Do please provide me with relief.
In other words, give me a frickin break.
The Mother Corp has joined the screaming poll brigade. Having exhausted the use of the word explosive when mentioning Gomery testimony, they now have a poll of their own courtesy of Environics, a respectable crowd of number-mashers.
The headline would have you believe that the responses to the poll "suggest" the sponsorship scandal is being the most important issue in the country. The lede says something along the lines.
Thankfully the webgoddess gave the question and actual response levels.
Look at the column in the margin.
Health care is the number one concern of Canadians by a seven point margin ahead of "poor leadership" at 14. The only way you can get Gomery in there is to take the number three choice - i.e. Gomery at 10 percent - add that to the second choice and vie-oh-la as Archie Bunker used to say.
Minor problem: "poor government/leadership" and the Gomery thing are not necessarily one and the same.
This is called creative re-interpretation of numbers by the CBC news staff to produce an answer the data doesn't actually support. Undoubtedly, they will protests that their lumping is somehow valid, but does that make it accurate?
We can't tell because CBC didn't see fit to give us either the actual survey instrument (questionnaire) or a link to Environics where the background info might be kept.
When I look at the results they released, I see health care is still the biggest issue out there, substantially ahead of all others. I also notice that most people surveyed don't see the need for an election - 41% - while 34% feel Gomery would be the justification for calling it.
Now your humble scribbler is going to give you a link to Environics' own poll and their own release, issued just a week ago.
Look closely at this one since you have figures to compare them to from previous surveys administered in the same way using the same survey questions.
One thing to notice is that the "no reason for election response" has dropped a mere seven points in the CBC poll from the one Environics did about a week and a bit ago. That's hardly a catastrophic drop.
But if you really want to put their numbers in perspective look at the "sampling precision". By region it could be off by as much as nine percent in some provinces and is off by over six percent in Atlantic Canada.
Personally, I think this is the kind of polling that Diefenbaker had in mind when he made the crack about dogs.
Lemme go have a look at SES and see what they have to say.
More to follow.