Be Wary of the Polls

Polls,polls everywhere, everyday. Up,down,stagnant. What to make of them. Well just as I mentioned in a previous post about media bias and manipulation that you have to take what the media reports with a grain of salt, you should also take the horse race opinion polls with a grain of salt because what is reported is often actually the exact opposite of what's happening on the ground.

This from a column in the Toronto Star posted just last February, Election polls are fun, but they don’t mean a thing: pollsters.  That is coming from the pollsters themselves. 

Pay attention if you want to but, frankly, they don’t really mean anything,” sums up Andre Turcotte, a pollster and communications professor at Carleton University.
He has even more pointed advice for news organizations that breathlessly report minor fluctuations in polling numbers: “You should really consider what is the basis for your addiction and maybe enter a ten-step program.”
And for fellow pollsters who provide the almost daily fix for media junkies: “I think pollsters should reflect on what this does to our industry. It cheapens it.”
Turcotte’s blunt assessment is widely shared by fellow pollsters, including those who help feed the media addiction to political horse race numbers.

Methodology can differ from pollster to pollster and there is also an unhealthy relationship with the media.

There’s broad consensus among pollsters that proliferating political polls suffer from a combination of methodological problems, commercial pressures and an unhealthy relationship with the media.

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The problem is exacerbated by what Gregg calls an “unholy alliance” with the media. Reporters have “an inherent bias in creating news out of what is methodologically not news.” And pollsters have little interest in taming the media’s penchant for hype because they won’t get quoted repeatedly saying their data shows no statistically significant change.
“In fact, they do the exact opposite. They will give quotes, chapter and verse, and basically reverse and eat themselves the next week,” says Gregg.

Be wary of the"margin of error."

 The MOE, as it’s known in the biz, is usually relegated to the tag line at the end of a poll story, advising that the survey is considered accurate within plus or minus so many percentage points, 19 times in 20. It’s rarely explained what that really means.

Take a poll that suggests Tory support stands at 35 per cent, the Liberals at 30. If the MOE is, say, 2 percentage points, that means Tory support could be as high as 37 and the Liberals as low as 28, a nine-point gap. Or the Tories could be as low as 33 and the Liberals as high as 32, a one-point gap.
If support falls within those ranges the following week, it should be reported as no change — but rarely is. A two or three point change is more likely to be touted as one party surging or the other collapsing.
Worse, the media often trumpet shifts in provinces or other small sub-samples of the population, like urban women or educated males. But with MOEs of as much as 10 percentage points, seemingly huge 20-point fluctuations are actually statistically meaningless.
“I’ve seen pollsters comment one week, you know, ‘The Tories are dead in Quebec’ only to have this magical resurrection the week after and there’s a pressure to sort of explain that and you come up with saying, ‘You know, well, (Prime Minister Stephen Harper) made this statement or he wore this tie,’” says Mukerji.
“I think if you take a step back and look at the general trend, there hasn’t actually been all that much that’s changed, quite frankly, in the party standings.”

Even the Liberals own pollster weighs in.

With little or no time between polls and the media fixated on the flood of horse race numbers, he says voters don’t get a chance to reflect on platforms or leaders or their campaign messages. Hence, “the only movement in the polls is in fact motivated by the previous polls.”
Polls have always had some influence on elections, helping to drive strategic voting. But Marzolini fears the sheer volume now is creating a situation in which the media — and, by extension, voters, — “just want to get the score for the game; they don’t want to watch the game.”

So yeah, polls can be fun but focus your attention on the issues. Probably a more accurate and true account of what is going on is listen to what is happening from the local ground war.  Look passed the what the media reports and read and listen to the candidates actual words.   Then vote accordingly.

Liberals Hidden Agenda on the Miltary

Liberals say they would cancel the F-35 contract and review it when needed.    Kelly McParland points out the holes and the agenda for the our military.

It’s hard to find a single plank of the Liberal position on the F-35s that doesn’t creak with empty talk and insincerity. The Liberals say they would immediately cancel the purchase and think about it again later. They can’t say when. They promise they would “save billions of dollars”, but can’t say how. They say they will “put further steps on hold during a review of all military procurement,” which means more delay and more uncertainty for the forces. They promise any future purchases — when they get around to it — would undergo a “transparent competitive process to procure equipment that best suits our needs,” without spelling out what they see as Canada’s “needs.”
We’ve been here before, of course. Jean Chretien campaigned for the 1993 election on a promise to cancel the Conservatives’ $4.8 billion purchase of replacement helicopters for the military’s decrepit Sea Kings. Like Ignatieff, he claimed they were too expensive and unnecessary. Once elected, he carried out the promise, paying $500 million in penalties and dooming Canadian troops to two more decades aboard dangerous aircraft that spend as much time being repaired as they do in the air. Chretien could never admit the mistake, of course, so it wasn’t until he left office that Paul Martin could place the same $5 billion order for new helicopters.
Ignatieff is in the same position, and for the same reason. The new party platform concentrates on supporting UN operations and promises a “new leadership role in peace operations,” the same puffery used by previous Liberals governments to justify starving the forces. “Peacekeeping” means sending troops to areas where they won’t have to fight, and might not even have to be armed. The UN has been “peacekeeping” in the Congo through years of slaughter, doing nothing to halt the horrors there. It did nothing to avert similar bloodshed in Rwanda or Darfur.
“Peacekeeping” is a pleasant code word that hides the Liberal intent to save money by cutting back again on the military. There is nothing wrong with that, if, and it’s a big if, the party is willing to be open and honest about its policy and its implications, and let Canadians pass judgement. But it’s not.  Like Trudeau and Chretien, Ignatieff isn’t willing to have that debate, so he hides behind spurious claims about the high cost of jet planes and pledges to look for a better deal. He knows, (or should know) that cancelling the F-35 purchase means cancelling any purchase for years to come. Like Chretien, he could never admit the decision was a mistake, so no new plane would be ordered for the life of an Ignatieff government.

