Why should anyone care? #nlpoli

We can often see things more clearly when we compare one item  to something that is supposed to be similar to it.  It's one of the simplest ways we can learn. Babies learn to do it at an early age and comparing is at the heart of the old Sesame Street song about One of these things.... 

You can do it with objects, or, as in this post, with political parties and people.

Let's look at the Liberals and the New Democrats in this province. 

This week the New Democrats and their leader Lorraine Michael did a couple of things worth noting.  On the front page of Tuesday's Telegram, underneath a picture of singularly the most incompetent and nakedly-biased Speaker the legislature has had since Confederation (except for the guy who had the job right before him), there's another story about a protest in front of the Confederation Building. There’s a picture of a bunch of people who want the House of Assembly to open this fall for a regular session. 

The guy shown in the picture holding a megaphone has been camped out on the Hill since last week. it’s a great sign of free speech in a province where speaking your mind publicly has been known to get you attacked by friends of the incompetent Speaker.

And right there in front of the crowd listening to the guy with the microphone are NDP leader Lorraine Michael and newly elected Skinner-skinner Gerry Rogers, also a New Democrat member of the legislature.

Basic political issue:  House of Assembly ought to be open so the politicians can debate and discuss important issues.  NDP right there.

One of the issues the NDP would like to discuss is how the provincial government builds ships for the provincial ferry fleet.  The New Democrats would like to see a long-term policy that lays out the plans for maintaining the fleet and building new and replacement ships.  The New Democrats think this could lay the foundation for the shipyards around the province. With some guaranteed local business, the companies could plan for the future and take on steady work from elsewhere.

The ferry contract is an issue on the Burin peninsula, especially in Burin-Placentia West where the Marystown Shipyard just finished building two ferries but can't get started on the third and fourth because of some unspecified problems.  With no other work at the yard, the provincial government work is important.  The New Democrats don't hold that district in the House, although they came close in the recent general election. But the shipyard policy has implications that reach beyond one district.  The policy will affect provincial budgets just as surely as it can affect the smaller shipyards in the province, subcontractors who do work for the shipyards and  - it almost goes without saying - the people who ride the ferries daily in order to live their daily lives.

Compare that to the provincial Liberals.  By virtue of the fact they have one more seat than the Dippers, the Grits are the official opposition party in the legislature.  They get a bigger budget and their leader gets some extra money to have an office and staff comparable to what a cabinet minister would have.

That reflects the importance of the position in our system of government.  The leader of the opposition, after all, should be someone the lieutenant governor is supposed to be able to call on to form an administration in the event the current one fell. People tend to forget that, but it is the way our system is supposed to work.  It is one of the ways we could avoid having elections every five minutes during a minority parliament, but that's another issue.

Last week, the Liberals got together for the first time since the election.  They called the media together for scrum about the House being closed until the spring.

The media - not surprisingly - wanted to talk about the Liberal leadership.  Fill-in leader Kevin Aylward has been invisible since the election.  He didn't win his seat.  People are wondering what Kevin plans to do and how the Liberals plan to handle the House.  The grim-faced gang stood in front of the reports and Yvonne Jones - the person who, in effect, never stopped being Leader of the Opposition, answered questions about the leadership question.

And then they got around to talking about the House.  Scrum over, all but one of them headed back to their districts.  They'll come to town again to be sworn in later this week and then, if the usual pattern holds,  they'll head back to their districts as fast as they can.

In the scrum, one of the reporters asked Jones about prospective leader Dean MacDonald and his support for Muskrat Falls. The caucus is basically holding the leader's job for Dean, when and if he wants it, incidentally. Whether this is the arrangement they cooked up before Jones "stepped back" from the leader's job  - Dean and Yvonne didn't have a lengthy meeting to talk finances - or if it is a post-election plan or even a desperate caucus hope, the job is Dean's.

And on the controversial project, Jones answered that until someone could show the benefits to the province and since Muskrat Falls brought no benefit to Labrador she was opposed to it regardless who was backing it.

The contrast in the two parties could not be any more stark.  On the one hand, you have a party that is active on the local political scene demonstrating their position on an issue and garnering some coverage on their stand in the meantime.  The Dipper leader spoke out about an issue  that doesn't affect her district directly.  The Dippers took a position about shipbuilding based on the wider provincial impact.

Contrast that with the Liberals and Jones' position on Muskrat.  Her opposition to the project is framed not on the numerous policy problems with it but on the absence of apparent benefits to a specific part of the province.  She noted that the project didn't deliver benefits for one particular spot.

In truth, that last bit is the key bit about the post-2003 Liberals.  It's all very local, and very much about individual districts.  And if you take Jones' comments to their logical conclusion, you can see pretty quickly that her opposition would melt away once someone delivers some pork to address her concerns.  String a couple of power lines into Jones' district, talk about making power available for local industry in Labrador and she'll be standing by ready to wave flags and cheer for the mega-debt disaster.

Now to be fair, the NDP is backing Muskrat Falls whole-hog.  Their conditional endorsement  - if it is viable - is so lame as to be laughable.

But look at the difference in how the Liberals tackle an issue and how the NDP does.  For the Liberals, there is no provincial perspective, at all.  Everything starts and ends in the specific districts the party members hold.  Yvonne Jones  - and hence the Liberal Party - won't be speaking about shipbuilding generally because it doesn't bother anyone in her district.  She would talk about one ferry boat, though, because it does affect her district.  Jones will even talk about a wildly, insanely ludicrous idea like the Stunnel because - you guessed it - the end point would be in her district.

And as for everywhere else, who gives a flying frack?

It isn't just Jones who operates this way.

It isn't just Danny Dumaresque.  The only difference between Danny D and the rest of the Liberals running in the last election was that he just said it out loud.

It's all of them.

And that difference between the Liberals and the NDP is why one is on the rise in the province and the other is pretty much irrelevant to the political future of the province.

Liberals these days will talk about all the work that the party needs to do to rebuild.  The party's ersatz Danny-in-Waiting said it last week, too, using the Danny-esque hockey metaphor.

But what the Liberals seem to be missing is that the party is way beyond the point where a few meetings and a couple of warm bodies will put them back on the road to power. 

Even if Dean MacDonald comes back and rolls up his sleeves as passionately as any passionate windbag politician ever did, people in the province will need a reason to get involved with the party.  They will need to have a reason to give money or offer up as candidates or even to take the simple step of giving Liberals a vote in 2015.

Right now, the party has spent eight years telling more and more voters in the province that they aren't interested in anything about them.

53% of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians listed health care as a top concern during the last election.  The Liberals held out fisheries ideas from the 1970s as their major policy statement.

Disconnect.

The result is a party that is at a record low in the polls and - despite having one more seat than the NDP - is not a viable alternative to the ruling Conservatives. 

Take a look at the chart, just to make sure the message is plain.  This ain’t 1985, Toto. 

The inevitable message the Liberals have been sending for the past six or seven years is that the Liberal Party doesn't give a rat's ass about anybody outside the few districts they currently hold. 

An active Liberal made a few comments on a post from Monday.  He finished up by asking your humble e-scribbler:

So in your opinion the work starts with making good policy, and then building from there. I don't disagree. As i said, there is lots of work to be done. I'm not one of the Liberals you refer to as waiting for a savior. That is not how I see the Party getting out of this.

Curious on your thoughts: who should be doing the policy work that you see as the first step? Caucus? The leader? The executive? A committee of the board?

The comments from your humble e-scribbler weren’t about  policy, incidentally, but those questions go to the heart of the Liberal problem.

To get at the Liberal problem, you’ve got to get even more basic.  When people say the Liberal Party doesn’t speak to people any more what that means is that the party no longer gives people a reason to support it. 

If they want their party to survive in the future, Liberals have to figure out why anyone should care about the Liberal Party.  It's a simple enough thing to state. The answer isn't implicit in it.  And it goes to the heart of what any political party is about:

Why should anyone care?

