Sunday Afternoon Links

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- Joan Bryden notes that even pollsters are warning against paying too much attention to tiny fluctuations in their results:

(T)he media often trumpet shifts in provinces or other small sub-samples of the population, like urban women or educated males. But with MOEs of as much as 10 percentage points, seemingly huge 20-point fluctuations are actually statistically meaningless.

"I've seen pollsters comment one week, you know, 'The Tories are dead in Quebec' only to have this magical resurrection the week after and there's a pressure to sort of explain that and you come up with saying, 'You know, well, (Prime Minister Stephen Harper) made this statement or he wore this tie,'" says Mukerji.

"I think if you take a step back and look at the general trend, there hasn't actually been all that much that's changed, quite frankly, in the party standings."

- I tend to agree with the theory, raised by Alan Shanoff among others, that the recently-developed responsible communication defence to libel or slander claims should be a guiding principle in determining how the CRTC should handle false news. But it's also worth pointing out where the law of defamation falls short of protecting the public interest: shouldn't the need for responsible journalism be just as obvious when a broadcast involves subject matter that isn't so directly aimed toward an individual's reputation as to be enforceable through a private lawsuit?

- Stephen Gordon criticizes the new head of Statistics Canada for being willing to spout the Cons' party line on the census even when his organization has conclusively refuted the claim that there's any real prospect of a voluntary survey providing data of the same quality as a mandatory census:

In point of fact, Statistics Canada has done quite a bit of research documenting the fundamental flaws associated with voluntary surveys; see Kevin Milligan's guest post as well as this. Insisting that "critics cannot be sure" is a remarkable thing for a Chief Statistician to say; statistics is not in the business of providing absolute certainty.
...
I understand that as Chief Statistician, there are certain truths that Mr Smith cannot speak in public. But that's no excuse for making statements that are contrary to available evidence. Statistics Canada has a reputation to maintain; Mr Sheikh resigned in order to protect it. It would be a very bad thing indeed if Statistics Canada is itself the next victim in the continuing assault on evidence-based policy.

- Finally, while the conventional wisdom is that cabinet ministers have absolutely no ability to act outside the wishes of the Harper PMO, let it never be said that at least some cabinet ministers can't take a stand on principle. That is, when it comes to true matters of conscience such as airplane colour schemes. I'm sure news will soon leak that despite his census embarrassment, Tony Clement should be seen as a maverick for refusing direct orders as to his tie selection.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

The census debacle overview from Heather Scoffield and Jennifer Ditchburn is well worth a read - and I'll plan to circle back to a couple more points in future posts. But for now, let's highlight their concise summary of the sheer amount of dishonesty - in terms of both the number of people involved and the number of false claims - put into service by the Harper government to defend the indefensible:

The Prime Minister's Office's response in the early days of the debate was unusual at best.

The director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, sent reporters an email underlining how many Canadians had listed their religion as "Jedi" during the 2006 census, and making reference to census workers visiting homes at 10 p.m. — something Statistic Canada says does not occur.

Clement was forced to defend the decision with no prior consultation or polling to back him up. Neither was there any clear indication of just who in Canada was upset by the intrusive questions in the long form.

Bernier claimed that as industry minister, he had received 1,000 complaints a day during the census season of 2006 — but then couldn't produce a single one.
...
Cabinet members such as Transport Minister John Baird and Treasury Board President Stockwell Day helped spread a few untruths, ridiculing non-existent questions in the census on bathrooms and reading material.

(Edit: fixed typo.)

Deep thought

Maybe Bruce Campion-Smith has a point that the NDP should assume it will be referred to by a two-letter acronym. Just think how the many Canadians are already confused into thinking that elections consist of a choice between a wire service and a vinyl record.

On repeated patterns

Sure, it might seem like Robert has caught the CP's Joan Bryden and her sources for an article on EI distorting easily-checked facts about the impact of an eight-week eligibility standard. But don't we know by now that truth is no object when it comes to keeping the uppity working folk from benefiting from government action?

Credit not due

From the CP's headline, "Harper to go North as government moves ahead with deep-sea port, icebreakers", I'd almost thought for a second that Deceivin' Stephen might have reversed course again to actually keep his party's campaign commitments on those issues.

But sadly, the article makes it clear that the Cons are instead pushing forward with pale imitations of their original plans. And what's worse, with a false headline atop a rare article about Arctic issues, the Cons will have an easier time avoiding any public accountability for another set of broken promises.

Distorting the story

The CP's story on federal party fund-raising has received plenty of attention. But one element that's largely gone unnoticed is that the article reflects an all-too-familiar example of the media focusing on the Con/Lib dichotomy even where the effect is to confuse how the story is reported.

After all, based on the actual fund-raising standings (which see the Cons well ahead of the pack, followed by the NDP, Libs, Greens and Bloc in that order), one would figure the NDP would receive the second mention within the article, along with at least as much discussion of its methods as is given to the Libs and Cons. But instead, the headline, lead-in and article text all give first priority to the Cons and Libs - with the NDP (and its total more than double the Libs') mentioned only as a relative afterthought:

Stephen Harper's Conservatives raised almost 10 times more money from 10 times more donors than the Liberals in the first three months of 2007.

Even the NDP — historically the poorest of the three main national parties — managed to raise twice as much money as the once-mighty Grits.

According to quarterly fundraising results, posted Tuesday by Elections Canada, the Liberals managed to raise only $531,141 from 4,365 donors.

By contrast, the Tories vacuumed up almost $5.2 million from more than 45,000 contributors. The NDP scooped up $1.2 million from almost 15,000 donors.

For those looking for another problematic part of the article, the same scenario arises between the Greens and Bloc - as the Greens' fivefold advantage in fund-raising still only earns them mention after that given to the Bloc's numbers.

Now, it would be fair enough to say that the amount of money raised in any given quarter likely won't have much direct impact on future election results. But rather than even making that case to justify the shape of the article, the CP seems to take as a given that the reporting has to reflect the media's usual order of party discussion - even if that order makes no sense in light of the issue being reported on.

And that only hints at just what both the NDP and Greens are fighting in their respective efforts to move up in the federal party standings...no matter how much money they can raise compared to their competitors.

A handy reporting tip

Memo to the CP in response to this sad excuse for a story:

When Stephen Harper doesn't have anything interesting to say, that isn't news. If anything, it's simply his governing philosophy.

(Edit: cleaned up wording.)