It is an early rallying cry from the army of Liberal leadership hopefuls crisscrossing the country from the spring until December looking for support.
“Party members are fed up with polling replacing the wisdom of party presidents, the instincts of candidates at the door,” Toronto Member of Parliament Carolyn Bennett told Alberta Liberals early in April.
“We’ve got to present new ideas, and those ideas cannot be based on our pollsters,” Liberal and previously Progressive Conservative MP Scott Brison proclaimed at the same meeting.
Were it so simple.
The comments reflect the post-election backlash among Liberals against the sense that every policy pursued by Paul Martin’s government emerged only after it had been polled and focus-group–tested by Earnscliffe Research and Communications, the Ottawa firm founded by some of those closest to Martin.
As Christopher Page argues in The Role of Public Opinion Research in Canadian...
Christopher Waddell is a professor emeritus at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. He served as CBC Television’s Ottawa bureau chief from 1993 to 2001.
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