Bullshit Bulletin, Week 3: Do YOU believe the polls?
Also, stop handing out guns to all the violent criminals, which the Liberals think is apparently something that is happening under their watch.
Ah, man. And they’d been doing so well.
Last week, in our second Bullshit Bulletin of the campaign, we noted that the major parties had, more or less, behaved themselves. It had been a pretty clean and honest race so far. Indeed, as late as the middle of this week, your editors chatted by phone and worried that filling this week’s bulletin might be a struggle.
And then … the rest of the week happened. No such problem presented itself! In fact, this bulletin is surprisingly and depressingly rich in content. So much so we had to divide it up. CPC is up first, LPC after that. It was a lot to wade through this week. Come on, guys.
Remember the rules, folks: When we say something is bullshit, we don’t mean partisan spin or things we just disagree with. We mean things that are either flatly untrue or torqued to the point where truth loses all meaning. We’ll also include room for conduct that may not fail a lie detector test but is, well, egregious bullshit.
We will also be partnering with our friends at Ipsos. Each week during the campaign, and for the week afterward, the polling and analysis team at Ipsos will be providing The Line with snapshots of their polling on the issues that are motivating the Canadian electorate.
The Bullshit Bulletin accepts submissions! Send anything you think qualifies to lineeditor@protonmail.com.
And now, from our friends at Ipsos, their weekly snapshot of key issues during this election.
An energy opportunity no one is talking about
An election focused on the U.S. and Canada’s response to tariffs has created an opportunity to talk about some critical issues, such as energy. However, energy hasn’t been much of a topic of discussion during this campaign. Yet we see more openness from Canadians toward building new energy infrastructure projects — yes, including renewable energy, but also an east-west pipeline to transport Canadian oil.
That may be because Canadians have finally realized we need to open new markets to Europe and other places and also support our own energy needs. Close to nine in 10 Canadians believe that Canada needs to invest in becoming completely energy independent from the U.S., meaning we produce our own energy for our own consumption.
Concern about climate change has not disappeared — indeed, half of Canadians believe we need to do more. But that is down from close to six in 10 Canadians in 2023. And four in 10 now say that action on climate change needs to wait, given the current state of the world.
The Conservatives have tried to talk about energy during the campaign — and have even announced some clear policy platforms on speeding up approvals — while the Liberals have signalled a willingness to do whatever it takes to combat the U.S. tariffs. But the debate we need to have has been largely drowned out by talk of the one and only ballot issue at the moment: Trump. Meanwhile, the premier of Alberta has been clear on Alberta’s conditions, and one of them is support for energy infrastructure coast-to-coast. Are Canadians ready for it? Are Canadian leaders willing to spend their political capital on it?
After years of entrenched opinions on energy, have we finally reached the point where we can have a debate about both our energy and climate change needs? The election seems an ideal time to have that debate — even if the discussion is in response to what is happening in the United States.
Click here to find out more about our ongoing measures of the health of Canadian society.
Well you know that the Conservatives know that they’re cooked when they stop trying to attack the incumbent and instead move on to finding scapegoats to deflect from their own failings. This is a special brand of bullshit — the bullshit of blame-deflecting self delusion.
Never mind the fact that Poilievre et al. consciously decided to evoke a Trumpy tone and messaging — and that this radically backfired for them when Trump became something more than a nostalgic memory of owning the libs. Never mind that the campaign was criminally slow to move away from the “Carbon Tax Election.” Never mind that they’ve stuck to slogans and small-ball incrementalist conservative policy in the face of what might prove to be an existential economic or political threat. Never mind the decision — and this was a conscious and informed strategic decision — to run against the mainstream media on the hope that social-media-empowered partisan activists could carry the message more effectively.
No, no, we all know where the real fault lies. Not with the leader. Not with his campaign manager. Not with an insular team that has effectively alienated swathes of movement conservatives who failed to meet their personal purity and loyalty tests. No, this can’t be right. The blame must lie elsewhere.
The more sophisticated copium will focus on “structural issues” — the fact that Canada simply isn’t very conservative, and the concentration of Conservative voters is inefficiently distributed. Further down the chain, “Blame the Media” is a classic for a reason. In fact, though, “The Media” has not been particularly brutal toward the Conservatives in this election at all; water carrying and gotchas were relatively evenly distributed, and Carney’s gaffes have been well covered … by The Media. Even if it were true, the Conservatives still made the choice to actively alienate anything they deemed “mainstream” media. The Conservatives have actively and willfully fostered a hostile working relationship with the press corps since the Harper era.
