Ever
since that day in 1969 when I chased W.A.C (“Wacky”) Bennett, the long-time
Premier of British Columbia, through the corridors of a high school in Salmon
Arm, in the interior of that beautiful province, hoping to ask him how he could
continue to support in the current election one of his local candidates who had
recently been convicted of beating his wife, ever since that time, I have never
believed opinion polls should be allowed in the run-up to elections.
It has always seemed to me that such
polls are not so much polls of current opinion as they have become guides to
bewildered voters on how to vote, and, when used aggressively, almost as orders
to the doubtful telling them how they must vote. One might almost say that at
such times, the relevant authorities use these polls as a means of issuing orders
to hesitant voters as to how, where, when and for whom they must register their
vote.
I came to that conclusion because Wacky
Bennett had forbidden the publication of such polls in the weeks leading up to
elections, thus, at a single stroke, depriving all the wiseacres in the local
press of their indispensible tool in their ceaseless efforts to pretend to know
what had been going on before their eyes.
You have only to cover one election
to realize how little understanding any reporter can have of the movement of
opinion as the campaign proceeds, that is, in the absence of any poll
purporting to foretell the results. I
covered that BC provincial election diligently, talked to as many voters as I
could find, who probably amounted to about 100 or so, and was then expected, on
the basis of those 100 conversations, to
pronounce learnedly on the issue of the general opinion, and the mysteries of
its supposed changes.
That is the situation absent polling.
The situation is totally changed with the publication of these polls: suddenly,
every reporter covering the event uses the poll results as his or her guide to
the way things are moving. They do this because it is the only guide available
to them, without which they would simply have to exercise their judgment
arrived at by the judicious application of their own experience and knowledge
and intuition.
Quite impossible, of course, but I
tried. The fact was, Wacky Bennett, a smalltown hardware merchant who later
founded the first B.C. vineyard for the
production of wine, had always been attracted to the idea of politics, and by
1969 was entering his twelfth campaign, his seventh election as British Columbia’s
irrepressible premier, after five false starts, making him the longest-serving
premier in the history of British Columbia. He
started off in his late thirties as a member of the Progressive-Conservatives,
then joined another, Labour, party in an unsuccessful coalition, and by the
time I was chasing him around the high school, he had already run an eccentric
but highly successful provincial government for 17 years. Although he had gotten into politics as leader
of the Social Credit League, an idea imported from Alberta, he never showed any
interest in the monetary theories of Social Credit, or in the fanatical
right-wing religion with which it was combined in Alberta, and, truth to tell,
even though he had bequeathed to his province such publicly-owned institutions
as B.C. Ferries, B.C. Hydro, B.C. Rail and the Bank of British Columbia, it did
seem that the populace had had about as much of him as they could stand after
all those years.
Certainly Tom Berger, the leader of
the New Democratic Party in B.C. in 1969 --- and incidentally one of the few
Canadians of my acquaintance who I would be prepared to describe as “a great
Canadian” no ifs or buts, whose own legacy to the nation is immense --- was totally
convinced he was on the path to a certain victory in the election, as,
coincidentally, were all of the residents, those 100 or so long-suffering
citizens whose opinion I had tried to
canvass in my coverage. I had met only one man who was convinced that Wacky
would not only win the election but would win with an increased majority of
votes and seats. And that man was Wacky himself. A totally ridiculous idea, of
course completely out of touch with the prevailing opinion, which had Wacky
retiring from a heavy defeat, his tail between his legs, always supposing, of
course, that anyone would be foolish enough to apply such a metaphor to the
ever-ebullient Premier Wacky.
Well,, what d’yuh know? Not only did
Wacky win the election, his seventh in a row, but he did so with an increased
majority, leaving Berger and his NDP wallowing in the pain of a 38 seats to 12
humiliating defeat. Along the way I had enlivened the readers of The Montreal Star with a story that
began by saying the electors of BC had discovered the man to save them from
socialism--- it was Tom Berger, leader of the NDP. A nice little joke, but one that suggested that the local “socialist” party, like so many
others in so many other places and at so many other times, might have been
better off to have stuck to their original beliefs, rather than constantly trimming
them to the winds of electoral convenience, a method which has led to their party
being hardly worth supporting by the time they are finally elected to office (pace Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP government in
1990), if ever such a drastic event should overcome them, which I have to admit
is seldom enough.
I have been brought to these reflections
about polling by the excessive power granted in these days to election polling,
as manifested in our recent national election. I suppose one could say that
there would be no harm in polling if, say, one poll were published a month
before the election, and then left to work its magic, if any, along with all
the other influences that work to influence voters. But that is not what is happening nowadays. The CBC, for example,
has its own resident pollster, Eric Grenier, whose conclusions are not merely
published by the network but are forcibly shoved down our throats through
constant repetition --- not just almost every day as we approached the election,
but sometimes even more than once a day, sometimes it seemed, two and even
three appearances, telling us in no uncertain terms, for example, that both sides are equal, and the possibility
of a minority government is looming before us all, not only telling us this,
but insisting on it forcibly, as if it were a dictate handed down from on high,
irrefutable and unquestionable. The
impact is worse, of course, when Grenier’s conclusions are taken up by one of
the network’s bird-brain programme moderators, who translate his recital of
likelihoods into fact, as if the
election has already been held and the conclusion announced.
I kid you not: I have heard it
from the very lips of these young men
and women who spoke, even before the vote was announced, as if the die was
already cast, the decision made, or on the way to being made, and the conclusions
more or less irrefutable.
This sort of insistence on the
elevation of this tool to a position given more prominence than others is an
insult to the intelligence of the voters, who are none the less told how important
it is for them to vote to maintain the democratic purity of our system. In
fact, one can tell from the sort of comments provided in advance of polling by
prospective voters, that all this brainwashing by pollsters has already had its
effect, and they are intending to vote in such as way as to make the
prognostications of the pollsters more real than the vote itself.
Oh, dear, oh dear… can’t they just
let us all vote, for whichever side we favour, and the devil take the hindmost?
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