Decision 2021 | Day 2 | Public Polling | Entertainment Value Only

August 16, 2021Decision Canada 2021, PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

Over the course of the next five weeks, when you turn on your TV to watch the evening news — be it the national news, or a local broadcast — or you go online to read The Globe and Mail or one of the local newspapers, almost inevitably you’ll be presented with a graphic, such as the one above, presenting the latest election “polling results” from one of Canada’s nationally recognized polling companies — EKOS Research, Ipsos-Reid, Forum Research, Quitto Maggi’s Mainstreet Research or, as above, Nanos Research, and you’ll read about or hear intoned the weight and the meaning of the latest election polling results.
VanRamblings is here to tell you don’t for a minute believe any of the results from these national pollsters. Why not? Because, the meaning of that polling serves a number of functions, none of which contribute to your understanding of where the parties stand at any point during the current 36-day election period. Rather the poll results serve as “earned media” for the polling companies (more often than not, the pollsters supply the polling information for free, as “advertising” for the work they do outside of election periods), or more simply as “entertainment” for the viewer, contributing to the notion that there is not an election of import going on addressing issues of concern to the electorate, but rather the election is little more than a horse race, a form of political amusement or diversion.
In a story published in The Globe and Mail over the weekend, the paper’s Ottawa bureau chief, Robert Fife, wrote …

“The Liberal Party appears to be losing its momentum and now faces the prospect of eking out another minority government … The poll by Nanos Research, completed Friday, shows the Liberals with only 33.4% voter support, a drop of 5.9 percentage points from four weeks ago when the party appeared headed for a majority government.

“They are not in majority territory any more — and based on our internal seat projections — the hot election speculation has turned off enough voters for the Liberals to go from a majority to putting 40 Liberal [potential] wins at risk,” said Nik Nanos, the polling firm’s founder.”

If you believe that palaver, VanRamblings has a bridge we’d like to sell you.

Public polling has fallen out of favour in recent years, with pollsters in Canada and the United States wildly wrong in their predictions as to the outcome of various elections. Why?
Polling respondents, more often than not, lie to pollsters — who also fail to survey a broad cross-section of the public. Pollsters fail to compensate or adjust their figures factoring in that those members of the electorate under the age of 45 are significantly less likely to turn up at the polling booth, or mail in their ballot, than voters over the age of 45 — but pollsters give these “younger” respondents equal weight in calculating their polling results. As a consequence of their continued failure to accurately account for the intention of the potential electorate, pollsters face an existential crisis, and a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption.
The polling that counts, and the polling the general public never gets to see is the polling conducted for the two leading parties, in Canada, the Liberals and the Conservatives, each of whom dedicate between five and eleven million dollars of their campaign budgets to paying private internal pollsters who, unlike the 1,000 respondents contacted for the Nanos Research poll above, conduct daily polling in the two hundred or so ridings the two mainstream political parties believe they have chance of winning, contacting between 300 and 500 respondents in each riding every day, as well as conducting in-person demographically diverse research groups in these ridings, among those members of the electorate who are engaged and likely, or almost certain, to vote in the current federal election.
The following “story” illustrates the meaning behind what you read above.

