Posted on 05/17/2002 11:24:13 AM PDT by jodorowsky
OTTAWA - Forty-five per cent of Canadians believe the Chrétien government is corrupt, according to a new poll by Pollara Inc., the Liberal party's own pollster.
Of those 45%, the national polling firm found, 65% believe the corruption runs "right through" the entire government while 30% believe it is "just around the edges" and 5% said they don't know.
Forty-six per cent of the nearly 1,700 respondents did not believe the Liberals are corrupt and 9% said they don't know.
The poll was conducted during the first week of May, after weeks of accusations by the opposition parties about the mishandling of government contracts, ministerial ethics and conflicts of interest involving potential Liberal leadership candidates and their fundraising activities.
Media reports yesterday suggested the Prime Minister is poised to name a parliamentary ethics officer who would oversee the conduct of MPs and Senators from all parties and would report directly to Parliament.
The Liberal government is also considering introducing legislation to close what the chief electoral officer called a "black hole" in political financing laws, by which millions of dollars worth of donations to leadership campaigns, nomination contests and riding associations have never been publicly disclosed.
The Prime Minister has indicated he will set new rules for Cabinet ministers who are raising funds for potential leadership bids.
Last week, Sheila Fraser, the Auditor-General, tabled a damning report in which she asked the RCMP to investigate the awarding of three contracts worth $1.6-million to a Montreal marketing firm with close ties to the Liberal government.
The poll found that Quebecers took the worst view of the government, with 55% saying the government is corrupt, compared to 39% who said the Liberals are honest.
British Columbians are nearly evenly split, with 49% thinking the government corrupt and 45% believing it honest. Fourty per cent of Ontarians think the government is corrupt, as do 41% of people in the Prairie provinces and 40% in Atlantic Canada.
Men were more likely than women to believe the Liberals are corrupt -- 49% versus 41%.
The poll is considered accurate within 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
The poll was not commissioned by the federal Liberal party. Michael Marzolini, Pollara's chairman, said yesterday his decision to conduct the survey was an "independent" one. He said he did not speak to any Liberal official or politician about it. Rather, he said, he decided to do the poll to counter the Leger Marketing survey, taken last month, that found 69% of Canadians believed their federal and provincial systems are corrupt.
Yesterday, Mr. Marzolini described the Leger poll as "pretty inaccurate."
He criticized the way in which it asked the question about corruption, saying it was designed to provoke a high response about government corruption.
"I'm not doing some sort of government whitewash," Mr. Marzolini said. "I was more incensed at the stop-beating-your-wife type of questions that were being asked in the poll, and how seriously the media and politicians were taking it. They didn't realize that it wasn't a good poll."
The Alliance used the Leger poll's findings to hammer the government over issues of ethics and corruption. Obviously concerned about the poll's findings, the Prime Minister took the unusual step of telling his MPs to challenge the media and spread the word that politicians are honest and politics is a noble profession.
The Leger poll asked: "Do you personally think that the Canadian political system is highly corrupt, somewhat corrupt, not very corrupt, or not at all corrupt?"
"It was a four-sided option of which three of them were corrupt," Mr. Marzolini said.
He said he strove for balance, asking: "Do you think the federal government is corrupt or not?" If respondents said yes, they were then asked, "Do you think this corruption runs right through the government or is it just around the edges?"
Mr. Marzolini said his poll shows the "sky is not falling" on the government, and that its ethical behaviour is "not seen as the crisis proportions as the previous poll was showing.
"Does this mean the government doesn't have to worry about being seen to be honest? No, it doesn't mean that at all. The government always has to work very hard on image and making sure that it's not just honest but seen to be honest," Mr. Marzolini said.
However, he said if he was in government, he would not take "solace" in these numbers. He said transparency and better communications would help improve Canadians' opinions of government. He believes the respondents' views were influenced by the opposition debate over the ethics issues.
The other 55% were declared dead, but were still able to vote in the last election.
I was talking to a friend today, he was talking about a "recapture" tax and asked me what it was.
I told him I thought it was the old "we are too stupid to know who to vote for" tax.
So they must not be as corrupt as our liberal Democrats, because our Dems would never admit this.
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