The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Does Polly Want an Election?

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Erin Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Advanced Symbolics Inc., joins The Agenda to share what Polly, the A.I. pollster, has to say about the public's response to Ontario Premier Doug Ford's snap election call. She will also be sharing what top issues Ontarians are caring about. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith,

a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Erin Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Advanced Symbolics, Inc. is with us now to tell us what Polly, the AI pollster, has to say about the public's response to Premier Ford's snap election call and what the pressing issues of the campaign are so far. Erin, always great to have you back in our studio. Nice to see you again.

Thanks for having me. Okay. What are you picking up? What's Paulie picking up in terms of the mood of the electorate right now? I would say the mood is nauseous. Like nauseous? Really? It's people are, I mean, we've come out of years of inflation, high housing prices coming out of years of inflation, high housing prices, coming out of COVID, and now a trade war with President Trump and not one election but possibly two elections on the horizon in a short space of time. People are angry, exhausted. I'm not even

sure which one is more ahead but I think a feeling of there is no leadership and no control. And who's running the ship? I mean, that's... We saw over 70,000 people just this week talking about this early election call. That is very big. Well, let me pick up on that then. Inside the Pink Palace, inside Queen's Park, the notion of the early election call has everybody extremely exercised. Of course, the Premier's very gung-ho on it.

The opposition parties think it's completely unnecessary. What's Pauly picking up? People are saying it's the number one thing they're saying is that this is a distraction. The Premier has a mandate. He's got a majority government. There is no better mandate in Canada. And not only that, they're saying

it's a distraction from the tasks at hand, is you know health care and how they're agreeing with the opposition parties they're also saying that it's going to make him weaker not stronger in negotiating with Donald Trump because Donald Trump likes to suss out weakness and if you're a politician who said I don't have a mandate and I have to have and you're in an election well this is an opportunity for him to bully you because you're vulnerable, right? And so that's what people are saying.

How does this make any sense? I don't know if Pauly can forecast this at this stage, but you know the opposition parties are clearly trying to make this early election call a thing. They would like this to be the ballot question. Unnecessary election, punish Doug Ford. Are you picking that up? Are people prepared to punish the Premier as a result of this? It's early days right now because people are angry. So, but there's something, there's a there there, right?

Like if they can pick this up and even more importantly, we're seeing now a lot of people are actually, because he's made this election about Donald Trump and not housing and anything else else people are actually now comparing him we're seeing to Danielle Smith you know how he said you don't want Merit Styles or you know Bonnie Crombie negotiating with Trump well that's actually not his competition here his competition is Danielle Smith a lot of people are saying hmm how is he doing compared to Danielle Smith and we've seen over time that people in Ontario even are liking her approach and wondering if that's going

to get better results than the we're gonna turn off all their power and we're gonna take all their bourbon off the shelves you know and what's really interesting is that the people who who are starting to say I like Danielle Smith's approach are more likely to say and I think Merritt-Styles Is more like that Approach which is interesting because Merritt-Styles is not a conservative. No But it's a Danielle Smith is taking a conciliatory

tact here and people are seeing that that's not the same people are seeing that that's not the same tact that Doug Ford is taking or that he's inconsistent in his tact. So it's interesting that the more that they go with Danielle Smith, the more they're moving away from Doug Ford. That is interesting. Now when the election was originally supposed to happen under the fixed election date law, June 2026, presumably Pauly starts looking into potential, whatever, currents waves in the lead up to that. I don't know what, three months, six months ahead of time? You didn't get a heads up this time, right? I mean, we're into a call almost a year and a half before you have to have one. So is Pauly sort of caught off guard here? Polly can work very quickly once we get everything up and running.

So the way Polly works, just to, you know, revise how she works. Always a good idea. Remind us, yeah. What matters when you're doing election forecasting, it's not the technology that you use. You know, whether I use phone polling or I stand on street corners, it's who you're asking or listening to. You have to make sure you have that representative view across the province different ethnicities and age groups and income levels and professions and all of geographic locations geographic locations and you're matching the census data so

that's what we're doing. Now Polly can and what Polly is doing in her case is she's looking at these people throughout their history on social media. So she's getting a representative sample and saying these are the people that I'm going to listen to in this election and I'm gonna listen to how they voted last time, how they voted ten years ago. I mean she can go back in time as if it were that time and see well why did they did they change? Do they change? Do they always vote the the same and what are the issues that have really been resonating with them over a long period of time.

So a snap election call shouldn't necessarily put off her ability to predict? It should not. No it will not. That's the only thing that will is you know as we get closer how solidified are people's votes as we get closer to Election Day? Are they still waffling as we go in? Because as you know, she categorizes people as definitely here, definitely there, and then lean. And it's those leaning one way or the other that she has to make a call on. You know, and that's the...

Pauli is deeply attentive to internet, social media, those kinds of things. But of course, there are a hell of a lot of people in the province of Ontario who are not on social media. So how does Polly figure out what they think? Well, that's why you have to sample it properly, because if we just took everything from social media, which is what social media listening does, it takes everything, you will be overrepresented in young people and certain income levels and things like that. So what Polly does is she says, I've already got enough 25 to 35 year olds in my sample.

