‘Why’ loses out in flurry of opinion polls in municipal election: Porter
Forum Research’s automated polling machine will speak to 1,000 people in a single evening. Why doesn't the machine ask some insightful questions?

TheStar.com
Oct. 20, 2014
Catherine Porter

Imagine you could creep into the minds of 1,241 people in one night and ask questions.

Oh, the things I would lift up and scratch under.

If you could choose your career over, what would you pick?

What keeps you up at night?

When was the last time you were moved to tears?

Forum Research Inc.’s automated polling machine spoke to 1,241 people one night last week.

What did it ask them?

“If the election were held today, who would you vote for?”

That was followed by: “Do you approve/disapprove of Doug Ford/John Tory/Olivia Chow?”

That’s it.

It didn’t offer the obvious follow-up questions: Why and why?

Forum Research Inc. president Lorne Bozinoff explained to me that the poll was quick for accuracy’s sake. People will punch numbers into a phone handset for three minutes, but perhaps not five.

“We aren’t as interested in the ‘why’ as the candidates’ (private campaign) polls. They are asking why, not to measure public opinion, but to change it,” Bozinoff said. “We aren’t interested in helping candidates.”

What about helping voters?

There have been 29 polls broadcast and printed in the media since last January. Some of them, in April and June, were hefty, packed with research on dreams and despair in this municipal election.

In the past month, there have been eight. Only one included a weak nod to underlining motivation. The rest were strictly horserace polls. They’ve tracked Olivia Chow’s decline, Doug Ford’s climb and John Tory’s firm grip on the wheel of voter popularity.

Shouldn’t it be the opposite — just as we approach the election, pollsters offer us more meat on the bone?

Imagine if Bozinoff’s machine had asked:

What three things do you want the mayor to do over the next four years?

If you don’t think government should raise taxes, how should we address one-third of Toronto children living in poverty?

Will you vote with your heart or your head?

Those answers would be helpful to me.

They’d give me a glimpse into my city’s mind and, by contrast, they’d help me crystallize my own voting rationale.

A huge public debate erupted around political polls in the late 1980s, two decades after they broke into the Canadian media. People felt there were too many during the 1988 “Free Trade” federal election. They claimed they were intrusive, often wrong, promoted the horserace over issues and unduly influenced voters.

A Royal Commission examined polls a few years later and suggested they be guided by certain rules and be banned for three days before an election. Those laws lasted five years before being struck down by the Supreme Court.

Do you know how many polls caused all that public fury in the 1988 federal election?

Twenty-two.

“Polls are a measure of public opinion,” Bozinoff, then vice-president of Gallup Canada, said at the time of the commission. “A thermometer does not create weather, and a poll does not create public opinion.”

Except, our reactions to polls have already changed this race for mayor. Both David Soknacki and Karen Stintz dropped out of the race because the polls showed they didn’t have the following, and the media kept repeating those polls.

“I’ve never seen a situation like I’ve seen in Canada,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO for Ipsos Public Affairs on the phone from Brussels where he was overseeing a poll for the European Union.

“It’s the worst.”

He blames the Canadian media for dropping our standards and publishing free junk polls, instead of commissioning our own in-depth ones. (Bozinoff’s firm pays itself for the political polls, motivated both by public service and brand promotion. He said he didn’t know how much they cost.)

Even if polls were banned in the media, Bricker said, they’d still be used by politicians. That was the Star’s editorial argument in the 1980s. The public has the right to know what the politicians know, heading into an election.

Except, politicians are gathering more information in their polls than their standing in the horserace. If we see any push on a new issue this week, that’s likely why.

I did my own informal poll this past weekend about crying in church.

I do that often. Last Sunday, it was prompted by the sight of a little blond girl in pig tails stroking her grandfather’s head rhythmically. His hair was silky white and straight; her hand petite and pale. Such uncensored love, I thought wet-eyed.

Before, I was always embarrassed by these emotional breakages. But four other women in the congregation told me they too are regularly moved to tears — by the music, the sermon, the beauty of light glittering through the stained glass window.

My informal poll made me realize I am not a freak, at least not in this way. I am human, give or take 3 per cent, 19 times out of 20.