Ottawa

Everything you know is of questionable accuracy

In a pair of stories, Joan Bryden effectively questions the basis for 85% of political discussion in popular media.

There’s broad consensus among pollsters that proliferating political polls suffer from a combination of methodological problems, commercial pressures and an unhealthy relationship with the media … “The dirty little secret of the polling business . . . is that our ability to yield results accurately from samples that reflect the total population has probably never been worse in the 30 to 35 years that the discipline has been active in Canada,” says veteran pollster Allan Gregg, chairman of Harris-Decima which provides political polling for The Canadian Press.

Further thoughts from Alice Funke and David Coletto.

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