The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Demystifying the Art of Political Polling

Episode Date: April 12, 2025

The Agenda's week in review looked at the secret sauce behind political polling, whether Canada should use retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. and what Canada's relationship to the oil sector should be.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's also a story about a system that is supposed to protect patients. From TVO Podcasts, I'm Krisha Collier, and this is The Oath. Subscribe today wherever you listen. Here are four leading pollsters and some of the numbers that they have. This is the latest federal polling, I think this is as of this morning, for the election campaign. Here's David Coletto's group off the top, Abacus, which has essentially got the race tied.

39-39 between liberals and conservatives, NDP at 11, of course. We won't go into the smaller parties for now. Liaison, that's Valentin's group over here. He's got 45, 39 liberals over conservatives. Polly, that's Erin Kelly's artificial intelligence algorithm. 39, 36, so liberals up three. And then the signal has got 42, 40. Now, here's my question.

Okay, Valentin, can you all be right? Well, yeah, we all can be right. I think one thing to keep in mind about most surveys is that they come up a margin of error. And so we're not saying it's going to be 38. We're saying it's going to be 38 within two or three or sometimes four percentage points. So if the poll says 38, but the actual number is 39, that's actually considered quite good.

Erin Kelly, you look at these numbers and nobody has the same numbers. So people will reasonably ask, how can you all be right? What's the answer? It's just like David said. It's your, I mean, I can give you an example of how we create the data to illustrate why sometimes you're going to have margins bearers. So in our case, what Polly is doing, she's doing a randomized controlled representative sample of the population from social media.

So we're really, really, we've been doing this for 15 years. So Polly does a random crawl through the graph. It's a probabilistic sample, which is the gold standard for getting the sample. And we've got millions of people in the sample. So we're very, very convinced that we've got, we know that we've got, and we've tested and measured, we've got a great representative sample.

We know if we say they're in Ottawa, they're in Ottawa. Here's the trick, though. The writings are different from the cities, right? So it's very easy for us or for Polly to determine that you live in Toronto and that David Coletto lives in Ottawa, even neighborhoods we can get down to. Writings are much more challenging, right? So if you're in Ottawa and we know you're in the Glebe, do we know which writing in particular you're in? People donbe. Do we know which riding in particular

you're in? People don't usually identify what they're riding. A campaign is 36 days long. So people might say, well this candidate came to visit me and we say, okay that's that riding. So you know we've got those breadcrumbs. But it's, we have to do those by hand. So we have to feed those to Polly by hand because she's, because they're so unusual, right? And they change. Okay, let me follow up with David Coletto on this. Because David, you've got the race tied 39-39 today.

And the other David, David Valentin here, has got a six point lead for the liberals. So again, people will reasonably ask, how can you both be right? What's the answer? Well, I think there's there's always Other other factors in determining how we get these estimates, right? So so my survey is done using Online panels and David's uses I believe

IVR which is a telephone survey based on an automated telephone survey. And so those, what we call mode effects can come into the results, right? So in the case of a telephone survey, for example, I believe right now, liberal Canadians, those are going to vote liberal, are more engaged right now. They're more likely to be picking up the phone, more likely to be answering the survey. So I think what we call response bias may be in part why you're seeing some of the telephone-based research being more favorable to the liberals. On the other hand, other pollsters, like myself,

make some adjustments in our waiting that might push down that liberal vote because our NDP number is slightly higher. So there's choices that every pollster makes that might get us to different results but in the end of the day I think David's right that we're still fundamentally seeing the Liberals having an advantage even if those top line numbers are slightly different. David do you have a view as to whether or not you get superior numbers more accurate numbers if you do it by telephone, off social media, off the internet, what?