People need a reason to get involved with a political party.  Usually it’s the chance to fulfill some personal ambition or to take part in a campaign that will accomplish some sort of bigger purpose. People will need to know that the Liberals are the ticket to something other than political obscurity.  That’s for the political activist types.

For voters, it’s not much different.  Some will want to be part of something, even if it is just the winning side.  Others will latch onto specific people or specific ideas.  And still others will respond to the notion of getting some tax breaks or some such..

But at the very least, the party needs to offer something no one else does.  They’ve got to look like they are going places and that they have the stuff needed to form a government.

Right now, the Liberals have none of that.  They also have no plan to get any of it.  If the Liberals wait around until Dean shows up – and it is a question of if Dean shows up – they will have what they have right now, plus Dean.

What they’ll be missing is what they are missing now:  credibility. 

And they still won’t have the answer to the simple question of why anyone in the province should care about the Liberal Party.

Working out the answer to that question will unlock all the other answers to all the other questions.

Let's see if anyone tries.

- srbp -

Tory snouts back in trough #nlpoli

In a characteristically display of arrogance and entitlement, Kathy Dunderdale today reappointed two of her key political hacks – Len Simms and Ross Reid – to their patronage jobs in the provincial public service.

What makes the whole sordid business that much more distasteful is that Dunderdale tried to make it sound as if the whole exercise was legitimate:

In keeping with Provincial Government policy, they had resigned from their respective positions to work on the October 11 election campaign.

The two buckos resigned their positions knowing full-well they’d get them back inside a month. 

Of course, if any other deputy ministers resigned in order to work for another political party, you can be damn sure Dunderdale would never have reappointed them at all, let alone do so as swiftly as she hooked her own two back up to the trough.

Those appointments got buried in another release on yet more changes to the senior public service.

The record-setting churn in senior management continues.

- srbp -

And then right on cue… #nlpoli

Someone starts talking about dumping military infrastructure that serves no military purposes any longer.

Then your humble e-scribbler reminds everyone not to worry since bases like Goose bay are far more important for the political pork value than their military value.

And right on cue:

First one politician launches into a defence of the pork base, while a new politician – who actually campaigned against the base at one point in his political life – now staunchly defends the pork he and his new political friends are pouring into the base.

Stuff like paving the runway at the base.

Again.

Paving?

Paving?

Hmmm.

Seems that the value of paving the runway depends on who is running the asphalt spreader.

In 2005, when the federal Liberal government paved the runway, one of Peter Penashue’s new political friends – the Pavement Putin of the Permafrost – had this to say:

We got $10 million in an announcement to put new paving on the runways up there, but I can tell you, $10 million of asphalt on the runway is not going to bring the allies back.

Asphalt, like shit, takes on a sweeter aroma for some people if they and their friends are spreading it.

- srbp -

Disconnect in the Brain Housing Group #nlpoli

The provincial Conservatives are a weird bunch.  They want to fight the provincial debt by increasing it.

They are nominally Conservative but their spending of public money is anything but prudent.

Via labradore – who else? – come two posts and with them two pretty charts that show the change in government spending since 2003 (less debt-related spending).

That’s budgeted spending, above. 

The second chart gives the annual spending on programs plus the percentage change from the previous year.

Just keep those in mind whenever you hear a provincial politician talking about the Conservative’s great record on controlling public spending or, as labradore points out, Kathy Dunderdale’s whacked-out claims that the Tories have already reduced.

- srbp -

Back to the Future #nlpoli

The Department of National Defence will freeze the size of the Regular Force and sell off property in an effort to cut spending and control budgets, according to David Pugliese.

The man knows what he is talking about. 

Take it as a given that this is what DND is planning to do.

You can also take it as a given that one of the properties on the block is Goose Bay.

Liberal Sen. Colin Kenny said closing bases and selling off surplus property is essential since unwanted or underused facilities are costing the military hundreds of millions of dollars annually to maintain. Up to 25 per cent of DND’s facilities, some of which date back to the Second World War, could be sold or shut down, said Kenny, the former chairman of the senate’s defence committee.

He said Goose Bay in Newfoundland and Labrador is a good example of a site that has become redundant to military needs.

“It’s been kept alive by political pressure,” Kenny noted, “and it’s costing millions to keep operating.”

He said any closure should be accompanied by a financial package to help communities and workers involved and money from the sale of properties should be funnelled back into the defence budget.

People in Goose Bay will get their knickers in a knot.  Provincial politicians will beat their chests and spit and foam and stamp their feet.

And nobody will notice that DND has been down this road before and never sold off bits of stuff he was supposed to sell.

Like the airfield at Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia.

In the 1990s, DND figured out it didn’t need the Shearwater base that was home to the Canadian Force’s maritime helicopter fleet.  So they proposed to sell off the airport and all the prime real estate that went with it.  The helicopters would move to  Greenwood out in the Annapolis valley.

Eventually.

Well, 15 years later, the only bit of the old Shearwater that isn’t still owned by National Defence is one runway.  Everything else is still where it was.

And the taxpayers of Canada are still pumping cash into upgrading and repairing and refurbishing one of the oldest air bases in the country.

Now, to be sure, Shearwater still has an operational purpose.  While the air force could have moved it’s helicopters out to Greenwood,  having the helicopters at Eastern passage makes it just a wee bit easier to marry them up with the navy when the ships deploy.  In fine weather you can fly the Sea Kings on or off the ships.  If the weather is crappy, you can just bring the ships alongside the Shearwater jetty and winch them on or off.

Goose Bay, on the other hand, simply has no operational purpose for the Canadian Forces.

Still,  if you dig around the records of previous efforts to sell off all the surplus military infrastructure, you are bound to find an example that fits the Goose Bay situation.

You see, as much as DND will talk about selling off places like Goose Bay, the odds are it will never happen.

As much as it makes sense, the politicians can’t afford to let it happen.

- srbp -

Astroturf #nlpoli

Sometimes the people using fake names online screw up their little game.

This little gem came from the Telegram last week and a letter to the editor in favour of free tuition at Memorial University.

Janice and Babs should have talked to herself before she hit “submit” the second time.

- srbp -

The rewards of planning an organization #nlpoli

While the Liberals in this province shuffle aimlessly toward the political gloom, their Nova Scotia brothers and sisters actually have enough cash in the bank that they can take $2.3 million and put it into a new thin-tank.

Nova Scotia’s Liberals have long been dogged by their controversial trust fund. 

But the Grits finally put the decades-old issue to bed at their annual general meeting in Halifax on Saturday. 

Liberal Party president John Gillis said the party is divesting itself of $2.3 million in the fund to help establish a think-tank, the Allan J. MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Government. 

Gillis told the meeting the new institute will honour a distinguished Nova Scotian who has dedicated his life to public service. A retired senator, MacEachen was a long-time federal Liberal cabinet minister and is an Order of Canada recipient.

Just think about that.

Meanwhile, the local Liberals are the better part of a million bucks in the hole with not much chance of paying it off in the near future.

- srbp -

Hydro concerned about contacts with power lines

From Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro:

Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro (Hydro) fears that an increased number of recorded contacts with power lines by members of the general public and contractors could eventually lead to a fatality. Hydro recorded two more power line contacts last week, bringing the total to 12 contacts in 2011 and 51 contacts since 2007.

Last week's line contacts involved one in Wabush, Labrador, when a contractor hooked a cable causing a utility pole to break, and another in Ming's Bight on the Baie Verte peninsula when a member of the public cut a tree that fell across a power line. Fortunately there were no injuries; however, both these incidents resulted in power outages to surrounding communities and Hydro's customers.

"These most recent line contacts are similar to contacts we've been seeing over the past few years, and it's deeply concerning," says Jim Haynes, Hydro's vice president of regulated operations. "We're lucky there have been no injuries; however, if this alarming trend of power line contacts does not stop, it's only a matter of time before someone is seriously injured or killed."

