The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - Will Delta Delay An Election?

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

Some good talk about polls and what you need to consider at a time when you may well be bombarded with polls.  Its another episode of Bruce Anderson and Smoke Mirrors and The Truth where we also weigh election possibilities as some may be getting cold feet about calling an election when a fourth wave seems possible.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. It is, can you believe it? It's already hump day. It's Wednesday. Wednesday means Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. A can of pet food, where every ingredient matters. Some companies like to brag about their first ingredient, but the A Can of Pet Food team is proud of their entire bag. That's because every recipe has been thoughtfully sourced and carefully crafted with the highest quality ingredients, starting with quality animal ingredients balanced with whole fruits and vegetables. Akana pet foods are rich in the protein and nutrients your dog or cat needs to feel and look their best. Available in grain-free, healthy grains, and singles for sensitive dogs.

Akana, go beyond the first ingredient. Ah yeah, it's a smoke day. It's a Smoke Mirrors and the Truth Day. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce is in La Belle Provence. He's in Quebec. He's near Baltimore, Quebec. He's got a little

Baltimore summer place up there. I only have truth today. I only have truth today, Peter. I don't have any smoke or mirrors. So stand by. It's going to be just truth today. I wanted to let listeners know

that in the mix with truth, there may be kind of the odd little audio stumble because you basically got the paper cup with the tin wire hooked up to a tree out there in the bush connecting to smoke mirrors and the truth. And so if there is a little bit of movement in the audio signal, that'll explain why. But you are connected.

I'm going to have this problem in a couple of weeks. Yeah, it seems like it. I'm going to have this problem in a couple of weeks. It seems like it's going pretty well. It is going well. I'm pretty pleased so far. I'm going up to the Arctic on around the 17th, 18th of August for about a week. And I'm going to keep doing the podcast every day from the Arctic.

Come heck or high water. Hopefully the water won't be too high, but we're going to be trying to do it from on board. The Navy's new Arctic patrol vessel. I want a seasick episode or two. I want a seasick episode or two. I want to hear your voice straining against the nausea and the sense of, oh, my God, am I going to get through this sentence, or have I got to run to the head?

I just want to feel that extra drama. Hey, that's very good. You know the terminology. I'm impressed. You know the terminology. Oh, it's going to be great. We're going through part of the Northwest Passage. I'm only going to be on it for six days.

They're going through the whole Northwest Passage. I'm sort of hitching a ride a little bit, go to Pond Inlet, go to Grease Fjord, go to Arctic Bay, go through Lancaster Sound. You're going to need a map. You're going to take your turn in making the meals and doing the dishes and everything and scrubbing the desk swabbing the deck i should say swabbing the deck whatnot polishing the brass bell but do it all man yeah i'm an old navy guy i was in the navy 66 67 they got rid of me they didn't want to keep me, but I was there for a while. Playing in my ear.

Anyway, what are we going to talk about today, Peter? I mean, we could talk about the Arctic, but I think we had something else that we were going to talk about. We are going to talk about something else. Listen, of your many areas of expertise, polls is one of them. And I want to, I want to start by, because I think we need to give people a, an indication of how to look at these things. Because they're about to, assuming there is going to be an election, they are about to be blasted with polls from all over. I mean, in Canada, there are, I don't know, eight, 10, 12 different polling companies

that seem to pop up, and you hear a lot of them during a campaign. Some of them are regional, some of them are city, some of them are national polls, like Abacus Data, yours, Nanos, Frank Graves has a national poll, Angus Reid has a national poll.us reed has a national poll there's a bunch of them out there um so i want a little guidance from for our listeners as to how they should react to

polls because it's interesting right now of for the big national polling companies and i won't break them down you know kind of because this isn't about individual companies as much as it is about the nature of polls but you've got two of the of the big national polling companies suggesting a a major lead for the liberals over the conservatives at this point in a campaign in the situation and there's no campaign on and there's no voting day today but whatever it's a significant lead the other two have it much, much closer. So I'm even suggesting that it's tied between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The NDP doing well in all the polls, but clearly in third place. So what's important to keep in mind each morning or every couple of days

when you wake up and you hear, well, a new national poll says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What should we keep in mind? Yeah. Well, you know, there's a number of things, Peter. I think, first of all, I've been in the polling business since 1983, I guess, and it's changed a lot since then. Back then, polling was still something where, in relatively practical terms, you could ostensibly reach everybody in the population and ask them the questions.