They’re allowed. It’s permitted. But. You can’t strategically run against The Media and then act like whiny victims when that backfires and your support tanks. You can’t choose to make enemies of the press in order to fluff yourself up in front of the manosphere, and then snivel when the enemies you created ask a scary question in public. It’s pathetic.
*apple bite*
Anyway, we were bemused to note that many Conservatives have added a whole new industry to the Great Enemies list: pollsters. Supporters have been spotted at recent rallies wearing sweatshirts and holding signs that read “Do you believe the polls?” Along with a tag that directs people to “CanadianRealPolls.”
Look, we at The Line are a bit torn about this one. As one of your editors is literally married to a pollster, we sorta think it’s hilarious. Some pollsters do take themselves too seriously — ahem — and while tracking sentiments may be useful to corporate and political entities, we do question what value and impact they have on the democratic process. Particularly when so many polls are poorly conducted at best, and outright manipulative at worst.
So, yeah, polls aren’t predictions. They’re snapshots of public feeling at a particular moment in time. This isn’t like gravity, or birds. You aren’t obligated to “believe” them or in them.
That said, do the poll-spiracists believe that the Conservative party isn’t itself using internal polling? Do they think any political operative isn’t using real-time data to ascertain message efficacy — well, nix that, it’s possible the Conservatives aren’t doing that, which is why they’re losing. Point being, do you all think that the Conservatives don’t know that they’re losing?
The concern we have here, is that the “Do You Believe The Polls” movement is being used as more than just a meme to mobilize demoralized staffers and volunteers. We are a little worried that it may be used to pre-emptively undermine the election results. After all, there is only one poll that actually matters — and that’s the final one.
And as for the scapegoating habit in general, guys: structural issues; mean media; rigged polling — you all are going to have to explain how any of those excuses hold up to the simple fact that the Conservatives held a 20-point lead for over a year. A lead measured by, gulp, polls, which the Conservatives seemed to have no problem believing when they told them what they wanted to hear.
Seems to be a bit of a theme, really.
To the above, we want to add a specific moment of bullshit that came out of the Conservative campaign this week, as regards the media. We won’t rehash all we said above, but we will note what Pierre Poilievre said about CTV’s Judy Trinh.
Trinh was at a press conference, in the bizarre little fenced-in holding area where reporters covering the campaign are contained. (We know these people, CPC friends. They aren’t that scary, and doing this makes you look like idiots.) Trinh wasn’t allotted a question that day, so she shouted one at the CPC leader. Poilievre was in the middle of being asked another question by a reporter who was participating virtually. Trinh’s shouted question overrode the one being asked by teleconference. Poilievre first said to Trinh, “Sorry, I’m listening to the question,” and fair enough, but then he apologized to the reporter on the line, saying, “Sorry, there’s just a protester here. Go ahead.”
And that is some bullshit.
Poilievre doesn’t have to answer Trinh’s questions. We wish he would, in general, answer more questions. But we get it. He’s not obligated to, and he has the right to take or ignore what questions he will. We wouldn’t even have minded much if he’d said to Trinh, “look, I’ve moved on, your colleagues get to ask questions too, so please, stop shouting.”
But calling her a protester?
That’s bullshit. And it’s exactly the kind of impulse toward combativeness that gets Poilievre into trouble. We suspect that the people around him know this. We suspect he doesn’t, and never will.
Trinh, for her part, shared her version of it all on Twitter, including pictures of the little holding facility she and the others were parked in. A memo to our friends at CPC HQ: maybe you guys would be seen as the natural team to strongly defend the country from outside threats if you weren’t treating local reporters like the scariest creatures bio-engineered to entertain visitors to the latest uninsurable iteration of Jurassic Park. It doesn’t exactly signal strength. We know that a lot of campaigns and parties put restrictions on the press. There are no angels here. But you guys have serious problems, and bullshit like this ain’t helping.
Had enough on this theme? Well, there’s more!
This week, Globe and Mail reporter Laura Stone — who, for the record, might be one of the most professional and polite journalists in the industry — asked an entirely valid question about Poilievre’s rally strategy. There is no question that he is bringing out thousands of people to rallies held throughout Canada, and that the Conservatives perceive these rallies as a kind of win. Stone asked — very reasonably! — whether or not these events were effectively broadening the tent. Or if chants about things like “woke” stuff and the “Century Initiative” were only really speaking to the converted. (The Converted in the very literal sense, as in, Poilievre has a tendency to use words and jargon that only make sense to those who have had a kind of political-religious conversion experience, which gives his rallies the same vibe as old-school tent revivals.)
