Too Many Darn Polls

Half of voters are sick of hearing about new poll results, the results of a new poll suggest.

A national survey by Strategic Communications found almost half of respondents, 49 per cent, said there was “too much polling reported in the media.” Only 6.1 per cent said there was not enough.

See full report from Irwin Loy at: Too many darn polls.

Maybe we should have a poll about the results of this poll.

You want this man to be Canada's Prime Minister?

Is Liberal leader Stéphane Dion acting more and more like a character on "the Simpsons"? There have been two less-than-stellar examples of the Liberal "leader" gaffes in the last few days.

The first was the CTV interview where Stéphane Dion shows that he truly does not have a clear understanding of English. He could not formulate a good answer after three tries. He should have three strikes and he is out! Imagine this happening on a world stage? Canada would be the laughing stock of the globe. The Liberals are claiming a hearing impairment, but this does not pan out. He heard the question just fine three times, but just did not understand. Dion was so focussed on his thirty day "plan", he could not think of the hypothetical situation of being in the Prime Minister's shoes during this financial crisis.

The second occurred in Halifax at Stephane Dion's speech to the chamber of commerce. The teleprompter malfunctioned and Dion proved to be helpless.

"Thank you very much, um ... Thank you. Uh, and thank you also. Thank you, Valerie. I think exactly like ... I will speak with my heart, okay?"
"Thank you Valerie. Thank you so much because what you have as an agenda is at the core of a plan that Scotch, um, Scott has shown, a plan that want development and for the next generations as well, build on the economy and environment together."

Full article from Greg Weston of the Ottawa Sun appears here.

Stephen Harper is looking more and more like a Prime Minister. One can only hope that the country gives him the majority he deserves.

Major Political Parties Website Search Statistics

Performing an online search on the major parties websites resulted in some interesting results. Websites were searched using the built-in search option at each of the following sites: www.liberal.ca (Liberal Party of Canada), www.ndp.ca (New Democratic Party of Canada), and www.greenparty.ca (Green Party of Canada). The only site that did not have a search option was www.conservative.ca (Conservative Party of Canada), so I have no statistics to analyze. I have sent an email to the conservative webmasters to ask why no search option was available.

A simple text search was performed and a count of the hits on each of the websites was noted for several different election issues. The total hits for each issue is summed to obtain a total issue value. Using this total value and the numbers of each issue hit a percentage can be calculated. This is displayed in pie chart format. I chose from the following list as important election issues: environment, leadership, crime, economy, integrity, corruption, taxes, health care, sovereignty, accountability, child care, and seniors. I figure if a party considers an issue important, it should rank fairly high in the percentage of issues.

Click image to view the raw statistics in a new window or tab:



Here are the pie charts and some commentary:


Is the Liberal Party attempting to compensate for something that it is lacking?
A quick analysis of the Liberal numbers:

• 51% of platform issue pages has leadership mentioned. Is this due to a lack of Liberal leadership, or is it just criticism of other parties? Leadership envy???
  
• For a party that brought out the "Green Shift", it is surprising to see only 5% of platform issue pages with environment in the text.
  
• I see a sliver of platform issue pages at 1% dedicated to the topic of crime. For me, this is disconcerting, seeing how gun crime and other violent offences seem to be perpetrated by repeat offenders. Locally in Calgary, there have been many incidences involving violent crime related to gangs and drugs. This should be a major political issue.
  
• Child Care - a topic seemingly near and dear to Liberals - is a puny 7%.
  
• Health Care - a topic seemingly nearer and dearer to Liberals - is an even punier percentage: 2%. Does this indicate the Liberals do not care?
  
• The other major component of the platform issue pages mention the economy at 26%. This is somewhat surprising since Dion only announced during the French language debate that his plan would be to spend thirty days in meetings to formulate a plan for the economy. I surmise most of the links refer to the new "green economy"?
  

It seems Jack Layton is attempting to cover every man's (and woman's) issues based on the political correctness colours on the pie chart. By far this is the most balanced platform based on pure statistics. But this also indicates an unfocused platform.
A quick analysis of the NDP numbers:

• Environment and Leadership are basically tied at the top of the platform issue pages for the NDP at 17% each.
  
• Health Care is a healthy 13% of platform issues. Nothing really new here. I still do not understand the NDP's reluctance to endorse private clinics that get would be paid by medicare.
  
• Another sliver of platform issue pages dedicated to the topic of Crime at a slightly larger value than the Liberals of 4%. This is a little surprising as Jack's Toronto ridings have seen "The Year of the Gun" and bodies dropped on the 401.
  
• Child Care - 9%.
  
• The economy at 12%
  
• Taxes are only mentioned about 5% in the platform issues pages. I am amazed this percentage is so low since every second phrase out of Jack's mouth is either a derogatory "sweater" comment or "I will remove corporate tax cuts."
  

Not surprisingly, the Green Party staple of the environment dominated at 30% of platform issue pages, but was not as large as I would have thought. The Leadership numbers of 51% of the Liberals is more or less what I expected from the Green's environmental base.
A quick analysis of the Green numbers:

• As stated, Environment dominated at 30% of platform issue pages. I expected much higher numbers.
  
• Second is the Economy at 16%. Many of these pages relate to the "New Green Economy."
  
• Leadership - 14%. Many of these numbers are from the Green's own internal leadership race and "Canada taking a leadership role...."
  
• Health Care 9%
  
• Taxes 9% in the platform issues pages. Interesting, since one of May's major platform pieces is to raise the GST one point. This is a tax increase....
  

I wish that the Conservatives had a search option on the website for a more thorough comparison of the major national parties.

A few comments about the Left-leaning parties website statistics:

• Sovereignty barely made a blip on the radar: LIB <1%, NDP 4%, GRN 3%
  
• Taxes not main platforms: LIB 3%, NDP 5%, GRN 9%
  
• Crime must not be important: LIB 1%, NDP 4%, GRN 4%
  
• The Liberals are focused on Leadership or the lack thereof.
  

Get out and vote on Tuesday, October 14, 2008. See link at bottom of page.....

UPDATE: Darren Barefoot has done some more analysis than I have done using similar techniques. A counting and searching brute force method resulted in getting the top 100 to 250 words used on the sites. So this does not bias the results by having to choose the tags as I have done. He even displays the results in an artistic type of display called a "Tag Cloud." Check out his article at Darren Barefoot

His graphical image results for the major parties are displayed below:

Problems with conservative.ca

Are the Conservatives updating their website - www.conservative.ca - to include their new platform? Is the site being stalled be a DNS-type attack? Is the media trying to download the entire platform at the same time? Did the Conservatives buy second hand servers? Did Windows crash?

These are questions for which I do not have the answer. I only know that I cannot access the Conservative website as of 12:26MDT October 07, 2008 - and could not from about noon. I did not have any problems with www.liberal.ca , nor www.ndp.ca . I cannot bring myself to even test the green site.....

Update:
12:36 - Conservative site seems to be up and running......I still do not know the cause.

Economists yell fire in economic theatre!

Some of the recent comments made by Canada's economists are akin to yelling "Fire" in a movie theatre. These types of reports create panic and may result in a self fulfilling prophesy.

See link: CTV Link