Because we're still doing a fair bit of interviewing using landlines and everybody had one. And there was some still doing door-to-door interviewing, which is expensive and cumbersome and that sort of thing. But one of the key things about polling during that era compared to today is pretty much everybody would answer the questions. Now, we've moved through different methodologies, and some of them have made it more efficient and less costly and faster to gather data. But we've also seen a drop in the number of people who are willing to give their time and their answers, regardless of the methodology that we're using. So I think it's important for readers of polls to, first of all, recognize that even though there have been some problems or challenges, I should say, introduced in the data collection methodologies because of this declining willingness to participate, polls are still on the whole pretty accurate. They've maintained an accuracy level because pollsters work pretty hard at trying to figure out,

okay, if we know that there will be a certain type of problem, how can we overcome it? And there are lots of different techniques. I don't think we need to get into all the different techniques today, but I wanted to highlight a couple of other things. One is that because there are so many polls now, there are polling aggregators in some cases, just professional people who decide that they're going to create a website. And there's a couple of them in Canada where they take all of the polls and

they kind of discuss them. And in some cases, they average the results out to kind of keep the amount of noise between polls down to a minimum. And sometimes those analysts also assign a rating or a grade to polling companies in terms of the accuracy of their numbers relative to actual election outcomes. And I know other companies have done well, but I would be remiss if I didn't say that Abacus scored extremely well in the last election in terms of accuracy.

But that's for another day or maybe for another venue. But my point is that people should not mistrust polls because occasionally some polling is wrong. They should not necessarily doubt the usefulness of polls because occasionally some polling is wrong. They should not necessarily doubt the usefulness of polls because sometimes polling companies show different patterns. Sometimes those patterns have to do with methodology. So the dominant methodologies right now are what I tend to refer to as robocalling versus online polls. Robocalling is when a computer calls you and you choose to answer the call

and you're instructed by the computerized voice to press one if you want to vote for the Liberals, press two for the Conservatives, and so on. I sometimes find that those polls feel accurate or more accurate to me the closer we get to elections, but maybe a little bit less accurate further out. And it may be just, and I don't think enough research has really been done to kind of clarify this, but it may be because people are less willing to spend the time well before an election. And the last piece is waiting. Sometimes polling companies know that certain types of voters are less likely to tell you what they're going to do if they're going to do a certain thing that they think is socially, I don't know, frowned upon or something like that. And so in some cases, companies will assign weights. You know, how did you vote in the last election? And they'll kind of check that against the actual results of the election. And if they feel like they need to, they'll kind of adjust the current results to make sure that they have an adequate proportion of the people who voted for each of the parties in the last election. That's a little bit challenging to do right now because you can have different levels of motivation. For example, historically, in recent history anyway, it's always been kind of understood that conservative voters were highly motivated,

a lot of passion for the choice that they wanted to mark an X for. And the assumption was that they were going to turn out, but also that they sometimes be a little bit less likely to say that they were going to vote conservative. I think right now we're in a kind of a gray zone in terms of conservative motivation. And also because we have two and maybe three other conservative style parties entering the battleground, it's hazardous to assign weights based on past voting, because this might be just a very different election campaign, not only because

of those factors, but because of the pandemic. So sorry that's long. Hopefully there's some helpful information in there. I still obviously believe that the information is better than not having it, and it's on the whole quite accurate. And I feel pretty good about where our numbers are at now in terms of accuracy. Listen, that was helpful, even for me. And I think I've heard it all before any number of different times, but there are some new things in there for me. I want to ask one thing, though, about polling companies. In terms of broadcasters, they're regulated as such by the CRTC. Podcasts like this are not regulated.

