Polls are a tricky thing to write about.
Anyone who followed the 2013 B.C. election or the recently Nanaimo byelection will know that polls can be pretty unreliable.
So keep this in mind while reading the results of a Nanos Research poll posted today that has the federal NDP – led by new Burnaby South MP Jagmeet Singh getting a pretty big bump in support.
The latest Nanos federal ballot tracking has the Conservatives at 35.5 per cent, followed by the Liberals at 32.6 per cent, the NDP at 19.9 percent, the BQ at 3.2 per cent, the Greens at 7.7 per cent and the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) at 0.5 per cent.
The NDP for the longest time has been mired at 13 to 14 per cent, with the party also struggling to raise money.
So to have a showing at nearly 20 per cent is to be considered positive news. The CBC’s poll tracker – which aggregates all publicly available polling data – has the NDP at 15.9 per cent.
The bad news for Singh is the other number Nanos had.
Nanos tracking has Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the preferred choice as PM at 30.3 per cent of Canadians followed by Scheer (27.3%), Singh (8.9%), May (7.2%) and Bernier (2.8%). Twenty-two per cent of Canadians were unsure whom they preferred.
So Singh is way down the list and has a lot of work to do. Things could get better now that he is an MP and gets to speak in the House of Commons. He needs to build his profile and fast because October is getting closer and closer.
Singh is getting huge assists from Trudeau with SNC-Lavalin and Scheer with his blunder after the New Zealand massacre.
Let’s see what he can do with these missteps.
For theNanos poll, the data is based on a dual frame (land + cell-lines) random telephone interviews using live agents of 1,000 Canadians using a four week rolling average of 250 respondents each week, 18 years of age and over. The random sample of 1,000 respondents may be weighted by age and gender using the latest census information for Canada. The interviews are compiled into a four week rolling average of 1,000 interviews, where each week the oldest group of 250 interviews is dropped and a new group of 250 interviews is added.
A random telephone survey of 1,000 Canadians is accurate ±3.1 percentage points, plus or minus, 19 times out of 20.
- Chris Campbell, Burnaby Now