The majority of these incidents have involved contractors and operators using large equipment such as excavators, dump trucks, booms, cranes, tractors and trailers, particularly in areas such as Wabush were there is heavy construction activity.  Other power line contacts have involved members of the general public engaged in construction projects around the home and trimming or cutting trees for firewood near power lines.

Haynes says that by taking the time to plan carefully and to identify overhead and underground power lines before starting work is critical to preventing injuries.  In the case of tree trimming and cutting, it's important to carefully assess your surroundings to ensure you are within a safe distance of avoiding a tree falling onto a power line.

"Cutting trees for firewood is common near some of our lines, and the best advice we can give is to avoid it altogether," stresses Haynes. "We urge people to move into parts of the woods where there is no possibility of contacting a power line when the tree falls. It's better to put the extra effort into finding a suitable location to cut firewood than to risk serious injury or being killed, which could certainly happen if these types of incidents continue. People need to start considering the danger of doing any type of work near power lines."

"Our priority is to ensure the safety of our employees, contractors and the general public."  said Haynes.  "Contact with power lines is extremely dangerous and can be fatal. We need all members of the public to be aware of the dangers associated with electricity and to take the appropriate precautions when working around power lines, and this includes cutting trees. We ask them to look up, keep back and call ahead to stay safe around power lines."

Specific requirements for maintaining clearances and providing worker training are mandated by the province's occupational health and safety regulations. Special permits are required when working near energized power lines.  Operators of equipment with the capability of contacting overhead or underground power lines must attend an approved power line hazards safety course.

Hydro reminds contractors and the general public that working around electricity requires their complete attention. Accidents can be prevented with proper planning, worksite evaluation and adhering to safe distances. For more information on working safely around electrical equipment, visit HydroSafety.ca or call 1.888.737.1296.

- srbp -

The Best Case/Worst Case Scenario #nlpoli

So there you have it.

The Liberal caucus, less a vacationing Jim Bennett,  met last week.

They decided Kevin can keep the job of Liberal Party leader and all the glory that involves these days.

He can keep it some time next year, as VOCM reported it. 

Fact is, Aylward could be there longer.

What Aylward will do as party leader is unclear. 

Why he was away from the caucus meeting that secured his future is equally unclear.  The unspecified party business excuse is a bit like “to spend more time with my family”.  It is a stock political excuse to be trotted out, when needed, even though everyone knows it is complete bullshit.

You can tell the caucus is enthusiastic about the future.  You can see it in the looks on their faces in the scrum afterward when they told reporters about their momentous decision.

As for Yvonne Jones,  the local media are reporting that she doesn’t want the leader’s job.  What they all missed is that Jones has the de facto leader’s job she supposedly doesn’t want and the hefty extra salary to go with it.  She has the plum spot in the opposition benches in the House of Assembly.  She makes staffing decisions.  Jones controls the budget.  She gets to ask the first questions in the  daily Question Period – when the House is sitting – and she’s the one the media will go to for comment.

Jones just announced to the world on behalf of the party leader what the party leader will do.

Yvonne Jones is the party leader for anyone who is paying attention.

From Yvonne’s standpoint, this is a best-case scenario.

So now what?

Well, that’s the political worst case scenario if you are one of the handful of people left in Newfoundland and Labrador still supporting the provincial Liberals.  While there will be lots of talk about stuff that needs to happen on the glorious march back to power, recent history will tell you that none of it will happen.

The party simply doesn’t speak to anyone anymore and outside of the 10 or 11% of the electorate who voted for them, they don’t speak for much either.

With the leadership set up of Jones-Aylward, there’s obviously no cohesion or shared sense of direction.  What the Liberals are left with is to keep going in circles for a while.

And that may be a long while, given that Saviour Messiah Dean the Magical Wonder Pony may not really want the job in the future just like he hasn’t really wanted it in the past.

In the meantime, you can count the number of minutes before the jokes start flowing from the Tories or Dippers about whether the Grit leadership creature is straight from Dr. Doolittle – with two heads – or the Pushmi - Pullyu’s other bits stuck together.

News of the Liberal leadership arrangement is met with both dancing for joy and chin-pulling scepticism, right, at a rally of all 11 Liberal Party supporters left in the province.

(Not exactly as illustrated.)

Indecision and inactivity over the course of four years are what led to the recent fiasco capped off by one of the most spectacularly inept and incompetent campaigns in recent political history.

More indecision and inactivity  - guaranteed under the current leadership arrangement - won’t make anything better.  Well, not if the goal was to challenge the Tories for the government in 2015, it isn’t.  At this rate the Liberals will be fighting for the life and struggling to hold onto the opposition in 2015 as the Tories and Dippers duke it out for power. 

As it stands today, the Liberal Party faced a near death experience a couple of weeks ago, a real “holy f***, that was close” moment.

Now that the danger has passed, they want to get right back to the old ways of doing business that put the party in his current sorry state.

The party needs to change.

A credible political party cannot afford to have a repeat of recent history including the way Jones left the job a few weeks ago and the board picked her replacement.

Change means things have to be different.  More of the same is not an option.  Change also means that so many people within the party will have to give up the traditional Liberal Party delusion that some saviour, some messiah will appear and make all the problems go away.

The party also can’t afford to try and recycle someone – whether Aylward, Efford or Jones – even on a temporary basis.  Temporary has a tendency to become permanent, especially when the shock of a near death experience wears off.

That was the SRBP call on October 13, in what turned out to be a truly Kreskin-like moment.  And then the caucus decided to follow right on with an ad for a new Messiah. 

No matter what the Liberals do next,  they’ve pretty much sealed their political fate.

-srbp -

“What is it do you want?” #nlpoli

“Do you want legislation well-prepared or do you want us to think seriously about the impacts that this is gong to have? (Like), is there is a sentence here that could be written one way and we think it means one thing but it could be interpreted another way and have a detrimental affect on people?”

That’s Kathy Dunderdale, lately chief excuse-monger of the former Republic of Dannystan on why she and her colleagues can’t seem to extract their collective thumbs from their collective anal sphincters long enough to deliver a piece of legislation – whistleblower protection – having promised it so long ago, people can’t even remember how long it is they’ve been committing this particular Great Fraud.

There is no greater fraud, after all, than a promise unkept. Some politician used to run around saying that about everyone else.

Well, anyway, since Kath is wondering, we could start with a premier who can speak in coherent English sentences.  Maybe then she wouldn’t be so afraid of the language and what one sentence might mean if you say it backwards while dancing around naked in the moonlight on a winter solstice [such] that government has been paralysed over this particular promise.

On the other hand, if you were part of a government that fracked up on such a regular basis, then maybe you’d be a little fearful of those letters and bits of punctuation.  Thanks to these goomers, you may recall, the people of the province now own a gigantic environmental mess in the middle of Grand Falls-Windsor.

It’s going to be a long four years.

- srbp -

* edit to clarify a sentence.

Traffic with leadership and vision #nlpoli

1. When is “nutbar” an unacceptable term?
2. Who leaked the amalgamation report?
3. The NDP Rise
4. The Dysfunctional Dunderdale Administration
5. Nutbar Factor 6
6. PPM:  The Polls in the 2011 Election
7. Follow the money:  political finance edition
8. Whither the Liberals?
9. Politics, polls and the news media
10. “And one fine morning…” or, change versus more of the same

- srbp -

“And one fine morning…”, or change versus more of the same #nlpoli

 Wanted: One Saviour  

No experience necessary 

Apply:  Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador

Since Joey died – politically, that is - the Liberal Party has often wandered the political desert of Newfoundland and Labrador.

They are out there again, searching for the a saviour who will - single-handedly and by sheer force of his magical personality - lead them back to the corridors of power just as Joe S did long, long ago.