The Liberals’ policy on the military is to have no policy, and hope no one notices. Mr. Ignatieff has a weakness for tough talk (“Mr. Harper, your time is up.” “Anywhere, any time”), but he plainly lacks the nerve for this debate.

They do indeed have a hidden agenda as far as the military is concerned.  Another embarrassing decade of darkness.  
The world is becoming an increasing dangerous place.  In order to punch our weight in the world and to have a safe secure nation we need a military that is  properly equipped to do their job.  A strong safe nation requires a strong military.   Vote for a Conservative majority government so that our military is kept properly equipped so that they can keep us safe and are able to carry out what is required of them in the world.

New Liberal Red Book ,Back to the Future?

Yesterday the Liberals released their newest Red Book.  On the surface it sounds good. A chicken in every pot but as John Ivison puts it,buyer beware.

  Mr. Ignatieff talks a good game about creating equal opportunity, building democracy and protecting families. But at the end of the day, the numbers just don’t add up. Buyers should beware.

Some are saying it would take us back to Trudeau land.

Whether he succeeds depends on whether you believe that Canada should return to its Trudeauesque past of increased social spending paid for by higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, or continue the Conservative emphasis on keeping taxes low while balancing the books.

Yup,it would be that '70's show all over again.

The Liberal platform is a remarkable document. It has the feel of catharsis to it: a party that was unsure of what it believed, or unwilling to say, finally finding a sense of direction and boldly declaring where it wants to take the country. And where it wants to take the country is back to the 1970s.

Heck, the Liberal plan would even hurt the oil patch in Alberta.

CALGARY - Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff hatched plans Sunday that could kill Canada's golden goose - the Western oil patch.
Ignatieff proposed a new, national cap-and-trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions that one economist estimates will cost Alberta's economy $30 billion.
It comes at a time when Canada's resource-rich western provinces are driving much of the nation's growth.

How do you spell National Energy Program?
I remember how the NEP really hurt Alberta.  There were foreclosures, bankruptcies,etc. It took a long time to recover.

Jim Flaherty points out that the Liberal plan would cost taxpayers. 

OTTAWA — The Liberals plan is missing billions of dollars in projected spending, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Sunday afternoon in Toronto.
“There are some items that are not mentioned at all that Mr. Ignatieff has committed himself to. One is the HST in Quebec, and the payment for that. There is no mention of the high speed rail promise which he has made which is billions of dollars in addition to the $10 billion plus that I’ve already mentioned. There is no costing for pharmacare at all in the budget, in the proposed spending items that Mr. Ignatieff has listed,” Flaherty told reporters.
“There is no free lunch and somehow they’ve got to find billions and billions of dollars in new spending in the Liberals tax and spend plan,” he said.

So do you want to go back to the future with big government spending programs with Liberals and their coalition partners or move forward with the Conservatives with low taxes and job creation to make the country a more prosperous country?

I think the choice is clear, vote for a Conservative majority on May 2nd.

Can You Picture Count Ignatieff as "Mary Poppins?"

Just think, the Liberal leader as Mary Poppins the ultimate nanny.  Yuck!!! He wants to impose a national daycare program that is so 1993 when it was first introduced in the Liberal Red Book.   He claims it would only cost $500 million but others say it really cost more like $10 billion a year.

While the Liberals have often complained that the Conservative program of giving parents a $100 monthly payment for each child under six is not enough, the truth is that program costs five times what Ignatieff is now offering. The Universal Child Care Benefit cost taxpayers $2.6 billion last year. Ignatieff is promising to do more with just $500 million.
Advocates of a national program claim it will cost about $10 billion per year, 20 times what Ignatieff is offering. Given that Quebec alone spends more than $1 billion a year on their government-run daycare program, a national system of the type Liberals and daycare activists have called for would likely cost much more.

  This program would just end up being a big government bureaucratic nightmare of a boondoggle. Can you say gun registry program anyone?The money would simply go to unionized bureaucrats and daycare workers and not actually going to care for the children at all.   

The count says that's what parents want. Nonsense.

A poll of 2,000 Canadians, taken by Fleishman-Hillard in 2006, showed that by far families would prefer to have one parent stay at home. The poll was taken at the height of the debate over replacing the Liberal plan for a national system with the Conservative plan for the $100-per-month cheques.
When asked what was best for children, 77.9% of Canadians said having a parent stay home with a child vs. 20.5% who said it was best if the child was looked after by a competent caregiver. When asked what was best for children if both parents had to work, 52.7% said having a relative look after the child followed by using a family-run daycare at 20.4%.

Conservatives have the best plan that allows choice for parents.  That's the way it should be. Children need at least one parent at home during the formative years.

If you want parents to have choice then you have no alternative. Vote for a Conservative majority, they are the only ones who will make sure parents have choice.  The other alternative is Count Ignatieff  Liberal/NDP/Bloc coalition and a bloated big government nanny state.No thanks!!!!

When it comes to Red Books,check out Gerry Nichols. He has a very good take on it.

Oh,Oh Not Enough Money In The Piggybank For Liberal Goodies

So the Liberal leader promises childcare,senior care,will pay for your child's post secondary education etc. A billion here, a billion there. What's his plan to pay for these big government programs?  He's going to raise corporate taxes. Will that be enough money to pay for what he wants to give Canadians? Well,it seems like there won't be enough change in the piggybank.
I think he should listen to Jack Mintz,Director of School Public Policy,University of Calgary on the Dave Rutherford show yesterday.