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Throughout the negotiations last fall and earlier this year between Ottawa and the provincial governments in Alberta and British Columbia, Prime Minister Carney has been guided by a series of internal government polls that showed a significant majority of Canadians were broadly in favour of his plan to push a new oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast, according to documents obtained by Global News.
Twice in the middle of last November, the Privy Council Office (PCO) included several questions in its weekly polling program to determine how Canadians felt about a new oil pipeline and other energy and natural resource projects. The PCO weekly program, first instituted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s staff in 2015, provides public opinion data to the prime minister, cabinet, senior Prime Minister’s Office *(PMO) staff and deputy ministers about a range of issues.
Though the polling program is run by the non-partisan bureaucrats at the PCO, the program is supervised by the partisan political staff inside the PMO and political staff, in conjunction with bureaucrats, design each week’s poll.
In two successive polls, for the weeks ending Nov. 23 and Nov. 30, the PMO-supervised poll asked a simple question of 2,000 Canadians in a live-agent telephone poll: Do you support new or expanded oil pipelines?
Among those surveyed, 67 per cent said they supported a new or expanded oil pipeline. Even more important from a political perspective, a majority in every region of the country said they supported an oil pipeline expansion, including 64 per cent support in B.C. and 56 per cent in Québec.
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But then, the PMO-supervised pollster went deeper and asked what, to many pollsters, would be considered a leading question — a “push-poll” — in which the question might be designed to skew the response. The leading question, in this case, appeared to be skewed towards opponents of a new oil pipeline.
The question, according to the documents obtained by Global News through an access-to-information request, that was put to survey participants in this live-agent telephone poll was: “One way of increasing energy exports to overseas markets is to build new pipelines. However, despite their contribution to the economy, some point out that building pipelines involves cutting corridors across ecosystems, with impacts on nature and habitat, and pipelines come with risks of leaks and spills. Given that, do you support new or expanded pipelines?”
And yet, even with that leading question, support for a new oil pipeline was only slightly diminished, with 62 per cent saying they still supported a pipeline. And again, there was a majority in every region — including Quebec — who supported an oil pipeline.
Carney’s PMO would have had some of that data when, on Nov. 27, it announced the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Alberta that would lead to this week’s agreement to build a new oil pipeline to the Pacific.
And yet, the week after announcing the Canada-Alberta MoU, the PMO-supervised pollsters wanted to be sure they were on the right track when it came to public opinion.
And so, from Dec. 1-7, another 1,000 Canadians were surveyed and, this time, they were asked: “As you may have heard, Canada and Alberta have signed a new energy co-operation agreement outlining the conditions that must be met for a new oil pipeline to the Pacific. In your opinion, is the Government of Canada’s decision to sign this new agreement with Alberta a good or bad decision for the country?”
It was a win again for the Carney government, with 53 per cent of respondents overall approving and a plurality in every region, including B.C. and Quebec, agreeing it was a good decision for the country.
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