In another world, Danny Williams would have been the Liberal Jesus-de-jour. 

Would have been, that is, except his Mom wouldn’t let him.

So instead, Danny transformed the provincial Conservatives into a crowd of drooling arse-lickers the likes of which the province hasn’t seen since the 1960s.

Inside the party, Williams surrounded himself with a bunch of people who, when they were not tugging forelocks, apparently believed the Danny-love they felt as they looked out Mordor’s windows would one day be Darin-love or Dunder-love or [insert-name-of-generic-Tory-here]-love. They are getting a rude shock.

The Liberals flocked to his nether regions, too, lips primed for fish kisses just as their fathers did and their fathers before them. Decades of conditioning is hard thing to break.

You’ll still hear them on the open line shows, pining for Danny’s posterior.  I am a Liberal, said one fellow on Thursday’s call-in show, but I backed Danny and I’d do it again.  Lots did.  Like Kevin Aylward, for example, and the people who are behind Aylward’s recent sojourn as fill-in Liberal leader.

One of the perennial saviour-wannabes of recent times  - Dean MacDonald - popped up this week delivering a speech on leadership and vision to the members of the Conception Bay Area Chamber of Commerce.

The story made it to the front page of the Telegram on Thursday, right up at the top above everything else. 
On cue, both NTV and CBC obliged the saviour-in-waiting with fawning, gushing interviews about his intentions, vis-a-vis the salvation thing.

And Dean, coquettishly protesting that he did not wish to be coy, was coy.

At least one of the interviewers asked about Danny and well, like he’s a Tory and like Dean’s a Liberal, so like what’s up with that? 

What’s up with that was obvious from Dean’s speech and from his comments during the interviews.

Dean lambasted Kathy Dunderdale for all the things he either praised Danny for or ignored when Danny did them. Unsustainable public spending?  That was Danny’s stock in trade.  Dean loved Muskrat Falls and then talked about the need for everyone to put politics to one side and get down to the political job of negotiating business deals. 

Sound familiar? 

It should.

Dean MacDonald is fond of saying things that are absolutely correct.  He did it a couple of years ago when he told a bunch of young Liberals that in politics you needed to distinguish yourself from the Other Guys.

And just as he says things that are correct, Dean likes to stand up for exactly the opposite of what he advocates.  In Gander in 2009,  Dean proceeded to explain  - as he did in his interviews on Thursday - exactly how he supports the same political ideas and piss-poor management that got the province into the mess it’s in.

No change. 

Exactly the same.

And therein lies the problem.

The province needs real change.

Dean MacDonald is just more of the same.

Dean would be so much more of the same, in fact that it is like something out of a Brian Tobin speech:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

- srbp -

Who leaked the amalgamation report? #nlpoli

Was it a city councillor with an axe to grind?

Do the neighbouring municipalities have a mole at Tammany at Gower?

- srbp -

The Dysfunctional Dunderdale Administration #nlpoli

Kathy Dunderdale thinks the provincial legislature is dysfunctional.

Well, if the House sat more often than it has since Dunderdale’s been a member, they might be doing better.

Dunderdale as premier is carrying on the tradition of her predecessor of avoiding the province’s legislature as much as possible. As labradore pointed out on Wednesday,  Newfoundland and Labrador has had the shortest election campaigns in the country and gone the longest period between voting day and when the legislature sat next.

In 2007, the Tories – Dunderdale was deputy premier – went 153 after the election before they showed up in the legislature.

SRBP has been pounding on this issue since 2006. Dunderdale is continuing her predecessor’s ignoble tradition.

Uppity Date:  labradore produced another picture that shows the time lapse between voting day and Throne Speech.  The results for some provinces changed dramatically. 

But guess what?  Newfoundland and Labrador still drags its ass across the finish line in the democracy marathon.  Or sprints effortlessly to an easy win in the anti-democracy dysfunction.

It all depends on how you look at it.

Either way, it’s nothing to be proud of.

- srbp -

PPM: Controversy, Accountability and Disclosure #nlpoli

On October 3, Liberal leader Kevin Aylward issued a news release in which he claimed that the second MQO poll released the Friday before had been “bought and paid for by the Tories.”

In the release, the Liberals also claimed that “[t]he Dunderdale Government has bought and paid for this online survey.” 

The Liberals had no evidence to back their claims that the poll was fabricated.  They offered no evidence to refute the polls findings.

In 1989, faced with a partisan poll scam, the Liberal campaigned released its own internal data that proved to be far more accurate than the one released by the Conservatives’ pollster.

In 2011, the Liberals didn’t have polls, let alone ones that could give numbers different from the ones MQO produced.  The release served only to keep alive a bad news poll for the Liberals for the third week of the campaign. The release looked much like a desperate effort by a disorganized campaign fumbling about for anything that could stave off collapse.  The release reeked of desperation.

That desperation became all too apparent as NTV, Environics and then CRA polls appeared all conducted around the same time as the MQO one and all showing numbers that showed the Liberals in more or less the same place as MQO.

Industry controversy, too

After the campaign, CRA president Don Mills complained publicly about campaign poll reporting.  The Telegram quoted Mills:

“There’s a lot of people who say online research is just as good as telephone research. That has not been proven to be true and we have recent examples in Atlantic Canada where a competitor of ours has used an online methodology and have not got it within the margin of error they quoted” he said.

Of course, Mills’ poll didn’t come any closer, but his comments did point to problems with the publicly released polls.

Industry Standards

The Market Research and Intelligence Association represents Canadian market research and public opinion firms.  MRIA has established standards for the public release of polls by firms.  The standards include these provisions:

1) Please include the following key facts in the report:

• Sample size, and population surveyed (who was included)
• Sponsor of study (who commissioned the research)
• Survey method (e.g. telephone, on-line, intercept)
• Timing (when the survey was done)
• Statement of sample error/margin of error (i.e. "+/- 2.5% 19 times out of 20")

2) Please make the following facts available to the public upon request (if not included in report):

• Name of practitioner (company conducting research)
• Sampling method (e.g. random, custom list)
• Weighting procedures (statistical weights, if used)
• Exact wording and order of questions

3) Always differentiate between scientific (most public opinion polls) and non-scientific studies (reader/viewer polls or other "self-selection" methodologies). 

4) Where appropriate, use the caveat that research is not necessarily predictive of future outcomes, but rather captures opinion at one point in time.

What’s the problem?

Both the Aylward and Mills criticisms are rooted in one problem:  a lack of disclosure of details of the polling not just by MQO but of all the firms that released polling during the election.

MQO only confirmed its research was done independently of its clients once Aylward raised the issue.  But even for the sake of its own public image, MQO‘s two releases didn’t offer a great deal of information that would have avoided that controversy or the issue Mills raised.

How do the firms stack up?

A simple reading of the first MQO release suggests that it meet those MRIA standards exactly, as limited as they are, with respect to what must be included: 

The poll was based on a sample of 413 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, with a margin of error of +/- 4.9%.  It was conducted between Friday, September 16 and Sunday September 18, 2011.

The release did not indicate the type of survey (telephone, online etc).  It did identify the company that conducted the work  - part of the “on request” information but didn’t release any of the other information in the same section.

If this release complied with the MRIA standard, the poll was a sample of all people in the province regardless of whether they could vote or not (“Newfoundlanders and Labradorians”). That would make it difficult to compare the poll to any others or even to the voting population as a whole.

There’s no indication of how MQO selected the sample, either.  Was it a randomly selected sample or was it something else?

The second MQO disclosed some additional information but that just raised questions about whether or not the second poll could be  compared to the first:

The poll was based on a sample of 464 residents of Newfoundland and Labrador, with a margin of error of +/- 4.6 per cent. The research was conducted via phone and online between Wednesday, September 28 and Friday, September 30, 2011, using MQO’s research panel iView Atlantic. The sample was weighted regionally to ensure proper representation of the province as a whole.