We don’t know if Poilievre was high on his own psychological supply, or if he’s just trying very hard to be superficially pleasant and is simply not very good at it, but he tried to deflect the question by plastering himself with an oleaginous grin, and then asking Stone to confirm the size of his rally crowds.
Which then, predictably, turned into a Very Online side debate about the actual size of said crowd, and whether or not it was the largest in Canadian history. Which, by the way, simply doesn’t matter. It’s the motion of the notion. That is, the race to survive is won by who can penetrate more votes into the actual ballot box. Rallies are foreplay, not payoff.
Rally size doesn’t actually tell us anything except that said political figure has a committed core of followers — and there was never any doubt of this in Poilievre’s case. The Conservatives’ problem is not, and has never been, that they didn’t have a rock-solid base of true believers. Their problem is that this base is not large enough or distributed enough to win, and the more they appeal to it exclusively, the more they alienate the squishy middle that they need to, you know, actually win an election.
If the election campaign was a plan to convert normies into frothing skeptics of the Century Initiative, well, it was … a plan. We give it that! How’s it working? Are more typical women just loving the creepy energy in this exchange? Are you winning, son? Might we suggest actually considering Stone’s point, next time, and building a general appeal that doesn’t need to be communicated in Parseltongue?
We just beat up on the CPC pretty hard, and they deserve it, but we are delighted to report, in the interests of balance, that the Liberals also began flinging a lot of cow dung around the campaign this week. We start with a story from the Globe’s dynamic duo of Robert Fife and Steven Chase. There are a lot of layers to this one and we won’t recap them in depth — read the article yourself. But the core of it is this: Peter Yuen, who was hurriedly airdropped by the Liberals into the riding where Paul Chiang — remember him?! — was no longer able to carry their banner, also has, uh, inconvenient links to China. Specifically, as the Globe put it, Yuen “is a member of a Beijing-friendly lobby organization and has given talks at events honouring a Toronto group that advocates for the annexation of Taiwan by China.” Also from the Globe story:
The new Liberal candidate as of Wednesday was listed as honorary director of the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada (JCCC), a Toronto-headquartered organization founded in 2002 with clear ties to China’s United Front Work Department. The UFWD answers to the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s central committee and oversees Beijing’s influence, propaganda and intelligence operations inside and outside of China.
Although listed as honorary director, Mr. Yuen said in a statement that his role with JCCC ended a decade ago. He declined to answer e-mailed questions from The Globe and Mail on whether he supports Taiwan’s self-determination, condemns China’s crimes against its Uyghur minority or disapproves of UFWD activities.
Oh. Okay, then.
The above alone would warrant some conversation, but it’s only the preamble. The Globe article further notes, “During the Liberal leadership race, Mr. Carney met with the executives of the JCCC, according to its website, which described the former central banker’s entry into politics as ‘an important turning point in the upgrading of China-Canada relations.’” Carney was asked at an event on Thursday, by a different Globe reporter, why he had met with the group.
Carney and the Liberal campaign hit back hard. “You can’t believe everything you read in the Globe and Mail,” Carney told the reporter from, ahem, the Globe and Mail. He went on to say that he’d never heard of the group.
Yeah, so anyway, the Globe had pictures of the meeting. They released them in a follow-up story.
There’s some nuance here — it’s very possible Carney did indeed never have a “meeting” with the group. It’s possible he’d never heard of them! There is indeed daylight between meeting a person and having a meeting with them. The Globe story was careful in how it phrased it; the Globe reporter at Thursday’s event wasn’t sloppy, but her phrasing was ambiguous enough for Carney to deny having a meeting, without addressing whether he’d met them.
And maybe he did! If his honest answer was, “I may have met them during my campaign — I shook hands and posed for photos with a lot of people,” that would have been totally reasonable. It wouldn’t have settled the matter of Yuen’s links to the group, but it would have been a reasonable answer on Carney’s behalf.
Instead, we’re left figuring out how much bullshit can balance atop the head of a pin here and sussing out the difference between having met someone and having had a meeting with them.
That’s bullshit on two levels. The first level is that the Globe report merits serious attention and a serious reply. Carney wants to portray himself as the man to defend Canada at a time of real threat? Fine. Great. Stop using semantics to avoid serious questions.
