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“Pollsters have put a lot of effort into trying to improve their samples and so forth. It is sometimes in reaction to the criticism that they’ve taken,” Clarke said in an interview.

When the 2015 Canadian election came to a close with a Liberal majority, for example, the Conservatives and NDP were not the only losers. Public opinion pollsters took such an unusually vicious shellacking in public opinion — a terrain on which they ought to be more sure-footed — that the National Post editorial board felt compelled to defend them in an editorial.

“On the same day, one poll will have one party in the lead and another in third, while another poll will have the reverse,” the editorial recalled, before settling on the conclusion that, for all their flaws, “voters have every right to consult the polls as part of their deliberations.”

This reflects top level court decisions, which have overturned previous bans on publishing polls during campaigns, for fear they will sway the outcomes. Lately, however, the real crisis for pollsters has not been a surplus of public trust, but a deficit.

Recent polling disasters include the 2015 British general election, in which Conservative support was pegged far lower than it turned out to be when they won a majority.

Photo by Jack Boland/Postmedia Network

There were similarly inaccurate polls in British Columbia in 2013 (in which Christy Clark’s victorious Liberals seemed to trail the NDP throughout), and Alberta in 2012 (when the Wildrose Party seemed a sure bet, but lost). Last year’s re-election of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi was notable for the polls that suggested he had no chance, which the pollster later called a “catastrophic failure.”