Well, I think on average, you know, my sense of it is if I'm doing a political project, I prefer telephone. But everyone has their own methodology and there's perfectly valid reasons why online panel sometimes takes a little longer to catch up. We've seen this in other elections where there's a little bit of a lag effect. But usually in the final week of the campaign, we always more or less end up at the same place. So even though we have a little bit of a difference now, I think in the end, we'll probably be just a few points away from each other. Generally speaking, do you think it's in Canada's best interests to retaliate with counter tariffs? Generally speaking, the economics would tell you, no, we should not impose tariffs, but

that's not the situation we find ourselves in. As you pointed out, we have retaliated against the unjustified measures that Donald Trump has put in place already. There are three good reasons for it that are probably not textbook economics. First is to keep cohesion here at home. That's absolutely essential in terms of the transitions that we're facing ahead. The next reason is to try and move some of the views of Americans or at least prevent cohesion behind the craziness that is Donald Trump. And then the other thing too is remember we can't give up what we aren't already doing. So some of

those tariffs were imposed on Canada because of supposed fentanyl. We're not exporting fentanyl to the United States. So in this kind of new arrangement with the US, we have to have some kind of tribute to give up. And so for that reason, we want to have tariffs to be able to give up at a later stage. Ian, what about you? Counter tariffs good or bad? They're the worst possible solution that we could adopt right now. We have known since Adam Smith, David Ricardo, 250 years ago, right down to, oh, 10 days ago in Toronto, when Governor Macklem gave an excellent speech summarizing the research of the Bank of Canada economists. And they found absolutely not one single

redeeming argument in favor of tariffs. They increased prices to ordinary Canadians, they are going to drive up inflation, it's going to make life more affordable, and in the research by Professor Tom at Calgary, University of Calgary, he showed that the impact on the US is trivial and the logic is arithmetic. When you take the total cost or estimated amount of the Canadian retaliatory tariffs and simply divide by the 30 trillion GDP, you probably have to go to seven or eight or nine decimal points to the right of the decimal point before

you hit a significant digit other than zero. points to the right of the decimal point before you hit a significant digit other than zero. In other words, the impact of a couple of hundred billion dollars on a thirty trillion dollar economy is similar to a multimillionaire finding a loony on the sidewalk and thinking they just became rich. The impact is negligible. We'll get to Trevor Toombs analysis in just a second here because I'm glad you raised him. We are going to come back to him. First, let me get Drew on this.

What's your view? Well, I agree with Jennifer, and I agree with Ian. How's that? But there's also politics to be considered. Our situation with the United States, we're not a small economy. We're a medium-sized economy, ninth biggest in the world. But we are the biggest economy dependent on one other big player, the super heavyweight. And we're more dependent on them than the

United States than they are on us. In those circumstances, I think in particular, as Ian points out, you know, we're not going to hurt them as much with retaliatory tariffs as we might hurt ourselves. Nevertheless, we're in the middle of an election and I think credibility states for those political parties, and let's talk about reality, that there has to be some sort of retaliation, in part because Canadians expect it. We're actually the outlier,

to go back to Ian's point about pure economics, of the 20 major trading partners with the United States, only two have retaliated, China, which could easily escalate, and us. And we did it in such a way that we worked hard to ensure that they didn't counter retaliate. And we'll see how that happens, where that goes going forward. I mean, Jennifer, let's touch on the political angle here. In the middle of an election campaign, can any self-respecting leader of a major political party not threaten the United States with countervailing tariffs and expect to win, given that 70%

of the Canadian public wants them? No, they can't. They have to impose some sort of countermeasure. And look, if countermeasures, counter tariffs were the only thing that Canada was doing, then we might worry. But don't forget, there's also been a huge amount of diplomatic efforts. There's been a massive public advertising campaign in the states. So I think we need to see these counter tariffs as part of a broader strategy, again, where

there are economic goals to consider, but there are also political goals. And frankly, we're not dealing necessarily with a standard rational actor in the Trump administration. I would point out, it's really interesting, I think, that we have managed to avoid the so-called liberation round of retaliatory measures from the US, and I think that's worth paying attention to. Ian, as promised, we're going to come back to Trevor Toome, the economist from out west, who calculated, here's his numbers here.

A 25% blanket tariff, he says, would have 40 times the impact on Canada versus the same tariff levied by Canada on the United States, as you indicated, basically a pimple on the back of an elephant. Having said that, should we be basing our response on spreadsheets alone? It's not on spreadsheets alone. It comes down to, I guess I'm going to quote Kissinger, you know, we have to be strategic in this, cutting off our nose to spite our face, to use a famous cliche, is not prudent.

