Polls Are (Not Always) For Dogs!
Emil van der Poorten
I arrived in Canada sometime after John George Diefenbaker had been reduced to a raucous front-bench opposition (Conservative party) voice after his famous and totally unexpected ascendance as Prime Minister (PM) to majority government followed by a bout of back-stabbing by the Tories that would have put the Rome of the Caesars to shame.
However, “Dief the Chief,” continued to earn the grudging respect of many Canadians despite his curmudgeonly conduct and his ultimate passing was mourned by even those who believed him to be the most paranoid PM that Canada had ever had and that was in a country that had in that same pantheon a very long-serving P. M. in the person of MacKenzie King who was claimed to be able to communicate with his deceased mother through a medium!
When the polling prior to Dief’s unexpected victory showed him trailing the Liberals, he made the comment that I’ve paraphrased as the title of this piece, the original reading, a most dismissive, “Polls are for dogs,” alluding to the propensity of the male of the canine species to raise its leg when passing any stationery object, punning on the words “polls” and “poles.”
Recent experience in the democratic world, particularly in Great Britain in the matter of the Scottish Referendum and in their most recent general election, proved polls to be anything but infallible, bringing back, to my memory at least, the grizzled veteran of Canadian politics in the nineteen-fifties, who, incidentally, visited post-independence Sri Lanka (“Ceylon” as it was then) and was most disturbed by its anti-imperialist politics and its lack of affection for the King (or Queen) of the Commonwealth that had only recently emerged out of the dismembered Empire!
All of the preceding seeks to preface the recent polling in Sri Lanka which took place in a climate of fear and lack of trust in any nosy “stranger” seeking access to one’s political leanings. That (very justified) fear, something all-pervading since Mahinda Rajapaksa imposed himself on a nation only too ready to accept a xenophobic culture bordering on, if not entering, the “master race” ideology of that Teutonic demagogue earlier in the 20th century.