Approximately six months before Premier Christy Clark went to the polls in 2013, B.C. Liberal party campaign manager Mike Macdonald engaged the services of longtime Stephen Harper pollster, Maple Leaf Strategies’ Dimitri Pantazopoulos, one of Canada’s leading strategists and public opinion researchers, with more than 25 years of experience and practical knowledge in providing strategic advice to right and centre-right political parties and their leaders, and renowned for his dogged, thorough and in-depth, and almost invariably accurate, public opinion research studies.
Following in-depth polling in all, then, 84 ridings across British Columbia, approximately one week before the provincial writ was dropped in 2013, Mr. Pantazopoulos advised Ms. Clark and Mr. Macdonald that despite the public polling that had the B.C. Liberal party popularity languishing between 33% & 36% in the “public” polls, with NDP leader Adrian Dix polling in the range of 47% to 51% — and assured of an overwhelming victory and majority government in the coming provincial election5 — in fact, he believed Ms. Clark could secure a majority government, advising Mr. Macdonald to “write off” 34 “unwinnable seats”, and focus on the 50 “winnable” ridings that could secure a victory for Ms. Clark and her B.C. Liberal party.
Although many in the B.C. Liberal party were aghast at the advice Mr. Pantazopoulos provided to Ms. Clark and Mr. Macdonald, both chose to take his advice. Mr. Pantazopoulos and his team conducted in-depth polling nightly in each of the “winnable” 50 ridings, and crafted a message for the candidates in each of those ridings to present to the electorate the next day to address the specific concerns of the electorate in those specific ridings. Long story short, despite the public polling that had the B.C. Liberal party and Ms. Clark going down to flaming defeat, come election night, the B.C. Liberal party secured victory in every one of the fifty ridings that Mr. Pantazopoulos had identified, as Ms. Clark and the B.C. Liberal party went on to form their much cherished majority government.

According to information provided to VanRamblings by informed sources within both the federal Liberal and Conservative parties, pre-election internal polling has the Liberal Party on track to win 200+ seats come the end of the current federal election, with the federal Conservative party hoping to hold onto 99 of their current 121 seats — the details of which VanRamblings will provide in the coming days.
Over the course of the next 35 days, both mainstream federal political parties will conduct daily and nightly polling in the ridings they’ve identified for victory, and craft both a national and a local message for the electorate to respond to concerns that have been identified by internal party pollsters, many of whom will be out door knocking in ridings across Canada.
Of course, there’s still five weeks to go until election day and anything could happen, but despite the $63.5 million the Conservative party has in its kitty to “secure victory” s, as VanRamblings will explain tomorrow, it’s going to be an uphill battle for Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole to hold onto a good portion of their current seats in the House of Commons.

As always, VanRamblings will publish the daily Curse of Politics podcast …

Day One | August 16, 2021 | David Herle, Scott Reid and Jenni Byrne weigh in on Day 1 of the 44th Canadian federal election, joined by Politico Canada’s Nick Taylor-Vaisey.

David Herle, pollster, and founder of the Air Quotes Media podcast conglomerate.

In addition to the daily Curse of Politics podcast, David Herle has also created the new Through the Looking Glass podcast, today’s début episode presenting ‘swing voters’, where rather than focusing, as per usual, on interviewing political figures or insiders, instead the Through the Looking Glass podcast takes viewers through the looking glass of a focus group boardroom, done virtually, and into the minds of everyday people.
Through the Looking Glass: Swing Voters 2021 will meet with a group of swing voters from the greater Vancouver and greater Toronto areas as they form opinions about the federal election. Both of these Canadian metropolitan areas have a surfeit of seats up for grabs, and are home to some of the most competitive ridings in the country.
Through the Looking Glass will check in with this group of swing voters once a week throughout the campaign period to hear what they’re thinking and feeling about the issues that have come to the fore, the leaders of the four main political parties, the party platforms, the debates (upcoming, in English Canada, on Thursday, September 9th), party ads, and ultimately, how they intend to vote as we head into Election Day.
Here’s the début episode of the Through the Looking Glass podcast …

Episode One | August 16, 2021 | The new Air Quotes Media Through the Looking Glass podcast.

Decision 2021 | Day 1 | Canadian Federal Election | Sept. 20th

August 15, 2021Decision Canada 2021, PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

David Herle, Scott Reid & Jenni Byrne will provide daily coverage of Decision 2021