You get on, you say basically what you want, you try to keep it within reason, especially for something like Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. You're trying to deal with the truth as much as you can, as much as you're capable of doing. Is polling regulated beyond self-regulation? No, not really. I mean, polling companies have to abide by the laws that everybody else has to abide by. So that puts some parameters in place,

but there's no regulation other than self-regulation as it relates to how to conduct polls. And I mean, there are privacy laws, but as I say, those apply to all kinds of things. And so this has been a conversation, Peter, that's happened a lot over many years. You know, when polling typically kind of pumps out a lousy result, an inaccurate result, a lot of people kind of wonder, well, did the prominence of that inaccurate result before an election actually affect our democracy in a negative way. And therefore, should we have some regulation over how polling is done?

And I kind of understand the dynamic around that. But I think that is probably not the right direction to go in. I think the better approach is basically for people to kind of factor polling information in along with everything else that they consume. And sometimes as a pollster, I can look at a story. You mentioned broadcasters. So I did see a story on the CBC News website only a couple of weeks ago, and it was written by a journalist whose work I generally think is good. And I didn't really think the story was wrong, but I thought it kind of was presumptuous and it was wrong in a few places. And the story was basically why unvaccinated Canadians aren't getting vaccinated,

if I remember correctly. And in the course of the story, there were interviews with a few people. And I found myself reading the story going, well, you know, we've interviewed 30,000 people probably in the last four or five months on this very question. So we have a lot of information about it, but there's no polling information in the story. It was just a reporter interviewing a few people. And I read that story and I thought he should be able to write that story. I don't see a problem with that, but it isn't the best information that we have or the best way to understand the dynamics around vaccine hesitancy or refusal. So I think the market for information has room for enough different types

of information and people are mature enough and knowledgeable enough to be able to make some decisions about what they want to trust and how much. Okay, one last question on polling. We see the results of the public polling that's done by the big companies and the small companies because they put it out somehow and sometimes they're aligned with a news organization that puts it out as well um the parties all do their own polling and yet those we don't see those numbers and i'm just wondering um not about whether they're the same whether they turn out to be the same but whether they're the same, whether they turn out to be the same, but whether they're actually asking the same kind of questions. Are they looking at different things? I mean, I know all the national pollsters like yourself ask a number of different questions

as they relate to the big picture, and they break it down into regions and everything. But what are the parties looking for when they do their own private internal polling that helps them determine how they're going to campaign and where they're going to campaign? What are they looking at? Well, I think there's three things that really stand out. First of all, a party would never really do very much nationwide polling. Their polling would be focused on the parts of the country where they have swing seat interest. In other words, seats that they hold now that they are worried about losing or seats that they don't hold now, but they think they have a chance of winning. So you would put

your polling dollars into understanding voters in those areas rather than spending any money trying to understand voters in a in a riding where you're almost sure you're going to win or almost sure you're going to lose. So that's the first thing. I think the second thing is that once you've identified the geographies that you're interested in, what you really want to know is which voters can we effectively reach and with what message? So in the case of the liberals, they might be spending a lot of time focusing on what is it that could make an NDP-leaning voter vote liberal? And what is it that could make a kind of a 2019 conservative vote come over to our side? So those are very different questions aimed at very different kinds of voters.

And then the last thing that they will do often is they'll test advertising or messages and pieces of creative to kind of make sure that they have a good handle on what would work and why if they put it into the broader marketplace, because once you hit sand on those, you've made an investment, obviously, and that's important to make sure you're getting your, you know, good value for money, but also you don't want to make a mistake. And, and sometimes people in political parties can sit around and look at stuff that they think is great, convince themselves that it's the best piece of creative ever, and they put it out in the marketplace and everybody else looks at it and goes, what were they thinking? So those are three things that are different. Okay, that's good to know as well. What's especially good to know is we're into August.

