Want to know why the polls are all over the place? Read this.
What seems clear, however, is that things are more or less the way they were before the writ was dropped. Harper has peaked. His game of divide and rule has reached its limit. He can’t pick up any support because a significant portion of the population outside of the west simply does not trust him. At the same time, the months of branding Michael Ignatieff in a relentless smear campaign has had its effect. And Jack Layton, meanwhile, has been enjoying a “surge” the last couple of days, thanks to notoriously unreliable online polls in which the young urban population is over-represented. The old saying is that the only poll that matters is the one on election day. Thanks to poor polling practices, that’s especially true this time round.
In any event, it looks like another Conservative minority at this point.
John Ivison indulges in wordplay in his article “NDP surge is bad for the Bloc, and economic coherence”:
“Before they get carried away though, Canadians should remember what they are considering voting for here – anti-corporatism, intellectual incoherence and a leader who knows jack about running the country.”
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/04/21/john-ivison-ndp-surge-is-bad-for-the-bloc-and-economic-coherence/
Thanks for the quote, Veronica. I’d as soon take John Ivison’s advice as I would the advice of John Fund of The Wall Street Journal. And who says that reigning back upon theft-by-corporate-policy is necessarily a bad thing, anyway?
Is it possible to say this too many times? The top percentile of the population has taken just about all of the wealth generated by increased productivity during the last 30 years. These are the same people who collapsed the financial markets two and a half years ago, throwing millions upon millions of people out of work all around the world. For their trouble, they picked up about four percent more of the national wealth than they had possessed previously. But they still need more tax cuts.
So are we really required now to listen to them and to their apologists at The National Post? Do they even speak with any reliable authority at this point?
Allan Gregg ‘acknowledges that he and his fellow members of last week’s influential At Issue panel on CBC-TV’s The National “maybe over-reached” in speculating about the NDP supplanting the Liberals.
Trouble is, such poll-driven speculation could become self-fulfilling prophesy.”
Is he suggesting that the NDP as the official opposition would be bad for the country?
He may well be doing that, Veronica. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong to make the point. Pollsters and the news media have a fundamental responsibility to get it right. We live in an age in which the corrosive effects of mass media on political discourse is obvious, and it is unacceptable that journalists should get bread and butter issues like polling data and its likely significance wrong. At the very least, it raises the question: what exactly are they being paid for if not to provide information and analysis that is reliable?