condition? Would you take your cue on optimal cancer treatments from a random online survey? How about legal advice from an opinion poll?

Didn’t think so.

Why then put any weight in political polls from utter strangers – when you would not accept their advice even on where to get a decent burger?

Poll results are little more than infotainment but their impact is far from benign, further supplanting our own critical thinking with apparent consensus opinion.

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My brief step back from the election circus is not encouragement to fall into apathy or indifference. Rather, it derives from being confident in tuning out the noise because I know the issues, know my mind and know what I want for our country.

Nothing has changed.

I’ll have more to say before April 28, but this weekend I will continue enjoying my temporary apathy.

Stay tuned and stay pragmatic.