It's decision time. It's coming close to D-Day for those who are pushing for an election campaign now. And there are a few things that have cropped up in the last few days that may be giving some people some pause.

So I want to talk about that. But first, we're going to take this quick break. Peter Mansbridge back in Stratford, Ontario. It's Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. It's your Wednesday edition of The Bridge. Bruce Anderson is joining us from near Baltimore, Quebec this week, which explains why the line isn't terrific. He's kind of in the middle of the bush, really,

but we're lucky enough to have him online. He just may have to listen a little closer because he's sitting there in a kind of, you know, a temporary style podcast position. He's holding a microphone like Sinatra used to hold it. Michael Buble holds it now. It looks like he's about to sing at any moment. And the little sign comes up across the screen,

says your internet is unstable. It's up now. I can hear you now. I think it's stable now. can hear you now i think it's stable now i was giving i was giving you a great introduction i hadn't asked your question i was rambling i was skating i was doing what we have to do to you know fill time while we try to figure out where you are so um here's here's the question it's you know, we and a lot of other people, I might add, have been saying for some time that mid-August,

things are going to happen. The campaign's going to start. And the Liberals feel bolstered by a number of polls which suggest they have a, you know, a good lead and one that could be comfortable going into an election campaign, although you're never comfortable because you never know what's going to happen over a five or six week period. Lately, in the last little while, although we've been warned about the Delta variant for weeks, if not months now, there is a kind of nervousness around some of the people you talk to who wanted an election this summer

or this fall about whether or not it would be such a good idea because the delta numbers especially especially outside of canada have grown considerably in the states in parts of europe in the united kingdom and it is of a legitimate worry in different parts of Canada as well. And it's raising all kinds of questions about whether this is really the right time to be thinking about an election campaign. So what do you know and what do you think surrounding that issue? Is this just, you know, are they hitting the pause button from what you're hearing or not?

Or should they be hitting the pause button? I don't really get a sense that the Delta variant as it's manifest here in Canada is really changing the calculation about an election at this point. That's not to say that it couldn't, but I do think that there has been some anxiety about watching what's going on in the UK, watching what's going on in the US, and wondering whether or not we're going to see similar patterns here. And if we do, will that change the way that people feel about going to the polls?

But so far, I don't think that those numbers, those patterns have really affected the Canadian conversation in the same way. And the reason I think for that is that, first of all, I think the patterns are inconclusive in the UK as it relates to the role of vaccination in helping minimize the amount of illness or serious illness. And so people are waiting. I guess there's a report coming out of the UK in a day or two about their red light, orange light, green light scenario. And in the United States, I think Canadians are now pretty convinced that we're closer to community immunity than the United States is

because our vaccination rate is so high, relatively speaking, and it continues to grow. I do occasionally in the last week or so, Peter, wonder if COVID is going to be a factor in this election campaign and if a fourth wave is going to be the reason COVID is a factor in this election campaign. Six months ago, I would have said that's a reason for the Liberals not to have an election. And it would be a bad thing for them if they tried to have an election in the middle of a fourth wave. Now, I'm not so sure.

