I really wish that pollsters would have a few more scruples when they are asked to do a poll by the media. There are issues that just cannot be adequately handled by a poll and they should tell their clients and decline to do the poll.
This train of thought occurred to me when I read a poll yesterday (by a pollster who shall remain nameless) that essentially stated that a very large plurality of Canadians would like to see reduced trade with China. My immediate reaction was "What a useless polls." My second reaction was that the poll could be very damaging, if people actually took it seriously, which fortunately most people do not.
Why was it useless? Trade with China is way too complex of an issue to be encompassed in a single polling question or even a series of polling questions.
One issue is China is the manufacturing powerhouse of the world. Virtually everything the average person buys is made in China. If you happen to shop at a Dollar Store you are buying things made in China. Walmart is able to sell products for a "reasonable price" because they are made in China. The computer that I am using to type this post was assembled in China and it is very likely that Chinese companies had a hand in the manufacturing of the device you are using to read this post. So the real question a pollster needs to ask is "Would you be willing to pay higher prices for cloths, computers and cell phones in order to reduce trade with China?" I am pretty certain that the response to that question would be a resounding "No".
A second issue is how would we be able to prevent trade with China? Countries do not trade. Companies are the entities that drive trade. It is a simple fact that Western companies went to China a long time ago because they could take advantage of lower costs to manufacture their products. I am wearing a shirt that I bought at The Bay for about $40. If that shirt had been manufactured in a textile mill in Ontario the retail price would probably still be about the same but the margin for the manufacturer would be much less because the salaries that would be required to pay the workers at that Ontario textile mill would be much higher than the wages that would need to be paid to Chinese workers. Simple business logic dictates that the manufacturer would stay in China which brings us back to the question that started this paragraph.
A third issue is who would prevent trade with China? The obvious message from the poll and the explanation from the pollster was the government was responsible for this issue, although he never really identified the issue in concrete terms. Of course, the only way for a government to reduce trade with another country is to make it too expensive for companies to operate in foreign countries or to bribe domestic companies not to move their operations, by means of tariffs and/or subsidies. Of course, tariffs just leads to retaliation from the other country and everybody loses and most of the time companies funnel subsidies to their stockholders and move their operations to low cost jurisdictions anyway. So there is no way for a government to prevent a company from moving its operations or to prevent trade with another country.
All of these issues make the issue of trade with China much too complex to be usefully addressed by a poll. So the pollster should not have even tried. They did and yet again pollsters and their clients in the media further dumbed down the discourse over what is a very important issue. They make it look like the issue is an easy one to address so that when governments and business find themselves having to live the complex reality they are seen as incompetent. It does a great disservice to Canadians and I am not certain whether it is just ignorance on the part of the pollsters and their media clients or a deliberate effort to misinform people.
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