As of this morning, Sunday, August 15th, following on the visit of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the residence of the recently-installed Governor General, Mary Simon, to request that she dissolve Parliament — a request to which she acceded — Canadians now find themselves in the chaotic midst of the 44th Canadian federal election since Confederation, in 1867.
Thirty-six days from now, Canadians will elect a new government — whether that is a status quo Liberal minority government or a majority Liberal government, as Mr. Trudeau might wish (quite simply, there are no reasonable and foreseeable other options on the table) we’ll know come the evening of Monday, September 20th, E-Day in every region across Canada — or within 10 days afterwards, as election returning officers conduct a hand count, post E-Day, of the more than five million ballots that are expected to be cast by mail during the latter two weeks of the writ period.
We oughta know whether it’ll be a minority or majority Liberal government Canadians have elected somewhere around Friday, October 1st.
VanRamblings will provide our usual in-depth daily coverage of the federal election each week, Monday through Thursday, over the course of the 36-day election period, providing insight, publishing polls, exploring the issues raised by each of the parties, and in the final days of the election period postulating as to the specific probable outcome of the federal election.
For the 4% of you out there who give a good goddamn about Canadian federal politics — which, in some measure, brings you to VanRamblings today — there is no more important activity to which you might turn your attention than the current federal election, which will serve to determine what kind of country we will become over the course of the next four years, and what values will be reflected in the legislation brought before government by the governing party. Make no mistake: your vote counts!
As always, elections are a crapshoot: in the early going, you just can’t predict the outcome.
In 2015, Justin Trudeau and his federal Liberal party began the election with only 23% support among Canadians, while Tom Mulcair and the NDP were rock steady at 35% popularity in the polls, in all regions of Canada, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper following closely behind with 31% support in each of the 10 provinces and three Canadian territories.
Following an unprecedented 78-day election period, on Monday, October 19, 2015 Canadians elected a majority Liberal government to Parliament, and a new Prime Minister. At election outset, no one could possibly have imagined that outcome, so entrenched was the Harper government, and so popular was the New Democratic Party under the leadership of Mr. Mulcair.

At the top of the page of today’s post, you’ll see a graphic of the relatively new Curse of Politics podcast, created to provide daily, informed coverage of the 2021 Canadian federal election.
David Herle is a Canadian political consultant and Principal Partner at leading polling and research firm, The Gandalf Group, and a regular CBC political commentator. Scott Reid is a political analyst and commentator currently working for CTV News, and a columnist and contributor to the Ottawa Citizen, CBC.ca and Macleans, among other publications.
As is the case with his colleague David Herle, Mr. Reid has acted as a political advisor to a number of Canadian politicians, having served as Advisor and Director of Communications in the Prime Minister’s Office of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. Along with Macleans columnist Scott Feschuk, Reid owns and operates Feschuk.Reid, a strategic communications and speechwriting consultancy.
Jenni Byrne is a political advisor, political commentator, and government relations expert. A member of the Conservative Party of Canada and the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, she is a former senior advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and former Principal Secretary to Doug Ford. Once referred to as “the most powerful woman in Ottawa,” she currently operates her own consulting firm, Jenni Byrne + Associates.
Messrs. Herle and Reid and Ms. Byrne will cover the 44th Canadian federal election with greater, and more informed insight than you’ll find anywhere else in the media during the election period. Each of them has been inside the rooms where decisions have been taken by government, over the course of the past 40 years in the case of Messrs. Herle and Reid, and more than a quarter century, in the case of Jenni Byrne. As the three opined recently, “You know that you haven’t made it in politics as a senior political advisor until the Prime Minister has told you to fuck off,” a signal event which each of the three hold proudly & closely to their bosoms to this day.

The Curse of Politics podcast will be available on (just click on the links) …

VanRamblings looks forward to seeing you back here tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the début episode of the Curse of Politics podcast, above.
Update. Here’s the kick off to the election Curse of Politics podcast …

David Herle, Scott Reid and Jenni Byrne weigh in on the kick-off to the 44th Canadian federal election, in a podcast published mid-afternoon on Sunday, August 15th.

The 40th annual Vancouver International Film Festival will run from Friday, October 1st thru Thanksgiving Monday, October 11th, screening 100 features & 100 shorts this year.