And the reason I say that is that I do think that enough voters feel like the Liberals have had the right approach in managing COVID. And a pretty significant number of voters wonder whether or not conservatives would do as many of the right things if there was another wave. Would the conservatives be reluctant to spend the money to support incomes and to support businesses? Would they spend what it takes for other measures of protection? Would they put in place the right kind of controls on the movement of people, bearing in mind that conservative parties tend to also want to win support from those people who say, I'm a freedom lover and I don't want restrictions on what I'm doing. And so I'm not sure that an election where who do you trust to manage another wave of COVID is a bad election ballot question for the liberals, because people might be angry that they timed an election that way. I think on the other hand, it could become one of those things where the Liberals end up getting more of the benefit of the doubt. And I think Jason Kenney is an important part of that whole calculus because I think Canadians are hoping that things go well in Alberta,

but I think they're not sure that what he was doing, what he's doing, which is saying, if you have COVID now, you don't have to isolate. Makes sense. Canadians are very cautious about COVID still, and they don't like to see governments taking measures, which they think are, you know, maybe more kind of in that ideological freedom loving let's not over think this let's get back to normal kind of vein so that's where i am right now and i don't know what do you think where are you at what are you you talked a lot of people what are you hearing well it's funny because if you'd asked me two weeks ago, I probably would have said, I don't think COVID's going to play as big a part in this campaign

as we might have expected given the last year and a half. And that was because a couple of weeks ago, it seemed to me like we were doing very well. We certainly have done very well on vaccine deliveries and the vaccine take-up is really very solid for those who are eligible to get the vaccine at the moment. And after perhaps a week or so of talking about how the pandemic was handled, people would move in the final weeks of the campaign into what about the future?

You know, what's going to happen in terms of how we're going to, the government's going to operate, where it's going to spend its money, how it's going to pay for all the things that it did. And that's the way I was thinking the campaign would unfold a couple of weeks ago. Now I'm thinking, you know, somewhat the same as you, is that the pandemic may actually play a much bigger role, especially if we're on the edge of a fourth wave

or we're in a fourth wave or the concerns about Delta are, you know, basically screwing up a lot of families' plans about what their kids were going to be doing come September 1st in terms of school and that it could be very clearly at the forefront. And that makes the decision, and I assume when it gets right down to it, there's only one person who makes the decision, you know, if the government's not defeated and has

decided to, you know, take the initiative, and that's Justin Trudeau. That's the prime minister's decision based on the advice, guess he gets from those who are immediately around him um but that becomes a much tougher call because for trudeau everything's riding on this campaign he doesn't have to have an election now um but choosing to have one we've talked about this before, he's pretty much got to win a majority or his days, one assumes, may be numbered on the part of his own caucus may wonder about his future. So that's kind of the way I see it. I think the situation has changed somewhat in the last few weeks

in terms of what, if we're going to have a campaign, what the major talking point through it is going to be? I think so. It's possible. And then, you know, every day that goes by when I think that, I kind of, you know, in Ottawa, where I live, there was one case today. So this vaccination rate, we have to keep on pushing. And I think we can get another five or 6% of the adult population vaccinated. I don't think we're going to get past that, but that should get us up around 90% of the adult population vaccinated and a corresponding number of children, I would think, once children of all ages can get vaccinated.

So if those numbers are as good as the vaccine data indicate they would be, there's no reason to doubt that right now. They all seem to be doing what we thought they were doing. Then, you know, we will hear about a fourth wave. It might happen in other places other than Canada or in some small pockets in Canada. But I think people are very accustomed now to consuming information about, well, what about where I live? What are the case counts? What's happening? Is it getting worse? Is it getting better? Some people obviously consume it, you know, very diligently in terms of knowing the numbers.

Others just have a sense of getting better, getting worse. And I feel like for most people, most of that information, at least as we can see it so far, is going to be getting better or not getting worse because the vaccination rate is so high. I think it's probably not a bad idea not to stretch this out too long because we could lose you at any moment. And God forbid, then I would have to talk all by myself for, you know, for until the end of our kind of normal timing. Well, then the audience would spike, though. We'd see that in the day after.

