This election has been a difficult one to track and predict for pollsters, says the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, but there is one trend that just about everyone agrees on: the NDP is losing ground, and fast.
Darrell Bricker joined Tom Clark on The West Block this weekend to discuss the challenges of polling the electorate in 2015, and said the NDP slide (heavily concentrated in Quebec) seems to be showing up across just about every survey with about two weeks to go until election day.
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“I think that that’s probably one thing that you can count on,” Bricker said, noting that this exceptionally close race is playing out not on a national scale, but at a regional level.
“How the parties are doing in a specific province like Quebec or Ontario will likely determine who forms government on Oct. 19.”
“The biggest place of confusion where we’ve seen ups and downs in various polls that is really material for the campaign is the province of Ontario,” Bricker said. “Some polls have shown that the Conservatives are way ahead, some polls have shown that the Liberals are way ahead, and still other polls have shown the two parties are really close.”
READ MORE: Tories move ahead of Liberals, NDP in latest seat projections
It’s difficult to say why the various firms are coming up with such different results, but Bricker speculates that it may come down to the different methodologies they have employed to gather their numbers. Some use a combination of phone and internet surveys, for instance, and use different methods to make their samples more representative of the actual voting population.
“The problem, of course, is that each of these methodologies has different types of biases. So the question really is, you know, what are we disclosing about what we’re doing? … And the problem is different people provide different levels of disclosure.”
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