“We knew this would happen,” began a Progressive Conservative fundraising email that was sent out to supporters on May 25 in response to a Forum Research election poll.

“The media, the pollsters, they don’t want us to win. They’re making up numbers to write stories about NDP momentum. The pollsters and the media are ganging up to try to keep us down. They are scared of what happens when the people get a voice.”

The message was signed “Doug.”

Over the past 10 days, the Tories have sent out three emails accusing pollsters and the media of conspiring to create a false picture of the Ontario election campaign, of cooking up and disseminating data they know to be flimsy in order to boost the NDP and rob potential Tory supporters of a sense of momentum.

This is a bold claim — an allegation that two entire industries are in cahoots. (TVO requested an interview with the PCs to give the party an opportunity to elaborate on its claims; a representative declined.)

The second email, sent last Tuesday, took issue with another poll — one that gave the New Democrats an 11-point lead. “Some hucksters called ‘Pollara’ did an online survey, and the media is reporting it like real news. They’re calling it a poll, but it’s junk science. [And] the media is going to report on it like it was fact.”

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It’s notable that supporters didn’t hear of these misgivings about polling data in previous weeks, when the same firm showed the PCs well ahead of their rivals.

In the real world, polling firms have reputations to protect. They’re participants in a competitive industry and they make money by conducting opinion surveys for large companies and organizations. Elections give them a chance to show off their accuracy; throwing a survey for political reasons would be bad for business.

At the same time, people who work in the media are painfully aware that polls don’t deliver perfect prognostications. Precisely because polls fail in their predictions, mainstream media outlets have procedures and standards for reporting on them responsibly. The Canadian Press Stylebook, a resource for journalists, includes six pages of guidelines and advice that warn reporters to avoid overstating their accuracy. When Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells reported the results of the Pollara survey — which the magazine had commissioned (and, for the record, did look like an outlier) — he tacked on a 215-word-long disclaimer explaining the limits of the methodology.

The plot thickened on Wednesday, an even more recent Forum Research poll showed the PCs in the lead again. It was difficult to see how this would fit into the conspiracy theory outlined above. If Forum is in the bag for the NDP, why would it suddenly go back to showing a Tory lead?

The PCs dealt with this twist by refining their target. A third email, blasted out last Thursday afternoon, took aim at the Toronto Star. The email pointed a finger at the Star for publishing the earlier Forum poll results on the front page when numbers looked strong for the NDP, but maintaining “silence” when the later poll from the same firm showed the Tories back on top.

That’s true as far as it goes: the Star stuck the earlier Forum poll showing the NDP at 47 per cent right at the top of the front page on May 25. But that poll was surprising: it indicated that the New Democrats might be surging well past their rivals. Even if the numbers haven’t held up in the days since, the simple fact is that it was newsworthy at the time.

Anyway, if the Star is supposed to be throwing its coverage to make it seem as if Doug Ford’s chance to become premier is slipping away, the paper is doing a poor job of it. Samantha Beattie’s Wednesday article about the NDP-PC horse race did the opposite of “making up numbers to write stories about NDP momentum.” It avoided making precise reference to poll results. It carefully explained that, thanks to geographic vote distribution, the Tories enjoy an advantage in scenarios involving a tight race in the popular vote.

The PCs have bucked the orthodox approach to media and public relations for this election: they booted reporters off the campaign bus; they’ve offered relatively few Q&A sessions at campaign stops; many of their candidates have been no-shows at riding-level debates. That might annoy the media, but the party is free to campaign how it chooses, and it remains the media’s job to cover the Tories fairly and accurately.

In the final days of the campaign, it might be wise for politicians to limit their musings about poll numbers to an old stock phrase. You know how it goes: “The only poll that matters is the one on election day.”

And no one’s accusing anybody of rigging that one — yet.