People would hear that that's happening, and then they would kind of rush in. They'd start leaving, right? Listen to the last bit. But I did want to keep you around long enough to let you know that I'm not sure you'd suggest it directly, but I think you were hinting in that direction that one of the things that we've been lucky enough to do on the bridge in the last couple of months really is have a full extensive discussion with each of the three main national

party leaders um justin trudeau aaron o'toole and and Jagmeet Singh. And they've been well-received, and people have been downloading them in very good numbers. I wanted to let people know that I've put all three of them together on one spot on my website at thepetermansbridge.com, and you can hear them all. If you want to listen to the leaders and kind of compare them. The Trudeau interview was done end of March, beginning of April,

but the topics are the same, the pandemic, the possibility of the election, and the kind of how are you going to pay for all those questions. And then O'Toole and Singh just in the last couple of weeks. But what's interesting when you have them all there together is listening to the way they you know the way they discuss their ideas their positions what they think of the other people's positions uh and it's a pretty good format as opposed to what we all so often get which is is kind of the, you know, the 10 or 15 second hit out of a scrum somewhere. And you're going to hear a lot of those during a campaign,

if the campaign actually happens in the next couple of weeks. But having them all there in one place is, you know, it's an interesting way of actually getting ready for the campaign because you're going to hear a lot of stuff, but you may want. It is for them as well. I look, I think this is a great feature, Peter. I'm glad you're doing it. I'm glad the leaders all agreed to do it. I hope they, they agree to do another interview through the course of the campaign,

maybe with you, if you're, if you're up for that. I think it's having worked with some leaders in the past. I know it's good training and exercise for them to get into that zone where they're going to be asked the kinds of questions that they're going to need answers to. And in some cases, the challenge is when they know it's a long form and you're not going to interrupt them the way I just interrupted you. I'm sorry about that. But they know you're not going to interrupt them and they're going to be able to kind of give long, thoughtful answers. But they also know that in the heat of the campaign, a lot of media organizations are only going to clip small parts of those answers. So it's good exercise in the sense that it allows them to speak freely and develop their thoughts and kind of really know what it is that they

have to say that they can be passionate and persuasive about, it's a little bit hazardous as exercise goes because it can make them forget the fact that you then have to really punch it out in a lot shorter form in an election campaign. So I love the long form. I love the way you do it. I love the fact that they get comfortable answering questions with you and that the rest of us can all listen afterwards and say, well, you know, he said two or three things that was interesting, that were interesting.

And I didn't really understand that one. I don't know why they keep saying that, but also you come away with what, our mutual friend, Alan, Greg used to refer to as a glimpse into the soul of these individuals, which is what I think a lot of voters are looking for in an election campaign. It's just kind of who are they? What makes them tick? What's in the soul? Well, I know what's in your soul right now. You want to get back out into the sun and enjoy nature because you're like a real nature boy.

And so, yeah, listen to that. I've got all the fresh vegetables to eat too. Yeah, you were probably up this morning at 6 out there fishing, doing a pan fry of your breakfast. It's all good. It's all good. Listen, thank you for this We'll keep it a little shorter than normal

For this week Because we don't want to put too much strain on the That audio system you've got set up Trying to catch the internet As it passes over your Your little cottage Good to talk to you Enjoy

Enjoy the summer And we'll talk to you again soon. I should let everybody know the plan, very basically, is that as soon as the gun goes off, in terms of the campaign, I probably shouldn't use that gun terminology, but as soon as the campaign starts, we're going to revert back to a daily format for the bridge, and we've got a whole, you know, it's the place to be for election

over the five or six weeks of the campaign. There will be one little period in which we won't be talking election because I'll be up in the Arctic and I'll be trying to do the podcast every day from there, from whatever community I'm in or wherever I am on board the Navy's Arctic patrol vessel as it makes its way through the Northwest Passage. So we're looking forward to both those elements. It should be something very different for the bridge on both cases.

We'll give you a full idea, a full rundown of what's going to be on those programs, perhaps next week. In the meantime, have a great week. Have a great week, Bruce. We'll talk to you again soon, and we'll be back with the bridge that you're listening to right now in seven days. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Yep. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye for now.