Again, the sample appears to have been drawn from people resident in the province, regardless of age.  The second release includes information on how MQO collected the data – “via phone and online” – but it isn’t clear how the sample was selected if MQO a previously screened research panel.

The other firms aren’t necessarily any better, though. Consider how Canadian Press described the Environics poll:

Unlike traditional telephone polling, in which respondents are randomly selected, the Environics survey was conducted online from Sept. 29 to Oct. 4 among 708 respondents, all of whom were chosen from a larger pool of people who were recruited and compensated for participating. Environics then adjusts the sample to reflect a broad spectrum of the population.
The non-random nature of online polling makes it impossible to determine statistically how accurately the results reflect the opinions of the population at large.

More information in many respects right down to the fact that participants in the panel were recruited and paid for participating. And to be fair to Environics, this is the CP version, not necessarily the exact description the polling firm gave of its sample and population (who they were studying).

And then there’s how CRA typically describes its quarterly omnibus:

These results are part of the CRA Atlantic Quarterly®, an independent survey of Atlantic Canadians, and are based on a sample of 400 adult Newfoundland and Labrador residents.  The survey was conducted from August 15 to August 31, 2011 with overall results for the province accurate to within + 4.9 percentage points in 95 out of 100 samples.

Some information is missing – presumably it was a random sample – but CRA appends to the release a table of data, the wording of questions and comparative data for several previous polls.

Even with industry standards and even considering the firms involved  are all MRIA members – MQO and CRA are Gold Standard members – the polling firms don’t follow the same practices in how they report polling information. 

Why Disclosure is Important

For those who might think Mills’ criticism about the online panel are accurate, check Geoff Meeker’s post on the controversy.   Meeker put the question of the panel to MQO and got a written reply.  Included was this description of the panel composition that – from MQO’s standpoint – justified including a margin of error while Environics did not:

iView Atlantic is a probability-based panel, meaning that every member of the population has an equal chance of being selected for participation.

These are not esoteric issues.  The MRIA news release accompanying the disclosure standards included these comments by the past president of MRIA’s predecessor organization:

"All of these reporting items create transparency in the polling process and help the public establish an informed opinion about the results of a poll…If we want people to take part in the democratic process, we must be certain they have confidence in the way we conduct our business, from the time they answer our questions through to the results being published."

Ensuring public awareness of opinion research techniques and issues also fulfills objectives set out in the MRIA Code of Conduct. Members of the public should be able to have complete confidence in the poll results they see as well as in their ability to compare results from different research methods.

Given both the controversy in the recent election and the variation in the amount of information polling firms released – even with established standards -  the MRIA has some work to do.

The American Example

With a larger polling industry, more election polling and a much wider experience with controversy, the American polling industry has much more stringent disclosure standards than those of MRIA. None of the polls released during the Newfoundland and Labrador election came even close to the American standards. 

Few Canadian polling firms typically come close to the American standards, but then again, the local controversy is merely one part of a much larger issue in the Canadian industry.  Perhaps it is time for MRIA and its members to review their existing standards with an eye to making them more prescriptive.

The American Association of Public Opinion Research also promotes education for journalists on polls and polling in order to improve knowledge of industry standards and practices. AAPOR has also developed an online course for journalists run in co-operation with  the Poynter Institute.

The National Council on Public Polls has also compiled a list of 20 questions journalists should ask about polls.  The information contained in the questions and answers includes plain language discussions of margins of error and sources of error.

- srbp -

• Monday:  “Politics, Polls and the News Media”
• Tuesday:  “PPM:  The Polls in the 2011 Election”
  
• Wednesday:  “PPM:  The Polls and the Local Media”
  
• Thursday:  “PPM:  Controversy, Accountability and Disclosure”
  

Amalgamation #nlpoli

The only way anyone should agree to amalgamation on the northeast Avalon is if the entire crowd at Tammany on Gower - council and senior staff alike - have absolutely nothing to do with the administration of the new city.

As a townie, there is no way your humble e-scribbler could sleep at night if the crowd on Gower Street currently wreaking havoc on common sense got the chance to spread their ways to anyone else in the province.

- srbp -

PPM: The Polls and the Local Media #nlpoli

All daily media in the province reported polls released by polling firms during the 2011 general election. 

They reported the polls as the firms released them.  That is, they did not question or alter the presentation of the numbers, nor did they discuss the different methodology used to generate them. This CBC report is typical.

The second MQO poll, released on September 30 stands out in particular as a result of the way it was reported.  This poll prompted a news release from Liberal leader Kevin Aylward that we’ll discuss in greater detail in the final segment of this series.

What’s most interesting about the second MQO poll is the way the firm reported the results for a question it asked on the leaders’ debate. 

One can make a theoretical argument about eliminating undecideds in the presentation of a party choice question. Some pollsters would claim this would allow you to match their poll result with the popular vote on election day.

But there’s no reason to alter the presentation of the results in such a way for any other sort of question.  Yet that is exactly what MQO did with the leaders’ debate question.  For some inexplicable reason, MQO reported the results in such a way that they placed the emphasis on those who watched the debate.  They then presented their responses as if those who reportedly watched the debate was 100% of the sample.

When asked about the leaders’ debate, 34 per cent of those polled said they watched the televised leaders’ debate on Wednesday, September 28. Of those respondents who watched the debate, 36 per cent felt Kathy Dunderdale won the debate, while Lorraine Michael was seen as the winner by 22 per cent, and six per cent said Kevin Aylward came out on top. The remainder of respondents said there was no clear winner of the debate.

The result was this sort of presentation in news stories:

The poll poses serious questions for Kevin Aylward and the Liberals who have been struggling through the campaign with an accumulated debt and difficulty with recruiting candidates.

Of respondents who had watched the leaders' debate on Wednesday night, only six per cent said Aylward won it. By contrast, 36 per cent chose PC Leader Kathy Dunderdale and 22 per cent chose NDP Leader Lorraine Michael.

"The remainder of respondents said there was no clear winner of the debate," MQO said in a statement.

In the rush to write a news story, no reporters caught that 66% of the respondents didn’t watch the debate.  They didn’t adjust the rest of MQO’s numbers accordingly. The result is that MQO’s misleading presentation of its results survived into news casts.

Aside from the MQO and Environics polls released by the companies themselves to all media, two of the province’s major media outlets commissioned polls for the 2011 election.

NTV commissioned their usual pollster, Telelink, to conduct a poll similar to ones they have done with Telelink on several occasions over the past six years.

The poll served the usual purpose.  It gave NTV exclusive news content as well as a marketing opportunity.  NTV was also able to ask a question on Muskrat falls similar to one from an NTV/Telelink poll in February.  As such, NTV was able to describe not only the results of the new poll but the trend – in this case a decline in support – from the earlier poll.

The Telegram commissioned CRA to conduct a poll with what turned out to be the largest sample of any poll conducted during the election. 

Consistent with experience elsewhere, the Telegram used the poll to generate large amounts of original content in addition to reaction pieces.  The poll was the centrepiece of the paper’s election coverage over three days, beginning on October 6. 

The poll, however, did not add significant new information to any other poll results.  The Saturday edition  - October 8 - featured responses to questions on the so-called rural-urban divide.  However, the questions – which party do you think best deals with rural issues and so on – basically mirrored the satisfaction questions without adding significant depth or colour to public understanding of the issues and public opinion. “Satisfaction” questions ask respondents to indicate how satisfied they are with government performance on a given topic. 

The Saturday edition of the Telegram also reported on another key question.  The Telegram asked respondents which party they would chose if Danny Williams was still the Tory leader.

Curiously,  the Telegram found that health care was overwhelmingly the major issue for respondents, just as CRA polls for the provincial government reported for the past year.  However, the Telegram did not probe any dimensions of that opinion.  What is it about health care that people are so concerned about?