The second level is simply that every party and every leader ought to declare a unilateral truce on “Gotcha!” moments when photos like the above come out, because no leader and no party can pre-vet literally everyone before someone poses for a photo at an event or grabs a selfie at a rally. Every party knows they’re vulnerable to this sort of thing, and every party can’t quite help themselves when they see a chance to link an opponent to someone or something unsavoury.
They all know better, or they should. It’s the Liberals insisting it was just a photo this time, but we doubt that’ll stop them from jumping all over some similar photo with the current or some future Conservative leader later. We’ll call bullshit on them when they do. This is bad for our democracy, friends. It should stop.
And also, on the big picture here, Carney wants to lead the country and is basing that especially on his willingness to stand up to foreign governments. The best-case scenario for him right now is that the GTA branch of his party has got some real problems with overly close ties to the Beijing regime. That’s something he should be worried about, and engaging with. We know that’s not as much fun as blowing off the Globe or dunking on Poilievre’s security clearance, but The Line would like to know how many more incidents like this need to be revealed before anyone in Liberal Land might dare ask themselves an uncomfortable question or two.
Can we suggest that now might be a good time?
More from the Liberals, alas. Your Line editors knew that guns were going to come into the campaign eventually. It’s one of the eternal issues for the Red Team, and while they seemed to have shied away from it a bit after some pretty brutal fumbling in Justin Trudeau’s later years, we figured it would be back eventually. And so it was on Thursday, when Liberal leader Mark Carney announced, as part of a package of crime policy proposals, that a re-elected Liberal government would make sure that guns were automatically taken from anyone convicted of a violent crime, including intimate partner violence.
*pulls hard on chain, activating bullshit klaxon*
See, here’s the thing, friends. First of all, to take Carney at his word here would require us accepting, even just for a moment, that this didn’t already happen. That up until Thursday of this week, the Liberals were hunky dory with people convicted of violent crimes, including intimate partner violence, keeping whatever guns they may own or wish to acquire.
That is, we suspect readers know, utter bullshit. Removing guns is already required in those circumstances, and it doesn’t even require a conviction. Police officers can seize any weapon of any type if it isn’t in the safety interest of any person, even without a warrant, and revoke any license they hold immediately.
Nobody is eligible to hold a license if it isn’t in the safety interest of a person — that’s literally the first eligibility criterion in the Firearms Act. Issuing a license requires the issuer to consider all past convictions, mental illnesses, history of violent behaviour, previous prohibitions, any potential intimate partner violence, and any potential harm to any person before they issue it. That is checked through a process called Continuous Eligibility Screening, where license holders are checked for “hits” against police systems every single day to determine whether they are still able to hold a license.
This is something almost no one outside Canada’s firearms-owning community understands, and The Line wants to underline this point — anyone with a firearms licence is automatically checked for any new legal issues that might render them unable to own firearms every single day. If you happen to find yourself hanging out with someone with a firearms licence, they were checked out by law enforcement within the last 24 hours. This includes your friends at The Line. The day you’re reading this is a day they passed another screening.
A conviction for a violent crime, it hardly need be said — well, actually, check that, apparently it does need saying — would render one rather ineligible! Not only is this already the law, but there are so many overlapping laws to deal with that exact scenario that it takes real effort to be ignorant of them. Weapon prohibition orders on conviction for violent offences? Already a thing at the federal and provincial levels. Prohibitions while on bail? Already a thing. Firearm seizures during divorces? Not automatic, but common, sometimes even where there is no history of violence or reasonable belief that violence is likely.
The Liberals know all this, especially since it was the Liberals who last changed these laws — though not to add the removal provisions, which largely already existed, but to remove any discretion or ability for rehabilitation.
Every party is fine with keeping guns away from domestic violence perpetrators. Carney making this an issue is bullshit. He’s counting on the public to not know enough to call him out on it.
It’ll probably work.
Oh, and by the way. If you don’t want to take our word for any of the above, you can just read the Firearms Act yourself. Relevant section, below.
We get kind of awkward targeting our own tribe, especially when we know a lot of criticism that is aimed at the media is bullshit. But there really was a genuine screw-up by the media this week that we should note. A story by the Canadian Press went out to CP customers and described how Chinese-language information being transmitted via the WeChat app has been identified by Canadian officials as possible foreign interference.
The CP report notes that, “A background document released Monday by the Privy Council Office said narratives were spread on WeChat ‘amplifying’ Carney's stance on the United States and targeting his experience and credentials. Analysts saw ‘positive and negative narratives’ about Carney in the operation, said Larisa Galadza, a director general at Global Affairs Canada, which houses a unit that monitors the online environment.” Canadian officials have assessed that the efforts are not enough to have threatened the integrity of the election.