I need some more people 65 plus. So she balances that. And that's how you do it with any kind of polling. You're never going to speak to everybody in Ontario in the next week or two, right? It's impossible. And it would be prohibitively expensive. So what you have to do is make sure that you're balancing the people that you listen to so that you compensate for the fact that you can't listen to everyone.

And these people become, it's a representative sample, so these people become representative of their cohort. And what you have to make sure is that sometimes when you can't get enough people to fill out a survey, you do weightings. You say, okay, well, I've only got three Indigenous people, so they represent all Indigenous people in Ontario. Hopefully I've picked them right. For Pauly, because we've got lots and lots of people that we're able, we've got much

bigger sizes, that's kind of an advantage there. Pauly's done pretty well in the past at forecasting certain outcomes. Brexit, Pauli picked. The first Trump victory, Pauli picked. But she doesn't always get it right, right? Because she is evolving. You have to put new information in and she takes account into that. How have you slash she adjusted her brain since, let's say, the last Ontario election or the last presidential election,

the last big thing. Well, Polly learns each time. So Polly, and this is true for any AI, AIs learn through positive reinforcement, like a child, right? If you want to teach a child to be polite or whatever, you say, please walk. You don't say, don't run, right?

And it's the same. Well, I mean, that's a point of view on parenting. I know everybody has different views. But that's how you raise an AI, if you will. You have to put her through all these elections. And you don't say, well, you did this wrong. You say, OK, that was your forecast. Here's what actually happened.

And she teaches herself. So we don't say to her, well, next time do this or do that. We say, thanks, Polly, here's what actually happened. And then... Machine learning kicks in. It's machine learning, so she evolves. The public's perception of what's going on in Ottawa right now, we keep hearing about a power vacuum

because Trudeau's announced he's leaving, but he's still there, they're having a leadership. Anyway, everybody knows the drill. How is that instability in Ottawa affecting what's happening on the provincial election scene? Well it's affecting it a lot because people were I guess hoping like when let's let's back up a few weeks we had a power vacuum we've had a power vacuum for a bit now in Ottawa Doug Ford was seen as stepping up and he was getting

great kudos for that. He was bringing everyone together and people kind of seeing him as like a pseudo prime minister. But if he's now distracted by an election, then you know what happens? The vacuum persists. Yes. And that's why I think a lot of people are saying, well Danielle Smith is our person now because she's not running, she's not distracted,

she's very focused, right? She had a real 180 though. I know that when she first came out saying, I'm not signing the communique and I'm gonna back my sector to the hilt and sorry about the rest of you, I mean, I talked to people who said, what a traitor. Did you, were Polly picking that up in the beginning? We are.

Here's what we're picking up. So yes. We're also seeing some people say, well, maybe the reason is because Trudeau is, a lot of people think he's very polarizing and that she's affiliated with Pierre Polyev. So we have all these different conversations happening online where people are saying, well, maybe she's just a trader

or maybe she's getting results and maybe when she says we need to give him a win this is a David and Goliath battle you know she's David and David won as I recall yeah I remember the story David won and what she's saying is give it like you're not going to win by saying I'm gonna turn off all your power and she's not the only one saying that Scott Moe is saying that and our Quebec the Quebec Premier is saying that. He's signing on to Team Canada but he's also telling the media is not going to turn anything off. So there's a bit of disagreement there that this idea that you have to have this belief in order to

be part of Team Canada, what happens to the premiers who don't believe that that's the right move? And that's, people are starting to have that conversation. So I think people are more open-minded than black, white, she's a traitor, she's great. I think it's maybe she's got a good point, maybe you know we need a variety of possible responses, but here's something to know about Donald Trump his motivation is that he actually feels that his country is vulnerable. Do you remember when the pandemic happened and we had no vaccine manufacturing and I

think we still don't even though we were all sorts of deals are being signed? If you can't manufacture your own vaccines you're vulnerable as we. Well, if all of your manufacturing happens in China, and then you're having a war with China, do you think they're going to send you supplies? Probably not. So by saying we're going to cut off your electricity, that just reinforces his view that America needs to be self-sufficient.

He's trying to make America more self-sufficient. And that's why he wants the tariffs. It's not so much to punish Canada, it's to say, it's to force his own people to bring back the manufacturing. Got one minute to go. Let's do one more thing here. And that is, you know, the opposition members are alleging that part of the reason Ford wants this early election is to get out ahead of potential charges related to the green belt that may affect members of his government.

Polly, picking any of that chat up? Yes. Like what? What are you hearing? So I asked Polly to rank what people are saying are the reasons for this election. Number one is destruction. So which... And then number two is RCMP investigation. And then number three was Trump.

So people are aware of this Green Bay situation. They're aware. Now the people who are talking right now are the people who are the most gung-ho. It's probably your viewers, right? It's people who are politically astute, because these are the earliest people talking. As the campaign continues and more people

join the conversation, we'll see if that changes. But that's in the first week. In the first week, that message is definitely getting through. So it's up to the opposition people now to see if they can keep that going and keep that thread going or if we get distracted, if you will, with the Trump tariff threats, whatever happens in February. Understood. Erin, we look forward to future visits during this period.

So thanks for coming in today and we'll see you again down the road. Thanks for having me.