It’s the most controversial piece of legislation in recent Canadian history. And yet, cries the Globe and Mail, citing anti-terror Bill C-51’s 82 per cent national approval rating, there has “rarely been a bill before Parliament that was more popular.”
Eighty-two per cent! My, what a large number. When countries like Russia, Iran and Kyrgyzstan boast 95 per cent election turnouts and 96 per cent presidential approval ratings, we in Canada collectively loose a big, hearty, democratic belly laugh at the sheer absurdity of voter unanimity. This isn’t to imply that the Angus Reid poll was fixed – merely that as a serious assessment of how Canadians really feel about Bill C-51, it just isn’t very good.
Let me assure you, 82 per cent of Canadians agree on precisely nothing, never mind eternal fidelity to a piece of abstruse legislation. First, the poll is not a random sample. The sample was 1,509 individuals drawn from a pool of people registered at the online Angus Reid Forum, a website where anyone who completes a survey can enter “sweepstakes draws to win gift certificates or cash.” The problem isn’t necessarily that respondents were enticed with prizes.
It’s that the poll was a) peppered with poorly designed questions and b) restricted to a self-selected batch of Canadians who have the kind of time, internet savvy and computer access that permits leisurely completion of surveys. It simply cannot be used to support grandiose statements about the general Canadian population, like the Globe and Mail’s proclamation that “more than four in five Canadians back the new legislation to expand the powers of intelligence agencies and police.”
But let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend that the poll took a random and representative sample of the real-life opinions of average Canadians. Eighty-two per cent is a lot of people, but it’s not quite so impressive when you consider that 57 per cent of those surveyed openly admitted that while they do support the bill, they know almost nothing about it. Specifically, 855 of the 1,509 survey-takers self-characterized their knowledge of Bill C-51 as either “Not read/seen anything at all” or “Just scanned/saw the headlines.”
To paraphrase, more than half of Canadians who don’t really know what Bill C-51 is think it’s utterly marvellous. Or do they?
Bill C-51 is 62 pages of dense legal text that would make most lawyers wince. The Angus Reid poll consists of two large-print pages with seven nice and easy questions – less onerous than your typical hotel satisfaction survey. And with questions like whether or not one is in favour of or opposed to “making it illegal to promote terrorism,” it’s probably less subtle, too.
Tell me, typical Canadian, which of the following two statements more nearly reflects your feelings:
a) There is a serious threat of terrorism here in Canada
b) Politicians and the media have overblown the threat of terrorism in Canada.
I choose c. I’m not CSIS. Questions about my personal appraisal of the threat of terrorism are irrelevant to the actual content of Bill C-51, so why don’t you take your leading questions elsewhere and ask me something else?
In its favour, the poll successfully ascertains that 65 people in Manitoba who go online to complete surveys are indeed worried about terrorism. The numbers in Saskatchewan are somewhat more troubling. In response to the question “How familiar are you with the proposed legislation?” 13 per cent of people had “read stories about it,” 28 per cent had seen “a story or two,” 39 per cent had “just scanned the headlines” and 21 per cent had not read “anything at all” – all of which is fine, except the numbers add up to 101. Mathematics!
It’s a free country. If you want to support Bill C-51, then thine is the power. But the idea that this bill is an unstoppable juggernaut, a force of nature with such awesome powers of public approval that it’s simply irresistible at this point is nonsense.
This isn’t Facebook. I couldn’t care less how many “likes” Bill C-51 has. I only want to know two things: a) what it’s about and b) under exactly what circumstances and how far the government intends to ram its snout into my private life. I suspect most Canadians would agree.
Showey Yazdanian’s humorous book Loopholes won the Ken Klonsky Prize for best novella manuscript by a Canadian author in 2015 and will be published in June by Quattro Books.
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