Last night on our newscast and today in The Globe and Mail, our news organizations kicked off what we hope will be a special year-long (or longer) project on climate change. We decided to start this project by asking our pollster, The Strategic Counsel, to survey Canadians about a variety of environmental issues. Last night and today in The Globe, we present some of the big public policy/political results that of that poll. Tonight and tomorrow in the paper, we’ll have much more.
Over the next few days, I’m going to blog some of the poll results. I’ll present the question that was asked and some more detailed results than we were able to report on our newscast.
One of the things we found that we thought was remarkable was the overwhelming support — even in Western Canada – for the Kyoto Protocol, a warning for any political party that wants to turn its back on the international agreement aimed at reducing the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Now it is probably true that most Canadians do not have a clear understanding of just what the Kyoto Protocol actually is — but that’s not the point, says Stephen Hazell, the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada: “Kyoto is really code for working with other countries co-operatively so that Canada will do its share in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.“
Here’s the questions and the results:
Q. As you may know, some time ago, Canada agreed to be part of the Kyoto Agreement and committed to reduce greenhouse gases by 2012. The position of the current federal government is that we have fallen so far behind that those goals are unachievable and we now need our own “made-in-Canada” plan. Others have said that we should continue to try to achieve our targets and keep our Kyoto commitments. Which one of these best represents your own view?
Continue with Kyoto:
- Canada – 63 %
- Quebec – 76 %
- Ontario – 61 %
- The West – 55 %
- Rest of Canada – 59 %
Need “made-in-Canada” plan
- Canada – 30 %
- Quebec – 20 %
- Ontario – 32 %
- The West – 37 %
- Rest of Canada – 33 %
The Strategic Counsel surveyed 1,000 Canadians between Jan. 11 and Jan . 14. The pollster says that, on a national basis, the poll is accurate to within 3.2 percentage points. The margin of error is larger for the regional results, the highest margin of error is in Quebec at 6.3 percentage points.