Dear Editor,
Suggesting a petition should be used to drive public policy is a pretty dangerous business to get into. Petitions are the crudest possible measures of support/lack of support out there. They’re also the cheapest and easiest to organize, so they’re pretty common. It’s good to recognize the pitfalls inherent in petitions.
For the organizers petitions are the best thing going. You only record the people who agree with you. You ignore everyone else. If it takes approaching 10, 100, or even 1,000 people to get one single person to sign your petition, you still get the same number of signatures. One. Then you move on to the next 10, 100, or 1,000 people. In a properly conducted poll or a survey the 9, 99, or 999 people who disagree with you – each time – get recorded as persons in opposition to your position. Recognized. With a petition it’s like opposing positions to yours don’t even exist. That’s bad for public policy purposes.
Petitions can be extremely difficult to keep free of bias. The question has to be simple, direct, honest, and especially, free of bias. For example, if the Save Georgian Bay volunteers went out armed with pens and clipboards and asked strangers, “Would you agree that a very dangerous and environmentally disastrous proposed construction project, one which will inevitably fail and wipe out the Town of Meaford, should be stopped? And will you please sign our petition to help stop it?” Well, very, very, few people will feel comfortable telling a complete stranger “Nope. I’m all for it. Let’s build two. And I want to help dig the holes. How long ’til Meaford gets wiped out? Roughly?”
There is plenty of research available that shows people will sign a petition SUPPORTING a position they OPPOSE just because they don’t want a stranger to think badly of them. Because of how the question was asked. And they want to simply get away. But let’s give the benefit of the doubt here. I am NOT saying that’s what Save Georgian Bay did. I haven’t even seen it personally. Let us all assume the Save Georgian Bay petition question people were asked to support was both legitimate and bias free.
The easiest way to run up the number of signatures on a petition is to petition where the support is. Maybe even include people who aren’t affected by the issue as long as they give the correct answer. Had they canvased in Calgary or Ft. McMurray, potential signers opposed to a Green Energy project could have easily been obtained numbering in the hundreds of thousands. But no doubt Save Georgian Bay thought that would strain their public credibility.
Personally I find it to still be a stretch to include all the way from Owen Sound (28 km to the west of the Base) to Barrie (100 km to the east of the Base), or 118 km of Hwy 26 all in, but you know what? If those guys feel affected? If they feel threatened? Count ’em! It’s not my petition. Except that does introduce some complications further along.
3,395 of anything seems like a lot. 3,395 passengers requires a fair sized cruise ship. But 3,395 grains of sand make for a pretty tiny beach. What about some perspective here?
Google tells me that the Save Georgian Bay team had at least 238,598 people they could have asked to sign their petition if they simply stuck to just the six towns named in your May 5th article. In the territory they chose, not me. With a question I already agreed we should assume was legitimate and unbiased. They got 3,395 signatures. Here’s the remaining problem with petitions. The Big One if you will.
If Save Georgian Bay canvased 3,395 people to get their 3,395 signatures, then the support for their initiative to stop the Pumped Storage Project Proposal is truly astonishing. Probably means close to 100% community support if they went on to canvas everybody!
If Save Georgian Bay canvased everyone in the territory that they thought was relevant, they got 3,395 signatures out of 238,598 people. In that case they got support from 1.42% of the community they chose. (And on a number the size of 238,598, 3,395 or 1.42% can be considered pretty much zero, statistically speaking. To avoid any arguments I’ll use 1.42% , not ‘statistically zero’.)
I’m guessing two things right now. The real Save Georgian Bay support number was somewhere between those two possible outcomes. And that we will never know what it was.
But if Mr. Ruff and Mr. Walker intend to incorporate the results of this petition into important public policy decisions, I really hope they will keep in mind that maybe somewhere between 1.42% and 100% of the people living within 0.67 and 100 km of the 4th Canadian Training Centre oppose the Pumped Storage Project Proposal. According to this petition.
Bruce Mason, Meaford