Rachel, you first. How in your view has Donald Trump's second term changed the narrative on the oil industry in our country? Well, I think one of the things it's done is that we're all talking about the oil industry here, and we're talking about pipelines, we're talking about exports, and I think the risk is we're letting it suck up some of the oxygen in the room. And the way that we're saying all of a sudden as a country realizing, you know, having all of our eggs in the basket of the United States is a big risk. Having all of our sudden as a country realizing, having all of our eggs in the basket of the United States

is a big risk. Having all of our conversation about our economic future and potential around fossil fuels is a big risk. We are sitting today in a very different place than we were in the 1970s. We've seen reductions of up to 90% in cost on renewable energy, on batteries, and we're seeing, for economic reasons,

like climate change aside, there is a massive movement towards more efficiently powered transportation, industry, energy through electrification. And while Canada sits here in this moment thinking about who do we want to be when we look back 50 years from now, looking to those opportunities as places we need to be putting our investment dollars and our energy in lieu of an industry which is inherently volatile and very much, you know, proven to be in decline,

although I'm sure we'll have debate about how quickly and how much. Well, let's have that debate, but before we get there, Heather, why don't you weigh in on that issue of Trump's second term and how it's changed the conversation around this sector? Yeah, a lot. I mean, for most of us, the conversation changed before when Russia invaded Ukraine. And we really started to think about energy security.

Before that, I think climate policy was dominating European discussions, American discussions. And then we started to think, you know, energy is not a subset of climate policy. It is the most important thing to our economy. I don't mean oil to Canada's economy. I mean the availability of affordable energy for any economy, for manufacturing, for transportation, for, uh, you know, uh, looking all those things. And so the conversation for me changed two or three years ago, and we've seen a little bit of the green lash and I think that's kind of what propelled

Trump and that's propelled the law of right-wing governments to be elected in Europe, is a reaction to, you know, this kind of monolithic focus on climate policy. And so I think what the Trump discussion now has done is a lot more Canadians are literate about the importance of oil and gas to our economy, to our exports, to our trade ballots, and looking at what is the lowest hanging fruit for us to diversify to get other trading partners to enhance our productivity that is still oil and gas. Rory, what say you?

I generally agree with Heather's point here. I obviously think that there is room to invest in a whole bunch of different aspects of the energy system. But I think that when you look at our comparative advantage as a country, we have some of the largest oil reserves in the world. We have the largest oil reserves within the Western Alliance, within the OECD.

We have just gobs of potential. And it's really about using that in the most responsible way to finance all the other things that we want to do. So I think that Canada can both continue to green its domestic economy while also supporting and facilitating the expansion of the oil sands in particular, as a booming export economy. And we're talking about reliance in the United States. Part of the challenge here is that it's always been easier and cheaper

to build pipelines to the United States. The industry's co-evolved together. The refineries are perfectly geared to produce our grades of heavier, sour, or crude. But when we're talking about kind of forcibly diversifying away from that, and I think that is a major and obvious now political and diplomatic risk for the sector. Now what we have seen is that Trump, despite repeatedly and falsely saying that the United States doesn't need our oil or our timber or our cars or whatever. They're just buying all that stuff because they like us.

Yeah, they're just being nice about it, right? But what we have seen is that both in the Canada-Mexico tariffs, we have now seen oil across the board exempted under the USMCA compliance exemption, and even with these latest reciprocal tariffs, which aren't actually reciprocal, but we'll leave that for now,

that were announced on Liberation Day also explicitly excluded energy. So despite Trump's kind of bravado around kind of the United States being energy dominant, enough voices within his orbit still recognize that they need broad energy imports and oil imports but specifically Canadian imports. Don, to the extent this has come up in the Canadian election campaign over the last few weeks, there have been some good discussions, I think, among the candidates on whether we need to build more pipelines east-west in this country and whether we need to have

our own refining capacity in this country rather than sending everything down south. How do you regard that question? Well, I think the issue there is, you know, I think it would have been a brilliant idea in 1980 to build the pipelines. I think it would have been a brilliant idea in 1980 to build the pipelines. I think it would have been a viable idea 25 years ago. My fear right now is because of the cost of that infrastructure and because of the timeline, if we look at 12 years and 34 billion for the Trans Mountain

and here we have a longer pipeline, we'd be doing 1,600 kilometers of new pipeline, I think 3,000 of retrofitting existing pipelines. So if we, you know, who knows what the price is, but let's, if it was 50 billion in 15 years, you know, what does the energy landscape look like in 2040? And I just think, you know, we could be sending, I think that the medium and long term risk is just, is too great.