The most significant aspect of the media and polls during the 2011 election was not what the media reported of specific polls during the election.   Rather it was the conclusion that news media drew from the CRA quarterly omnibus results and then the subsequent polls.

The Tories were assured of a massive majority, so the interpretation went.  The only thing potentially worth watching was a race for second place in poll results.

You can see the theme in national media – CTV or the Globe for example – and you can also see it in local coverage.  The CBC interpreted the second MQO poll with a particularly strident emphasis on the supposed loss of ground by the Liberals in the poll.  The decline, incidentally, was well within the margin of error.  The CBC characterised the change in numbers as “freefall.”

What this interpretation missed as a result was the dramatic battle between the New Democrats and the Conservatives in St. John’s.  No daily media in the province reported it before the election results on October 11.  In the October 8 edition, for example, the Telegram election coverage made no mention of the battle beyond the NDP confidence in seats changing hands. 

If they missed entirely a pitched battle right under their noses, it is no surprise that they also missed the Liberal campaigns in western Newfoundland that resulted in the party winning enough seats to continue as the official opposition in the House of Assembly.  The Liberals, as one wag noted, refused to follow the media script and die on cue.

By following the polls – marketing devices for the polling firms and for some news outlets – the news media missed the news in the local election.

- srbp -

 

• Monday:  “Politics, Polls and the News Media”

• Tuesday:  “PPM:  The Polls in the 2011 Election”

• Wednesday:  “PPM:  The Polls and the Local Media”

• Thursday:  “PPM:  Controversy, Accountability and Disclosure”

Follow the money: political finance edition #nlpoli

If you have eyes, be prepared to have them popped by labradore’s latest comparison of party financing.

He looks at the pattern of corporate political donations in metro Halifax and metro St. John’s from 2005 to 2009.  The results are startling.  In a region with a smaller population, the corporate sector in St. John’s gave more cash and they gave it disproportionately to the party in power.

Add that bit of information to a post on Monday that showed just how much the corporate sector gave in just a single year, namely 2010.

In 2010, the governing Progressive Conservatives raised $690,000 in reportable contributions, versus the Liberals $31,000 and the NDP's $59,000. That is the highest amount the Tories have ever raised in an off-election year.

Of the PC total that year, fully $383,000 — over 55% — came from business donors in the greater St. John's area.

And just to further refine those numbers, bear in mind that of the $690,000, the Tories got $235,000 or thereabouts from one sector:  the construction industry.

- srbp -

Handling the Undecideds #nlpoli

Opinion polls conducted in Newfoundland and Labrador that ask about party choice measure the opinion of the entire population of eligible voters.

As such, discarding the undecided responses (anything other than a party choice) or reallocating the undecideds according to some pre-determined policy tends to distort the poll results. It doesn’t matter whether the question is about a theoretical election “tomorrow” or one that will actually occur two or three weeks in the future.

What to do with the undecideds is a contentious issue among pollsters themselves.  The technique CRA or MQO used in their election poll reports has the effect of allocating the self-identified undecideds according to the same breakdown as those already decided.

But the experts at pollster.com, for example, will insist that late undecideds tend to break for the challenger.  That’s the opposite of what MQO and CRA do.

Other pollsters handle the undecideds differently.  As Mark Blumenthal noted in a 2004 post, the Pew Institute and Gallup sometimes allocate undecideds evenly among the other choices.

What’s interesting to note, though, is that the undecideds in the American poll results tend to be less than 10% of respondents.  The decideds comprise two choices each of which is four or five times larger.  Reallocating that small a percentage or discarding it entirely does not necessarily skew the picture of public opinion that greatly.

In the recent provincial general election, MQO reported the lowest level of undecideds in its polling at 18% for its second poll and 20% for the first one. But at least one of these was not the traditional random sample pollsters historically use.

The “undecided” category appears to capture those who said they were undecided, those who said they did not intend to vote and those who refused to answer the question.

In telephone polls during the election that apparently used random samples – Telelink and CRA -  the lowest reported undecided/will vote/ refused was 26% for CRA in both its poll for the Telegram and its August quarterly omnibus.

Telelink hit 42%. 

Environics had an undecided of 30% using its online panel survey method.

With undecideds at those levels, reallocating them can significantly distort the perception of what opinion the public actually holds.

This is no small point when the polls are apparently intended to describe the opinions held by all adults over the age of 18 years not just those who may – from election to election – decide to go to the polls.

In the most recent general election, the percentage of eligible voters who didn’t go to the polls was larger than the percentage that supported the winning party.

You can see the effect of the distorting effect when you compare the poll results to the actual vote result as a share of eligible voters. All the results cited below were conducted between September 30 and October 3. 

	Vote	CRA	ENV	MQO	NTV
PC	32	44	38	44	35
ND	11	18	22	27	15
LIB	14	12	09	11	08
DNV	42	26	30	18	42

The distortion can then lead people to draw some erroneous conclusions.  Take, for argument sake, the Telegram editorial on October 17:

Cheers: to more fun with numbers. The provincial Liberal party has made much hay with claims that by landing six seats and staying as the provincial opposition, it was somehow proving pre-election critics wrong. (The claims, of course, ignore the fact the party had the lowest share of the popular vote in its history.)

Numbers can be lots of fun, if you understand what they mean.  Election results in a first-past-the-post system depend very much on what party can get its voters to the polls in each district.  Even with overwhelming voter support – according to the distorted presentation of poll results that discount UND/will not vote – the Tories should have easily swept every district.

But they didn’t.

They lost seats.

The Tories lost seats in their heartland of St. John’s and came close to losing a bunch of others.

When voter turn-out drops, as in the election just finished, the actual share of eligible vote becomes more important.  The Telegram editorial ignores the fact that turn-out in the most recent election hit a historic low.  If voter choices had actually looked like the numbers their pollster claimed he reported, the whole election would have turned out differently!

But  - for some reason - their pollster missed a huge chunk of public opinion.  He wasn’t alone.  Only NTV/Telelink hit the number, even if it wound up being mislabelled.

In the end:

a poll released near to an election with a relatively high number of undecided voters is an indication that the questionnaire was not designed properly, and/or that the screening of voters was not conducted with enough rigor. Well-designed screening questions and well-written “who will you vote for questions” should, as a natural byproduct, produce lower undecideds in a final pre-election poll, all other things being equal. The solution is not, as some have recommended, for the pollster to make up numbers on election eve for the purpose of eliminating the undecideds, but rather to craft the survey instrument in such a way that it naturally results in fewer and fewer undecideds as the election draws near.

- srbp -

 

• Monday:  “Politics, Polls and the News Media”

• Tuesday:  “PPM:  The Polls in the 2011 Election”

• Wednesday:  “PPM:  The Polls and the Local Media”

• Thursday:  “PPM:  Controversy, Accountability and Disclosure”

PPM: The Polls in the 2011 Election #nlpoli

Polling firms released more election polls in the 2011 provincial general election than in any recent provincial election.

Corporate Research Associates, Environics, MQO (MarketQuest Omnifacts) and Telelink produced a total of five polls.  MQO issued two polls 10 days apart.  Telelink and CRA produced polls for NTV and the Telegram, respectively and Environics issued a single poll.

The Polls and What They Reported

News stories reported what the polling organizations reported to them.

MQO issued its first poll on September 20, one day after the campaign formally started.

They reported the responses to questions on  party choice (“if an election were held today”), leader choice, government satisfaction and top issue.  The news release gave the results for party choice and leader choice as percentage of decideds, but with the percentage undecided  - described as “noncommittal” in the leader choice paragraph – included.

The poll was based on a sample of 413 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, with a margin of error of +/- 4.9%.  It was conducted between Friday, September 16 and Sunday September 18, 2011.

Aside from the news release, MQO apparently did not release anything else about the poll including information on how the sample was chosen, any weighting, if the poll was done alone or as part of a larger poll or details of question wording and order.

