The Wildrose Party has finally owned up to being behind the push-poll that tries to tie Alberta Premier Alison Redford to federal Liberal child-care policies and the financial difficulties of a company owned by her chief of staff.
However, they’ve opted for a strategy of brazening it out, claiming that their robo-call survey uses a completely legitimate polling technique.
This is too bad, because as everybody knows, the first of the 12 steps to dealing with your problem is admitting that you have one. (Presumably, the Wildrose Party’s social conservative base doesn’t have any problems with the “higher power” part, but never mind that just now.
They sent out Shayne Saskiw, their candidate in Lac La Biche-St. Paul-Two Hills to do the unpleasant job of pleading guilty with an explanation to the court of public opinion.
“One of these things where we put forth the facts of the questions that we ask and then we provide people with the opportunity to provide a response,” Saskiw told the CBC yesterday. “We just want to see what Albertans think on it.”
Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen, and the usual unidentified sources in the mainstream media told me that the party brass were not releasing her itinerary this afternoon, presumably for fear the media would track her down and ask her the obvious.
While this is going on and we wait for the party leader’s response, the spirit of fairness has compelled your blogger to compose a completely unfair and unreasonable push poll of his own. The first question is as follows:
“As reported in the media, in 1999 Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith was fired by Alberta Education Minister Lyle Oberg as a Calgary school trustee along with the rest of the public school board. Disappointment came when school board chair described the actions of the school trustees leading up to the mass firing as ‘a failure of adults to act in an adult manner.’ How does knowing this affect your likelihood of supporting Ms. Smith as premier?”
You can press 1 if it makes you less likely to support her, press 2 if it makes you more likely to support her and press 3 if it doesn’t change your likelihood of supporting her.
Well, actually, you can’t press 1 because I’m not about to phone half the households in Alberta with this sucker. But you can click here and pretend.
Let me admit right here that the poll I have composed is not only unreasonable and unfair, it’s totally unscientific and almost bizarrely biased. But, what the hey, according to Saskiw’s line of logic, this kind of thing is going to be the new normal in Alberta politics, so I might as well get with the program.
I pledge to publish the poll results in a few days complete with a completely misleading spin based on intentional misrepresentation of the results. I may or may not keep my promise, depending on my mood at the time.
And if you don’t like it readers, well, I guess you can do your own darned poll! It’s not like you’d belong to an exclusive club!
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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