After a seven and a half month break, today’s VanRamblings column — our first in 2021 — marks the beginning of 516 consecutive days of publishing.
Over the coming months, we’ll cover the current federal election, followed by coverage of the 40th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, and begin coverage of the 2022 Vancouver municipal election. Of course, each Monday through Thursday, we’ll cover much much more of a political nature, as you will come to see in the days, weeks and months ahead.
As per usual on VanRamblings, Fridays will be given over to arts coverage (mostly, but not just, film) on Arts Friday, Saturdays to our must-read and indispensable Stories of a Life feature, and Sundays to the Music we love.
Hope to see you back here often. We promise you, it’s gonna be a ride!

#COVID19 | Canada Falls Behind | Number of Vaccinations Low

December 31, 2020Canada, Food & HealthRaymond Tomlin

In comparison with other countries across the globe, Canada’s roll-out of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna coronavirus vaccine has proved significantly more challenged, and much slower when compared with vaccine roll-outs in many other countries.
Oxford University’s online tool Our World in Data, from which the information in the graphic at the top of today’s column was obtained, has Canada listed far below other countries like Israel and Bahrain, when measuring vaccines administered per 100 people …

Canada at 0.14
United States at 0.59
United Kingdom at 1.18
Bahrain at 3.23
Israel at 4.37

In Canada, the slow pace is being blamed on limited supply, poorly planned vaccination programmes in some provinces, and the technical deep-cold storage required for the Pfizer vaccine.
Approximately 242,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 168,700 doses of the Moderna vaccine, for a total of just over 410,000 overall vaccines had arrived in Canada by early this week.

In the United States, President-elect Joe Biden has promised Americans that by the end of his first 100 days in office, or near the end of April, more than one hundred million COVID-19 immunizations across the U.S. will have been administered. To meet that goal, which works out at a million immunizations a day, Biden acknowledged that his administration would need to move several times faster than Trump administration roll-out, and vowed to invoke the Defense Production Act to accelerate vaccine production and launch an education campaign to tackle vaccine hesitancy.
In other words, before the end of April 2021, one-third of all Americans over the age of 18 will have been immunized against COVID-19. Biden has promised that by June 30, every American who wants a vaccine will have received a coronavirus immunization, to protect them and their families.

Meanwhile, in British Columbia, Public Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has stated that B.C. plans on immunizing 400,000 people against COVID-19 by late March of 2021, with priority given to residents and staff of long-term care homes and health-care workers — that would be fewer than 10% of British Columbians over the age of 18 will be vaccinated by March 31st.
Federally, in a sombre pre-Christmas Day message, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the populace roughly 375,000 Canadians, or one per cent of the Canadian population, should be vaccinated with the two-dose Pfizer shot by January 30th, with all Canadians who wish to be immunized due to be vaccinated by September 30, 2021 — three long months behind the U.S.

Meanwhile, for all the bluster among federal political leaders about not wanting an election any time soon, the political truth is as cold as the winter’s wind: the potential for a spring 2021 Canadian election will, in all likelihood, become a reality, as Canadians once again head to the polls.
And what will emerge as the key issue in the upcoming 2021 federal election? Could it be the painfully slow, behind every other developed country in the world, “botched” roll-out of the life-saving COVID-19 vaccine to Canadians anxious to return to some sort of normalcy, sooner rather than later, in 2021 — with the possibility that Canadians might experience an almost usual summer season full of music festivals, Hollywood blockbusters, travel across our great nation sans the necessity of having to wear a mask, a Canada that will allow us to once again congregate with our family, our friends, our neighbours and colleagues in safety and good cheer.

In addition to the already approved Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna novel coronavirus vaccines, in the coming month Health Canada is expected to approve the following COVID-19 vaccines …

Oxford-AstraZeneca: 20 million doses;
Johnson & Johnson: up to 38 million doses;
Novavax: up to 76 million doses; with …
Medicago (up to 76 million doses), and Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline (up to 72 million doses) also in the pipeline.

