Who can trust opinion polls, after they so blatantly failed to predict the results of so many recent elections, from the 2012 defeat of Wildrose in Alberta to the 2013 victory of the British Columbia Liberals to the recent election of David Cameron's majority government in Britain?
One thing is sure, though: In this federal election campaign, as in many others, the conservative (or rightist) vote might be severely underestimated by pollsters. The reason is that people who opt for the conservative side are more discreet than others, in part because their choice is not the flavour of the day – nor is it popular among the pundits and the urban media. They often pretend to be undecided although they're not; conservative voters also tend to be older. And older people vote in greater numbers.
In Quebec for example, all recent provincial elections brought surprising good news for the right, a.k.a. the Quebec Liberal Party. Even when it was defeated, the QLPs' share of the vote turned out to be much bigger than expected. In 1994, the Liberals lost power but received 44.3-per-cent support, only 0.3 per cent less than the winning Parti Québécois. In 1998, the PQ government was re-elected but with a smaller vote (42.8 per cent) than the QLP (43.5 per cent). In 2012, a tired and unpopular Charest government managed to deprive the Parti Québécois of a majority.
So the Harper government might benefit from the silent support of a group largely ignored by the pollsters or erroneously labelled as "undecided." Of course, it also helps that the two main opposition parties are fighting for the same clientele. But now another element has been introduced in the campaign, marking the triumph of sheer demagogy over human decency: the niqab affair.
As early as March, the Prime Minister's Office commissioned an opinion poll, by Léger, on the wearing of the face-covering veil at citizenship ceremonies. The opposition was flabbergasting: 82 per cent across Canada, 93 per cent in Quebec, 85 per cent among people older than 55 and, strangely enough, 76 per cent among those with a university education.
Never mind that there is a very small number of women who wear a niqab in Canada, and that the ones who do so at a citizenship ceremony are identified, in private, by a female agent before the event. The idea that a woman could hide her face on such a solemn occasion carries a powerful symbolic charge, and the Conservatives obviously planned to exploit the issue during the campaign.
So the Conservatives are now, in effect, campaigning on the back of an isolated and vulnerable minority, which must be the height of cynicism. But the tactic pays. This matter, as objectively trivial as it is when compared with other election issues, led to the most heated exchange during last Thursday's French-language debate. Even though Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe has always eschewed identity politics, he eagerly jumped on the anti-niqab bandwagon in the hope of salvaging his sinking ship.
An Abacus Data survey released this week shows the New Democrats at 30-per-cent support in Quebec, down 17 percentage points in the province since the pollster's Sept. 11 survey, a drop that can be partly attributed to NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair's position on the niqab. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has the same position but his party is suffering less (with provincial support at 24 per cent) because the Liberals are strong in non-francophone ridings, where the opposition to the niqab is less strident, while the NDP finds most of its support in francophone areas.
The Orange Wave still comes first in Quebec, but it has lost a great deal of its force.
Lysiane Gagnon