MQO issued its second poll release on September 30.

The release reported on questions on party choice, leaders’ debate,  government satisfaction and major issue. As with the earlier release, the results for the party choice and leader questions gave results as a percentage of decided respondents and included the percentage undecided.

The poll was based on a sample of 464 residents of Newfoundland and Labrador, with a margin of error of +/- 4.6 per cent. The research was conducted via phone and online between Wednesday, September 28 and Friday, September 30, 2011, using MQO’s research panel iView Atlantic. The sample was weighted regionally to ensure proper representation of the province as a whole.

The release did not include information on the research panel or how MQO combined the panel sample with the telephone.  The release only indicated the sample was weighted regionally but gave no indication of what standard was used to determine the appropriate weighting.

The release did not give any information on question wording, order or other information related to how the poll was conducted. The two releases do not indicate if MQO conducted both polls using the same methodology such that the results could be compared.

This release included two graphics showing some of the responses for the leader choice and party choice questions.

On October 3, NTV reported a poll it commissioned from Telelink. NTV reported on party choice and leader choice.  Telelink conducted the poll on October 1 and 2, with a sample comprising 511 residents of the province. Reported margin of error was plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.

NTV reported the results for the party choice question (how the respondent intended to vote) as a percentage of all respondents, including don’t know, no answer.

Telelink probed the undecided/refused and produced a second set of party choice numbers combining decided plus leaning.

On October 4,  NTV reported on a question on Muskrat Falls following up on an earlier Telelink poll it had commissioned in February.

Environics issued a poll result on October 5 through Canadian Press.

Thirty-eight per cent of respondents backed the incumbent Progressive Conservatives, compared to 23 per cent for the NDP and nine per cent for the Liberals.

Thirty per cent were undecided.

The online poll was conducted by Environics Research Group and provided exclusively to The Canadian Press.

Unlike traditional telephone polling, in which respondents are randomly selected, the Environics survey was conducted online from Sept. 29 to Oct. 4 among 708 people.

The respondents were chosen from a larger pool of people who were recruited and compensated for participating.

The non-random nature of online polling makes it impossible to determine the statistical accuracy of how the poll reflects the opinions of the general population.

Neither Environics or Canadian Press released any other information on the poll.

The Telegram commissioned Corporate Research Associates to conduct a poll exclusively for the newspaper. 

The Telegram will roll out results of the wide-ranging poll — which has a large sample size of 800 — in the coming days.

The poll was conducted between Sept. 29 and Oct. 3 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points with a confidence level of 95 per cent.

The Telegram reported results of the poll from October 6 to October 8 for questions on major issue, party choice, second choice, leader choice and government satisfaction. 

The October 6 edition reported the party choice question as percentages of all respondents.  The Telegram reported on regional results for some questions but did not indicate separate margins of error for the regional results. CRA poll reports obtained from the provincial government under access to information laws typically do not show margins of error for these sub-sample breakouts.

The Telegram did not release any other details on the poll including specific wording of questions, sequencing or weighting. 

What the Party Choice Question Measured

The party choice question is the one question asked by pollsters for which a genuinely objective confirmation exists.

The problem comes, however, in determining what the pollsters intended to measure when they posed the party choice question.  There is what may be called a standard question – “if an election were held tomorrow…” however at least one of the polls involved a non-standard question along the lines of “who will you vote for next week?”

Some of the polls apparently asked non-standard questions

None of the news releases or news stories indicated what the poll results for the party choice question would show.  That is, one can read the releases or news stories and not see clearly that the numbers were intended to show a party share of vote on election day.

Some pollsters, such as CRA, report results that discard all undecided responses and treat the specific party choices as if they were 100% of the responses.

The Telegram story on October 6 included figures reported that way at the end of the front page story:

Among decided voters across all regions, 59 per cent of them said they would vote PC,  25 per cent NDP and 16 per cent Liberal.

It also included the results of a proving question for the undecideds/refused (26-27%) of respondents.

Among the undecideds or those who refused to state their preference, 26 per cent are leaning towards the PCs, while 21 per cent are leaning towards the NDP and 14 towards the Liberals.

Some 38 per cent said they don’t know.

The Telegram did not report its own results for decided + leaners

Based strictly on the limited information provided in the news stories and/or news releases during the campaign, it is impossible to say for certain what the pollsters intended to measure.  As such it becomes very difficult to compare the polls – as reported – for accuracy and consistency.

Take, for example, the CRA report for the Telegram.  According to the newspaper account, they have three separate potential sets of figures in response to the single party choice question.  There is the raw percentages reported on the front page of the Thursday edition (PC = 44%, for example)  Then there is the decideds-only reported in the third last paragraph of the story. (PC= 59%) 

And then there would be the possible decided plus leaning response.  To figure this one out, you’d have to do some math to calculate what 26% of 26% is.  That’s the number of leaners within the undecided/don’t know/refused from the first set of percentages.  Do the math, though and you’d get 44% + 7% = 51%.

But what are these numbers supposed to represent? 

There’s the rub.

Based on information SRBP obtained several years ago, it appears that none of the polling firms screens respondents to exclude non-voters. They do not identify voters, specifically.  Pollsters in Newfoundland and Labrador simply poll a sample of those eligible to vote. 

That means that the correct comparison for their polling numbers is not the share of people who show up and vote on polling day but a comparison with the entire population of eligible voters.

You can see this in the CRA question reported by the Telegram on October 6.  The initial question asked respondents which party the respondent was most likely to vote for. If CRA had screened out non-voters, none of the replies should have been “I won’t vote” .  But, in fact, 3% indicated they did not plan to vote.

The same is basically true of all the poll results, to one degree or another.  They measure party choice by eligible voters.  In the process, they capture  - or are supposed to capture -  people who are genuinely undecided, people who claim to be undecided and those who will not vote.

All are important in presenting a clear picture of public opinion as it actually was at the time the poll was taken.

Anything else is a distortion.

- srbp -

• Monday:  “Politics, Polls and the News Media”

• Tuesday:  “PPM:  The Polls in the 2011 Election”

• Wednesday:  “PPM:  The Polls and the Local Media”

• Thursday:  “PPM:  Controversy, Accountability and Disclosure”

When is “nutbar” an unacceptable term? #nlpoli

CBC’s ombudsman has ruled on complaints about Kevin O’Leary’s on-air use of the word “nutbar”.  According to the Globe and Mail:

The watchdog says hundreds of complaints were filed after Mr. O’Leary called [Chris Hedges,] the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist “a nutbar” during CBC News Network’s The Lang & O’Leary Exchange on Oct. 6. The remark came during a seven-minute segment about the Occupy Wall Street protests unfolding in the United States.

“There is room at the inn for a range of views, but there is no room for name-calling a guest,” CBC ombudsman Kirk LaPointe writes in a decision dated Oct. 13.

Interesting.

In November 2010, O’Leary had a few choice words about the Old Man shortly after he announced he’d be skedaddling from provincial politics.

Nutbar Factor 6 is how O’Leary described Williams’ economic policies that included seizing private property using the power of the provincial legislature.

Maybe CBC didn’t get complaints about that one.

- srbp -

A study in fiscal responsibility contrasts #nlpoli

Alison Redford, Alberta’s new Conservative premier promises she will deliver some long overdue attention to the provincial government’s heritage fund.

That’s a stash of oil and gas cash created in 1976 as a kind of rainy day fund.

Previous Conservative governments took cash out, stopped putting cash in and otherwise neglected a fund that could be worth $100 billion today according to former premier Peter Lougheed, the guy who created the fund.

Meanwhile, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Conservative premier is promising “fiscal responsibility”. 

Unfortunately, Kathy Dunderdale and her colleagues have been promising that since 2003 and they still haven’t delivered. 

