From Friday's La Presse
The first opinion polling after the Labonté scandal shows the three parties really neck and neck (and neck). Though Harel comes out on top, the real story is Richard Bergeron, whose party is living the wet dream of being a contender.
According to the poll, the number of undecideds has plummeted from 30% to 10%.
Election day is Sunday, and (as a journalist who will spend the night in the newsroom) it’s gonna be fun.
Branchez-Vous has the EXCLUSIF today: a poll it commissioned shows that about two thirds (literally 66.7%) of Quebecers support the 253 workers who were locked out by the Journal de Montréal in January.
But the full results of the survey show that about the same percentage (65.5%) support the employees and their union in labour conflicts in general. So it’s probably fair to say that the level of support is more of a default position than any serious analysis of the conflict. This is backed up by results showing that while the vast majority (82.7%) of Quebecers are aware of the lockout, three quarters of them (70% in Montreal) say they know little or nothing about the reasons behind it.
Who wins in this is a good question. The union will no doubt consider this a big win, because it looks good on its face and because initially it seemed the public might turn its backs on the union because of the generous working conditions (32-hour weeks, high salaries, etc.). Despite Quebecor’s efforts, this seems not to be the case.
But public support is irrelevant if people are still buying newspapers and advertisers are still putting ads. We don’t know how this is affecting the Journal financially, but that will be the big decider in all this.
The online poll of 1125 adult Quebecers taken Feb. 10-16 (margin of error 3% 19 times out of 20) also breaks down its answers by region (Montreal, Quebec and other), though the only one that shows a significant difference is that people who live in and near Quebec City support locked-out Journal workers more than they would workers in general. This is probably a result of the long Journal de Québec conflict, which also began with a lockout.
Transcript of a completely fictional meeting at the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec:
Hey guys, I have an idea. We should commission a survey of Quebecers and ask them about how they feel local news has eroded over the past few years. Then we’ll release it and maybe convince some companies to stop gutting local journalism.
Great! I’ll get on it right away.
Make sure to get it done before our big conference in December.
[later]
So what did you find out?
It’s not good.
What?
Well, it seems 80% of Quebecers think they’re getting good local journalism.
Seriously?
Yeah.
Dude, WTF?
We checked it twice. These are the numbers.
But that doesn’t make any sense.
I know.
Well what about the regions? I mean, with the Montrealization of the media, the numbers must be better for us there.
Actually, they’re worse. People in the regions are more likely to be satisfied with local news than people in Montreal.
What? What the hell is wrong with people? Don’t they know what’s going on?
I don’t know, man. It’s all backwards.
OK, ok. We paid a truckload of money for this. What are we going to do?
We can’t bury it.
No, we’ll have to release it. We’ll say we were surprised by the results.
No kidding.
Maybe someone at the conference can explain to us how this makes sense.
The Journal has a feature article today about a survey they organized which shows rush-hour drivers want heavy trucks banned from bridges during rush-hour. The article doesn’t include any interviews with truck drivers or transport companies or anyone else who might provide a balanced perspective.
Had they done so, they might have come up with this simple argument: Truck drivers don’t like rush hour any more than office workers do. They try to arrange their schedules, whenever possible, to avoid high-traffic situations which slow them down and eat into their productivity. When they travel during rush-hour it’s because they don’t have a choice.
The survey, with 71% in favour of creating such a restriction, is also misleading. All drivers want less rush hour traffic. If they could, they’d have everyone but them banned from the road. But if you explain the economic consequences of unnecessary regulation of truck traffic (like higher retail prices), you might start seeing those numbers change.
The Park Ave. YMCA, which was involved in that unfrosted windows peeping tom debacle, has decided not to think about the issue too much (or trust some provincial commission), but to simply conduct polling and see what Joe Schmo Quebecer thinks.