If Canada’s roll-out of the life-saving novel coronavirus vaccines is, indeed, slow, you can reasonably predict that Canadians will be not just disconsolate but might find themselves more raucously up in arms, and perhaps even bloody pissed that Canada has proved so slow off the mark.
If there’s no crying in baseball, there ain’t no winning in politics, either.

Stories of a Life | Megan’s Boxing Day Specials | 1990s Edition

December 26, 2020Stories of a LifeRaymond Tomlin

For me, the 1990s are notable for the preparatory chess-like approach that a teenage Megan Jessica Tomlin put into preparing for what was, for her, a signal event in her life: the post-Christmas Boxing Day extravaganza where a hard earned dollar might best be put to salutary advantage, one dollar equalling as many as ten, and the acquisition of notable high fashion a necessary goal for a young woman who wished to be seen as presenting herself well to the world, not just as a Marxist feminist presence and young woman of substance, but as a woman of fashion meant to turn heads.
Yes, dear and constant reader, Boxing Days throughout the 1990s were a delight of immense proportion not just for this callow writer, but for the aforementioned Ms. Tomlin, whose Boxing Days unfolded as follows …

Each Boxing Day at 4 a.m. Megan and I would leave home, to attend at a Denny’s Restaurant, where we might enjoy a breakfast repast, as Megan informed this writer of her plans for the morning, through until noon day. With the required information in hand (and committed to memory), Megan and yours truly set about to acquire garments & clothing of not simply the most sophisticated fashion, but of the most careful design & construction.
Having enjoyed our breakfast at the Denny’s Restaurant, nearest to the retail establishment first on Megan’s list, within which retailer’s premises was contained a particular good, the first good of the day Megan felt must henceforth become a part of her wardrobe, the two of us — father led by daughter — would proceed to the store chosen as the first stop of the day for my acquisition-inclined teenage daughter, waiting patiently in line while the (most often young, and surprisingly, too, often quite churlish) retail staff prepared to throw open their doors to the maddening crowd of eager, mostly young shoppers — accompanied most often by their weary mothers.
At precisely 6 a.m.

At which point, those Doc Martens Megan had her eye on would, as she jostled through the store, making a bee line for the shoes of her choice, and then to the cashier to check out, in order that we might proceed to the “next” retail establishment on Megan’s well-crafted list of winter fashions.
Perhaps now would be the appropriate time to provide a bit of background.

Each Boxing Day, for some weeks leading up to that auspicious day on the retail calendar, Megan would set about to ensure that on Christmas Day a sum of monies totalling exactly $1,000 in cash would find itself into her most deserving possession. Megan’s indulgent grandmother, aunt, uncle, mother, mother’s partner, father, mother’s best friend, cousins, her boyfriend, and her mother’s partner’s children would present different denominations of bills, whether they be tens, twenties or fifties, the sum then of $1,000 in cash in Megan’s hands by late on Christmas Day evening.
To know Megan is to know that Megan is not to be refused.
Of course, one wishes to please Megan, as well — that is a prime directive.

For this writer, to be in the presence of this young, focused, giddily happy young woman for a period of eight consecutive glee-filled and joyous hours, where Megan was kind and thoughtful, generous in her thoughts, focused and political our conversation on how one might best going about changing the world, to share this young woman’s sense of joy and appreciation was, for this writer, throughout the entirety of the 1990s, a most looked forward to event & stretch of hours each year, on the post-Christmas Day calendar.

The final location at which to attend was, for Megan, almost a second home through most of the 1990s, and the single store Megan and I most often visited during the course of the decade was the Aritzia store, in the Oakridge mall. I don’t think there was a time when we were together when Megan and I did not travel to the Oakridge Aritzia store, if only to browse.
Those times are now part of Megan’s and my past, fondly remembered by me as Megan’s last breath of innocence, a time before almost a dozen years at university — or just at the start — a time before a marriage that would take place years later, in her late twenties, before her children were born, and before Megan began inexorably to feel the weight of the world, and the myriad responsibilities of adulthood, on her capable shoulders.