We hope that’s true! But what we know is that the headline on the CP article, as published by the CBC, was originally, “Security officials report a Beijing-linked online operation is targeting Carney.” And “targeting” strongly implies in a bad way.
We don’t want to spend any more of this bulletin parsing words for nuance. But we agree with the arguments we saw online — the headline suggested that Carney was being attacked by China, whereas in truth, the officials found it was a mix of positive and negative coverage.
We think we know what happened here. We aren’t 100 per cent sure, but often, when a story goes out from the CP or another wire service, it’s picked up verbatim by media companies that subscribe to that content. Including the headline. In recent years, the process has become automated — a story published by the CP might publish automatically, headline and all, on other news outlets. Potentially many other news sites. Your editors here are personally aware of some migraines caused by exactly this kind of scenario — a specific news outlet being slammed for publishing a sloppy or inflammatory headline that literally no human at the news org ever saw or tinkered with before it went live under the banner.
Technology, friends. It can ruin your whole day.
We don’t know for sure that this is what happened. We did note that identical headlines appeared beyond the CBC, and that the CBC did change the headline — that would have been a manual edit, we’d guess. So we get how this happens. A sloppy headline can go far and wide. The story itself was fairly presented. But given concerns about the media being biased toward the Liberals, and particularly the CBC, this was an unforced error on the media’s part.
We’ve got to do better, guys. We all know what we’re facing. This is especially true of wire copy that’ll be published widely and often automatically. Let’s try to avoid this kind of thing from happening. It feeds the bullshit machine, and no one needs that.
Sigh. A meatier bulletin than we’d thought. Do better, parties.
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It's hard to fully believe the polls when they show such a difference day to day and across the different polling companies, but they do make it easy to see trends, and those trends show that there has been a BIG shift towards the Liberals from the NDP, and a smaller shift from the Cons to Libs.
From media coverage, and I'll admit I'm a biased Conservative voter from Calgary, it appears to much of the same this time around. There's a tweet going around showing the CBC difference in how they've reported Con vs Lib crime announcements, and it's fairly telling. I'm shocked that Carney hasn't been challenged at all by the MM, they are seemingly in love with him. Again, biased, but it seems like every question Pierre gets is a "gotcha" style question, where Carney gets more softballs. I haven't seen anything outside of The Line mentioning the "Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism", and this seems like such radical policy, especially in the anti-tariff mindset most Canadians find themselves in. And don't get me started on the missed opportunity here for Pierre. Maybe it's being held for the debate?
Carney is also being let off the hook by the MM, and Canadian, for his party selfishly shutting down government for their own need to grasp onto power. If this was the Conservatives who had done this we'd never hear the end of it. It's not even mentioned during this campaign.
Lastly, but related, is the media seems to have galvanized on the opinion that Trump's actions must be met with counter tariffs and force, the "bullies only understand force" argument. They have been happy to cast Doug Ford the superhero and Danielle Smith the traitor, though both just seem to have different strategies of dealing with the tariffs. I'm not arguing in favor of Smith here, but I do think we need to put a little more understanding in the different ways of dealing with the crisis, and not just groupthinking our way into a confrontation with Trump that only seems to serve the Liberal's ambition.
I do believe the polls to the extent that I don't think the pollsters are lying or manipulating data (except possibly Frank Graves whom most aggregators seem to have rightly dropped). Clearly it's not fair or helpful to believe polls when they are in your favour and become a conspiracy level skeptic when they aren't.
However I do think it's possible that there is a certain type of person who is more likely to take polls regardless of their other demographic characteristics, who disproportionately parked their vote with the Conservatives in 2024 and now disproportionately moved Liberal. I'm not one of these people for example. I tend to hang up on pollsters who call my phone, assume text polls are scammers, and once I tried signing up for an online panel out of curiosity and ended up being spammed with so many useless nonsense surveys that I quit after like three days. Is my opposite a key swing demographic? Hard to say.
For the record, I think CPC turnout will add a few points to their column but I doubt it will be enough to overcome a collapse in NDP, Green, and Bloc vote, the former two of which don't even seem to be trying. Those leads in Ontario and Quebec would take a ton of polling error to overcome.
The reality is the Liberals used every lever of power at their disposal and timed this election just right to tilt it in their favour. This is the really concerning part and I'm still processing what that means for our democracy.