Apolitical Staples

When the election happens it will be driven by events. The most likely events to drive it will involve our security and safety. The voters will be weighing which party will keep them the safest. There is a lot of information to yet be made available from the arrests of the 17 in Toronto. Windsor is looking like a big problem.

In my mind who will keep us safe are the Conservatives who have not buried their heads in the sand and painted burqas on their butts.

But in Quebec where their MSM news and information is even more pathetic than in the ROC, the pacifist utopian nature of that province is a problem for us. Again the election will depend on events of the day and between now and then Harper needs to continue to demonstrate the calmness that he has so far.

I can’t decide if having no Liberal leader causes people to image the perfect leader there - will we improve as people see Bob Rae as leader and we get to remind voters that he almost drove Ontario into the ground with deficits and anti-business laws?

Polls are becoming a cancer on our democracy, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not against polls. What I am against is how they unjustly and unfairly skew the ongoing political narrative in a democratic society.

For the past few weeks, people have been using that Decima poll as though it were the Bible of what was happening in this country politically. People automatically were assuming that Harper was in trouble because of his foreign policy posititions. It became the default assumption of political narrative.

And I can bet you that some people, including some prominent people in public policy and the media, will continue with the assumption that Harper’s foreign policy has cost him politically.

That Decima poll was conducted during the same time Strategic Counsel said Harper had a comfortable lead, and a few short days after Ipsos said Harper had a 60% approval rating.

Yet everyone kept using the Decima poll because it fit into what everyone thought was the predictable response to events in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

People, including the media, need to refraim from drive-by assumptions being fuelled by polls that even sometimes have their own agenda. Decima, after all, is being run by former a former Earnscliffe executive. Some might think that that would make him a Liberal hack. Yet, here we were using his poll as though it actually represented what Canadians thought about ongoing events.

Whatever.

Let’s stop democracy through polling, eh? It’s a cancer.