Looking at one year of polling in Canada

In the last year since July 1st 2011 there have been 225 political public opinion polls in Canada at the federal, provincial and territorial level.   I may have missed some, but this is what I can find out there.

I was inspired to do this because of a presentation to the MRIA conference "Beyond the Headlines" by Frank Graves of EKOS.   It made me wonder how many political public opinion pollsters are there in Canada and how often are we being polled?

Here are some stats on those polls:

Pollsters ranked by number of public political opinion polls conducted in the last year

1. Forum                         44 - 6 jurisdictions
2. Leger                         26
3. Nanos                         23
4. Angus Reid                    18 - 5 jurisdictions
5. Corporate Research Associates 15 - Atlantic Canada only
6. Abacus Data               14
7. CROP                       12 - Quebec only
8. Ipsos Reid                    12
9. Environics                    10 - 5 jursidictions
10. Harris Decima                 10
11. EKOS                           8
12. ThinkHQ Public Affairs         7 - Alberta only
13. Campaign Reseach               5 - Alberta only

DataPath Systems,  Innovative Research ,   Insightrix , MarketQuest Ominfacts Research, NRG Research, Praxis, and Return on Inisight all conducted two polls.

Abingdon Research, Justason, Lethbridge College, Mustel*, Oraclepoll Research, Segma Recherche, and Viewpoints all conducted one.
* Mustel only released one poll in March 2012 but the release indicates they did conduct one in September 2011


Ranked by polls in a jurisdiction - bold indicates an election in the last year

1. Federal      54
2. Ontario      48
3. Alberta      40
4. Quebec       35
5. BC           18
6. Newfoundland  8
7. Saskatchewan  6
8. New Brunswick 5
9. Manitoba      5
10. Nova Scotia   4
11. Yukon         2
12. PEI           2

Based on an average poll size of 1000, 225,000 Canadian should have been asked their political opinion in the last year, this is 0.67% of the population or 1 in 150 Canadians.



We are averaging one public political opinion poll per working day in Canada and that number seems to be rising.