FLETCHER: Feeding poll-burgers to low-information voters

Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984.

Chewing through the daily menu of federal election news, it soon becomes clear that the favourite meal of news directors and broadcast pundits is the poll-burger, served up with fresh buns but the same old filling.

Who’s ahead, who’s behind, who’s got the momentum? This carries on even after large numbers of voters have cast early ballots, making the notion of campaign “momentum” even more illusory.

There are two primary reasons for this.

The first is that the number one task of 24-hour news channels and daily talk shows is to fill time. They won’t admit it, of course, but things like calling on a political science prof to speculate about what’s going to happen next are exactly this, and nothing more.

The second reason is that news gatekeepers, particularly in broadcast, see their audience as low-information people who might vote, but are likely to do so based on their feelings. They don’t have the time or inclination to drill down into issues like the causes of inflation or the weight of taxes and public debt on their household budgets. Coincidentally, this relieves the reporters of the hard work of understanding and explaining these issues.

The fact that you’re reading the Western Standard is a sign that you’re as tired of this as I am. You’ve also noticed the anti-Conservative spin that views huge rally turnouts with suspicion.

After all, that’s not what the polls say.

A poll story came across my screen Tuesday announcing that Liberal leader Mark Carney had surged ahead of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre on the question of who is most trusted to manage the economy. Fully 59% of respondents now trust Carney, compared to a drop of two points to 43% for Poilievre, pollster Mario Canseco said.

Leaving aside the minor quibble that this adds up to 102%, how can Carney have earned this distinction, and so quickly? The Canadian economy was taking on water long before Carney jumped from the sinking ship of international net-zero finance and into the prime minister’s office just two months ago.

His first Trump-ian flourish was to cancel the national carbon tax, taking credit for abandoning the central policy of his time as advisor to the Liberal government.

Is that the source of the alleged bump? Carney cuts gas price?

We haven’t heard yet how his increased industrial carbon tax will translate at the pump, or at the grocery store, but according to Statistics Canada, food prices were up another 3.2% in March, compared to a year ago.

Readers outside of B.C. likely won’t have heard of Canseco and his current polling company Research Co. He experienced negative bouyancy as a pollster in 2013, when his confident string of results all but guaranteed a big win for B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix. He and his Global B.C. media partners were left searching for answers on election night as Christy Clark cruised to a majority government.

A pair of televised debates this week will be Carney’s introduction to many Canadian voters, but he’s been around for a long time. I first encountered him in 2009, as the Canadian government grappled with the global financial crisis caused by U.S. subprime mortgage schemes, and he was settling into his role as Bank of Canada governor.

Carney did a Victoria Chamber of Commerce event, at the start of that long period of historically low interest rates when central bankers didn’t actually have to do a whole lot. His entire term in that job consisted mainly of holding the course that every central bank in the developed world was sailing.

At the time, Carney called his big idea “forward guidance,” bank-speak for making his musings about interest rates imply more than just a month or so ahead. I asked him if these longer forecasts might be taken as advice for people renewing mortgages, as I was doing at the time. With aristocratic condescension, he replied that the Bank of Canada doesn’t give mere consumer mortgage advice. Alrighty then.

In 2013 he denied a Financial Times report that he was about to jump to the Bank of England, a week before he jumped to the Bank of England. The term “forward guidance” has not often been heard since. Carney went on to politicize that role as he campaigned against Brexit. 

Just over a year ago, in his appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Carney did a TV interview in which he praised his fellow central bankers for doing a great job spending their way out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This was around the same time his successor at the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, was admitting that he and his international colleagues had under-estimated post-pandemic inflation, claiming it was “transitory” when in fact it continues to push up prices to this day.

Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984. tomfletcherbc@gmail.com

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