Poll Exposes Sad Truth about Race Attitudes in Quebec

A new poll conducted by Radio-Canada and the CBC puts paid to the notion advanced by the PQ that Quebecers are for a secular society that equally bans all visible religious symbols from being worn by public and para-public employees.

The poll, a logical extension of the debate was the first to ask ' la question qui tue  'a phrase which simply describes an uncomfortable question that begs a response.

And so we get to the heart of the issue.
Is the public against all religious symbols or just some. Link{fr}

"Elsewhere, 90 per cent of Quebecers said they’d be at ease with a doctor wearing a cross, while only 65 per cent of them said they’d be equally at ease with a doctor wearing a kippa.
The disparity could be owed to confusion about what a kippa actually is, said SOM Research Vice-President Éric Lacroix.
Considering that the kippa, a skullcap worn by Orthodox Jewish men, is actually the least visible of the headwear mentioned in the poll, Lacroix said it’s possible some respondents confused it with “kirpan.”: Link

 Confused? I don't know whether to laugh or cry...

Let's just consider the first figure, the one that indicates that 90% of Quebecers are fine being treated by a doctor wearing a crucifix.
All of a sudden the rationale that it is all religious symbols that upsets people is utter hogwash. It is the non-Christian symbols that are in dispute.

Let me wade in on the comment by the SOM researcher who seemed a little embarrassed by the fact that the kippah came in dead last, saying that perhaps those questioned mixed up the kippah and the kirpan.
It's not as stupid as it sounds, voters are notoriously opinionated and stupid at the same time.
Let us remember a recent story that indicated that almost half of Quebecers are functionally illiterate.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that 50% of the people being polled never saw a kippah or kirpan in their life or for that matter met a Jew or a Sikh in person, I'm not exaggerating.

Back in the day, as a political organizer, over many campaigns, I developed a 'dirty' polling technique whereby I would organize four or five campaign workers to poll nightly, to see where our candidate stood.
Obviously we couldn't get a large sample and so we carefully targeted those who were representative AND WHO INTENDED ON VOTING.
We'd pick from the voting list a fair sample of names that represented the ethnic and linguistic and as well as a socioeconomic cross section of the riding.

It's a fancy way of saying that in a riding like Westmount we'd poll voters in the poorer areas in proportion to their numbers as well as language.

Our pollsters would first qualify those they called with a first important question.

"There is an election coming up. How would you rate the chances of you voting?"
"Probably not - Maybe - Probably -Very likely."

If the caller answered anything but 'Very Likely,' the pollster terminated the call, experience has taught me that the caller would not be voting and therefore his or her opinion was moot.

If the caller told us that she or he was very likely to vote, we'd ask for which party, not which candidate they'd be voting for. Some people vote for the candidate, but all vote for a specific party.
This rule has been validated in the last federal election where NDP nobodies were elected in Quebec on the basis of party affiliation.

CBC Internet Poll about Montreal as a City State- Reliable?...err.

At the end of the night, after three or four hours of calls, we'd tally up the total, but also by voter category.
If we didn't have enough of say, francophone responses, we'd go back to the phones and interview francophones until our ratios were complete.

We'd sometimes have as little as a hundred responses, but they were quality responses and I'd put up my system any day over lazy Internet polls that get a thousand responses but are  completely unreliable.

So my problem with the SOM poll is that it is a lazy poll.

Only real pollsters on the phone can ascertain the intentions of the responder.

If the person hasn't seen or doesn't understand what a kippah or kirpan is, the opinion should be ignored.
As John Diefenbaker said... "Polls are for dogs"

By the way, the lazy polling techniques used today make results completely unreliable, as we've seen in many, many of the last elections.

Give me a small team of trained and dedicated pollsters and I'll out-poll the big boys any day of the week.
At any rate, the only thing we can take away from this poll,  is that the public has a problem with religious symbols, as long as they are not Christian.

That is where we are, not a pretty place.

One last thing, I'd like to touch on what is what I call the polling 'uncertainty principle," whereby asking a question has a unintended effect on the answer.
An example: "Did man really land on the Moon?"
Just asking the question makes the responder consider what he or she would perhaps never have considered as a possibility in the first place.
So asking a responder if they objected to being treated by a doctor wearing a kippah, falls directly in this category. The question itself will skew the results.
Perhaps we should delve into  the work of Werner Heisenberg, to see how he dealt with this quantum mechanics dilemma.

At any rate, we are plowing into dangerous territory, but for the PQ it is a question of damn the torpedoes, they have nothing to lose, while we have everything to lose ...