What’s worse,  they have explicitly rejected every responsible fiscal idea that’s been tossed their way.

- srbp -

The NDP Rise #nlpoli

On Sunday, the always provocative labradore dissected the NDP performance in the last general election.

The NDP gains in votes, and seats, came almost entirely at the expense of the Tories. The Liberals stubbornly refused to believe their own obituaries.

According to the script, this wasn't supposed to happen.
And it's not just a matter of raw vote- and seat-counts. Straits and White Bay North released itself from the Liberal clutches it fell into in the late by-election, but did so without rushing back to the Tory fold. Clyde Jackman saw his political career flash before his eyes, and the NDP was strong enough to be competitive in several of the St. John's area seats it didn't win. Apart from raw margins, another indicium of the potential winnability or convertability of a district is whether the second-place party is strong enough to win polls within the district. The NDP did so in at least four Tory-held St. John's seats Tuesday night, and enough of them that it was leading in suburban Cape St. Francis in the first hour of the count.

Whence the source of the nervous-nelliness.

Labradore’s colourful charts don’t convey the full sense of the shock on the ground. 

Your humble e-scribbler has had way too many direct and indirect accounts over the past week of good Tories who watched the telly gobsmacked on Tuesday last as the NDP ate Shawn and Ed and Bob.

They never saw it coming.

The shock is profound.

They really didn’t see the NDP second-place strength in the other metro seats otherwise they’d be flinging themselves out the nearby windows.

The Tories will have a very hard time dealing with the NDP insurgency.  The NDP policies are the same ones the Tories have been pushing since 2003.

Since the NDP voters are apparently former Tory voters – for the most part – the old Tory scare tactic of NDP financial irresponsibility just won’t find any purchase with those who will likely be looking to change votes and parties next time out.

- srbp -

Politics, polls and news media #nlpoli

For the past 65 years,  public opinion polls have been an integral feature of news media reports on politics and elections.

The reasons are pretty simple to understand.  Most public opinion polls are conducted by professional firms using scientific methods.  As such, they are considered to be inherently impartial, accurate and fair representations of what the public thinks about candidates and parties. 

The firms that poll during an election are usually independent of the political parties.  This gives the news media a source of independent information about the campaign.  Polls, especially ones exclusive to the news organization, can give the media outlets a direction for coverage.

When news media commission polls, they also gain a marketing boost.  Don’t discount the business imperative in news.  Tom Rosenstiel is executive director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.  Rosenstiel began a 2005 article on political polling and news media by recounting a meeting at the Los Angeles Times in 1991 to plan coverage of the 1992 election.

“Polls are a form of marketing for news organizations,”  Rosenstiel wrote. “Every time a Los Angeles Times poll is referred to in other media, the paper is getting invaluable positive marketing for its name and credibility.”

Presenting information in an entertaining way has always been a part of news. Poll results typically come in a form that lends itself to an horse-race story format.  That injects some energy into what might otherwise be a dull story of numbers.  .

Reporters usually have an easy time summing up a poll report.  That’s an increasingly important factor in newsrooms operating on tight budgets and facing heavy demands for content.

Rosenstiel marked that pressure in 2005 as a key feature of modern newsrooms.  But in truth, the need to produce news stories quickly has always been a feature of news media for some time now, especially electronic media. Political scientist Everett Carl Ladd wrote in 1980:

For the most part, the press… must work quickly to do its mandated job.  This observation obviously applies a somewhat less to magazines than to the daily newspaper or the nightly television news broadcast, but it holds generally. The story must be promptly brought to the audience.

What’s changed more recently is the increased demand for content as smaller numbers of news organizations produce material for print, radio, television and the Internet, sometimes from the same newsroom.  Often this is simply the repackaging of material, as Rosenthiel noted.  And that makes apparently simple stuff – like reporting a horserace poll – that much more attractive.  if the news organization commissions a poll of its own and delves into more than just the “who’s on first” question, they can generate new content for days.

Controversy

None of the media’s use of polls is has come without controversy. 

In the run-up to the spring general election, the seemingly wide variation in poll results generated news stories about the reliability of polling.

At a conference on the May federal election, people representing eight polling firms debated the impact of polls on the election.  Opinions varied – as they did – on what impact poll reporting had on the public.  According to a Canadian Press story, Frank Graves of Ekos Research said that post-election polling found that Canadians didn’t believe poll reporting affected the outcome of the election

Environics' Kevin Neuman was doubtful.

"People may say that (polls) don't influence, but it would influence the media and how the media cover the story and frame the story," he said, adding that the CROP poll "may have completely changed the media coverage."

In the recent Ontario general election, some pollsters complained about the publication of polls from different sources, often without any apparent concern for their accuracy.

“We are distorting our democracy, confusing voters and destroying what should be a source of truth in election campaigns — the unbiased, truly scientific public-opinion polls,” wrote Darrell Bricker and John Wright of Ipsos Reid.

…

Bricker said most research firms are accurate. But some are “so ridiculously inaccurate” he wonders how they got into the business. And elections bring out the carpetbaggers or those trying out untested, and dubious, methodology.

Still, the biggest question for him is not research firms. “I have to ask the question, what are the media thinking?

Closer to home, Corporate Research Associates’ Don Mills complained in the Telegram on Saturday about the accuracy of some polling released during the recent provincial election campaign. MQO released two polls during the campaign that relied on a combination of telephone polling plus online surveys:

“There’s a lot of people who say online research is just as good as telephone research. That has not been proven to be true and we have recent examples in Atlantic Canada where a competitor of ours has used an online methodology and have not got it within the margin of error they quoted,” he said.

“They are not even supposed to quote margin of error in online polls.”

Industry critics

Not all pollsters are as enthusiastic about the proliferation of polls and the increasingly close relationship between the media and opinion research firms.

In April, Allan Gregg – perhaps the country’s most famous researcher – and Frank Graves of Ekos spoke out in an article by Canadian Press.

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.

Start with the methodological morass.

“The dirty little secret of the polling business . . . is that our ability to yield results accurately from samples that reflect the total population has probably never been worse in the 30 to 35 years that the discipline has been active in Canada,” says veteran pollster Allan Gregg, chairman of Harris-Decima which provides political polling for The Canadian Press.

The increased use of cell phones and changing lifestyles have made traditional telephone surveys less reliable, according to Gregg.  Online polling may produce more reliable results in some instances but not in others.

Still, according to Gregg, polling firms are producing margin of error calculations “as if we’re generating perfect samples and we are not anymore.” 

Pollsters continue to generate horse race polls for their marketing value, according to both Gregg and Andre Turcotte, a pollster and communications professor quoted in Joan Bryden’s Canadian Press story from April.

Turcotte says political polls for the media are “not research anymore” so much as marketing and promotional tools. Because they’re not paid, pollsters don’t put much care into the quality of the product, often throwing a couple of questions about party preference into the middle of an omnibus survey on other subjects which could taint results.

And there’s no way to hold pollsters accountable for producing shoddy results since, until there’s an actual election, there’s no way to gauge their accuracy.

Not surprisingly, the association representing polling firms disagrees.  The Market Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) took out a full page ad in newspaper’s across Canada when the polling controversy first sprang up in February.  The ad affirmed the association’s “confidence in the results of our polling and the value that we provide to Canadians.”

Politics, polls and the media

The 2011 provincial general election in Newfoundland and Labrador brought with it both an unprecedented number of horse race polls and a certain level of controversy.

In the second part of this series – on Tuesday -  we’ll take a look at the polls, the polling firms, what they reported, and what the polls measured.

- srbp -

The Series:

• Tuesday:  “PPM:  The Polls in the 2011 Election”
• Wednesday:  “PPM:  The Polls and the Local Media”
• Thursday:  “PPM:  Controversy, Accountability and Disclosure”

Related:

• “Playing the numbers”
• “The media and the message”
• “The perils of polling”
• “The Danny Brand”