Thomas Jefferson opined that democracy would only work if the electorate were educated and informed.  Based on poll results in both Canada and the United States, democracy in both countries simply does not work. Everyone is quick to give their opinion, but few opinions are from those who are educated or informed.

Polls have become meaningless jokes. Too many times, questions are phrased in such a manner as to get the results the pollsters are looking for.  The results are then posted, and the uneducated and the ill-informed, in too many cases, jump on the bandwagon of the projected winning side of any candidate or question. In the last US presidential election, however, the wishful thinking of those conducting polls simply did not achieve the desired results, and the average guy discounted these phoney polls and voted in a way that caused the pollsters to lose what little credibility they once had.  It seems clear that these people let their prejudices affect their results and they, like just about all pollsters, ended up looking like the fools they are.

A couple of weeks ago, on the BNN Bloomberg site, the headline read, “Canadians split between Trudeau and Scheer on economic acumen”. Now, to be blunt, the average Canadian would not recognize “economic acumen” in any person if their lives depended on it.  Yet, opinions are freely given whether the opinions are informed or not. Outfits like Nanos Research Group dutifully, and for money, conduct these surveys and, with straight faces, publish the results as being absolutely accurate, give or take a small margin of error. Of late, the problem has been that these polls are dead wrong.  In the 2016 Presidential election noted above, the polls had Hillary Clinton winning the presidency in a landslide.  The polls were embarrassingly wrong.  How, people wondered, could that have happened?  Did the pollsters question their methodology? Or did the manner in which they conducted their polls assure them the hoped-for results, which they assumed would convince the great unwashed voters to fall in line and make the poll results a self-fulfilling, prophesy?

In the Nanos poll described above, Canadian voters were split: 30% for Trudeau having the best economic acumen to 29% for Andrew Scheer, even though it is pretty clear to just about anybody that the average part-time Grade 3 drama teacher/snowboarder does not, at first blush, know the first thing about economics or business in general.  But that did not stop 30% of the idiots who responded to the survey to think that Trudeau did, in fact, have economic acumen. 

Anyway, are we to give this poll any credibility?  The problem is that those with similar backgrounds to Junior will look at the results of this poll and for those who can read, will have their uninformed, baseless opinions, reinforced.

In the BNN Bloomberg article, it noted that, “Trudeau had a solid lead in Atlantic Canada and Quebec.”  With the Liberal government’s historical pandering to Quebec, one can understand why the citizens of that province would think that Trudeau had “economic acumen.”  In fact, if Collie the dog were the leader of the Liberal party, the people of Quebec—those terminal takers from the rest of us—would opine that Collie definitely had the most business acumen. 

Atlantic Canada is a bit of a mystery to me but I guess the gravy train you know is better than the gravy train you do not know.  As noted above, in this life you will come across people who are givers and people who are takers.  Quebec and Atlantic Canada have perpetually fallen within that latter group.

One final thought:  Andrew Scheer seems like a decent man to me, and I believe he would be a substantially better leader that the one we have now.  If Mr. Scheer had just a tiny bit of charisma, he would be kicking ass in the polls, even amongst those who are ever so anxious to participate in each and every poll that comes their way—educated and informed or not.