The American penny dreadful National Enquirer must have been named before Fowler’s Modern English Usage encouraged people to say ‘inquire’ for asking and ‘enquire’ for an investigation. Or maybe not. Nobody cares about the proper use of English anymore.
But something that caught our attention last week still has us puzzled. Why would the Department of National Defence be the biggest spender in the Canadian government in doing research into the opinions of Canadians? It is bothersome. One rarely thinks of our National Defence Headquarters staff of having enquiring or even inquiring minds.
Are we finding out with whom Canada should next go to war? Do Canadians want their navy to have a battleship? Or just some more tug boats? And yet we find that the Department spent almost $600,000 in the last fiscal year on researching public opinion.
Surely it could not be about the Joint Strike Fighter F35. Canadians have no general awareness of the strengths or weaknesses of this American fighter aircraft and since the Harper government has absolutely no clear idea of what the aircraft might cost, there is no point in asking the public for an answer.
And if you think that the amount spent by National Defence is odd, Citizenship and Immigration Canada spent close to $550,000 on public opinion polling. Are they inquiring as to whether immigrants like it here? Are they asking if there is more the government might do to make them comfortable?
And what is the point of this anyway? Do you recall how accurate the pollsters were in calling the last federal election? Or how accurate the pollsters’ forecasts were on the last provincial elections in Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario, to name a few? The pollsters have not only been consistently wrong but their forecasts can no longer be trusted. They are embarrassing.
But what Canadians should be concerned about is the cumulative information gleaned from millions of dollars spent across Canada can be useful, even if not trusted, by a political party. And the only political party with easy access to all that information happens to be the Conservative Party.
Why does Prime Minister Harper know that the number one priority of Canadians is the economy? He has all those polls giving him that information in considerable detail. It should also be causing him concern. He has been telling Canadians that he has that problem solved. He might have solved it for the one per cent. The rest of us are still waiting. We also have enquiring minds.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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