With respect to our friends at Toronto Life, the science of polling is not a game of charades. Oh ( they lament) pre-election polls are tricky. “C’est la vie.” Well, here’s a flash. There is nothing tricky about election polls except when someone is being intentionally tricky or is hopelessly inept. When polls produce wildly different results from the same period of time in the same jurisdiction it is because one of the pollsters is wrong. Do doctors read x-rays? The easy-going folks at TL have responded to the stranger-than-strange contradiction in Ontario election polling with a shrug as if to say “Oh well, that’s polling for you.” The two firms now providing entirely opposite information about public support for the Liberals and PCs are Forum Research (Libs ahead) and Ipsos Reid (PCs out front). Now we are sure that neither of these organizations is being “tricky”. But you know what? One of them should go back to polling school. It’s true that election day is the poll that counts and that people change their loyalty as the campaign goes along. But when polls taken in the same period show completely different results, voters have a right to demand an explanation. Toronto Life
