While the new Nanos poll told us that the Conservatives and NDP were in a statistical tie, that doesn’t mean that either party was particularly liked and when it comes to choosing between the major parties to form a government, Canadians are dragging their feet.
In a poll conducted on April 13 and 14, 1002 respondents were asked to assign one word to each political party.
“We basically asked people to role-play and assume that each of the federal parties was a person and to use one word to describe their personalities,” pollster Nik Nanos explained to The Globe and Mail. “Envision a social gathering at your home and the federal parties are there and they are people. This is how, as the host, you would probably feel about them.”
The results proved that this social gathering would have many unwanted guests.
In short, the survey found that Conservatives are untrustworthy, New Democrats are socialist, Liberals are incompetent, Greens eco-friendly and Bloc Quebecois useless.
“A lot of people had swear words and very rude words for all of the parties,” Nanos said. “We put them under ‘bad/incompetent.’ So that particular category also includes swear words and things that we thought were too rude to put in a data table.”
The Conservatives were also described as conservative, bad/incompetent, good, trustworthy, controlling, and arrogant. Roughly half of the responses were negative.
The NDP were described as caring, bad/incompetent, good, new, innovative and trustworthy and a bit less than half of their responses were negative
The Liberals only got endorsements out of 4 of the top 15 responses. Bad/incompetent, untrustworthy, good, competent, progressive, powerful, and arrogant are terms that have been used to describe them.
However, it can’t get worst than the Bloc who was described as narrow-minded, aggressive, boring, incompetent and useless.
“What is lethal for a party is the perception that it is irrelevant,” Nanos said. “There is a difference between people not agreeing with your party or not liking your party and [your party] not being relevant. ... It is obvious that for a significant number of [Quebecers], they just don’t see the Bloc as a relevant political option.”
The poll doesn’t have a margin of error but the firm believes that the final batch of data best describes Canadian opinion at the time of research.
“It would be fair to say that these questions are bad news for everyone in one way or another,” he said. “And I think that, if any of the parties want to break away, it is clear that they have to deal with their underlying brand and the level of cynicism and disappointment and anger that is out there amongst average Canadians.”
These results are of no surprise to me where a lot of people I know don’t have a positive outlook over any of the existing parties, or their members. Considering low turnout and increasing apathy in the past elections, it is clear that people aren’t inspired by any of their options and don’t see their relevance. If a party was truly inspiring and truly did give off a positive vibe, Canadians would have embraced said leader/party and would have come out in large numbers to get that choice. The reality remains that they didn’t in the past elections and as things continue to get grim in Canadian politics, we will see how many will show up in the next one.
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