With only a month to go before election day, a nasty spat is emerging between some of Canada’s top pollsters over a proposal aimed at reestablishing “public confidence” in the polling business.

On one side are pollsters like Darrell Bricker and John Wright of Ipsos Reid, who are poised to launch the Canadian Association for Public Opinion Research (CAPOR). The group, comprised of individual pollsters, academics and media representatives, plans to push for professional standards and transparency in public opinion polling.

On the other side are pollsters like Quito Maggi, president of Mainstreet Research, who say they were excluded from the founding of CAPOR and are concerned that its handpicked board will set industry standards designed to exclude competitors.

Mainstreet says it has filed a complaint with Canada’s Competition Bureau about CAPOR and released a statement this week publicly criticizing it.

Stuck in the middle are pollsters like Frank Graves of EKOS. While Graves agreed to sit on the board of CAPOR and has long thought Canada should have an organization like the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), he, like Maggi, questions why a number of polling firms were not among those invited to help launch the new organization.

Graves said he welcomes a group that will discuss polling and encourage more transparency.

“I strongly support the idea of greater transparency and disclosure which I see at the heart of what this organization is trying to do and I think that’s an urgent priority because there are a lot of places now in the media where that’s just not happening and consumers of public opinion polls in an election campaign or any other time are entitled and should be given that level of disclosure and transparency so that they can make some assessments of what confidence to put in the results that they’re looking at.”

However, Graves doesn’t think CAPOR should pass judgment – at least for now – on the different methodologies used by Canadian pollsters.

“Given some of the disputes currently going on about how to do polling properly, I think that this organization should stay away from that at this time unless it’s so flagrant and obvious that we can all agree.”

Others, like Nik Nanos of Nanos Research, appear to be avoiding getting drawn into the dispute, declining to be interviewed about the creation of CAPOR.

The reputation of Canada’s multi-million public opinion industry has been buffeted in recent years with some pollsters failing to accurately predict results in races such as the provincial elections in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario. Added to the challenges have been technological changes, which have disrupted the traditional polling methods of live interviews and led to the emergence of alternative, often internet-based, polling methods.

The question of polling accuracy flared up again last week when two polling firms made public very different findings for the race in Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s Montreal riding of Papineau. While CROP put Trudeau 11 points behind NDP candidate Anne Lagacé Dowson, a Mainstreet poll for Postmedia put Trudeau five points ahead. On review, it appears the CROP poll heavily oversampled known NDP supporters.

In June, Bricker announced that a new organization, CAPOR, was being set up to address the questions being raised about transparency and polling methods. But while pollsters working with Ipsos Reid, EKOS Research, Angus Reid, Léger Marketing and Earnscliffe Strategy Group are on the founding board of CAPOR, people working with other polling firms like Nanos Research, Environics, Mainstreet Research, Forum Research and CROP are not.

John Wright, a senior VP with Ipsos and secretary/treasurer of CAPOR, defends the decision not to invite people from polling firms like Mainstreet to be part of CAPOR’s founding.

“Why would we?” Wright asked. “I don’t know why we would.”

Wright said Maggi and other pollsters will be free to join CAPOR once it launches in a few days.

Bricker says CAPOR’s goal is to improve polling practices in Canada but he says there’s no plan for it to become the “polling police.”

“I think that there has been enough that has happened in the polling industry … over the last few years in which there have been some difficult circumstances that have occurred that suggested not just to us but many people in the polling industry that we need to do something to make sure that what’s happening is being done at the highest level of professional standards and whatever we’re doing, that we’re being transparent as people who are putting things into the public domain, that can have an influence on something for example like an election campaign, that we’re completely transparent about what we do.”

Bricker said people working with a number of polling organizations that aren’t currently represented on the board have said they plan to sign up and the group is also open to academics and members of the media who agree to observe the standards it will set.

“It’s a pretty gold standard group of people,” he said, listing off the founding directors.

Maggi, however, says one of the problems with public confidence in public opinion polling is Ipsos Reid itself, pointing out that Ipsos got the results wrong in both the 2014 Ontario provincial election and the 2013 British Columbia election that returned Premier Christy Clark to power.

“With all due respect, they’re the ones who got it wrong. That’s like calling the arsonist to put out the fire.”

Maggi supports the idea of professional standards and sanctions with real teeth for those who make serious errors, but he worries CAPOR’s rules will favour certain polling methodologies over others.

“The way this was done, I don’t want to play by somebody else’s rules with no input. I believe the industry deserves that, to get input from the entire industry and whatever rules that are set out, myself, many of the IVR pollsters who are out there, have had zero input into these new rules that they are going to implement.”

“I just question the way they went about it – behind closed doors, handpicked board, no information,” he said, pointing out the group hasn’t yet made its website live. “The way they’ve gone about it, I simply can’t endorse it.”

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