EKOS pollster ignites furor over divisive ‘culture wars’ advice
April 22 and 23, 2010 - EKOS pollster Frank Graves has ignited controversy over his recent advice to the Liberal Party that they should “invoke a culture war” on Western Canadians.
I told them that they should invoke a culture war. Cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy. If the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad. Go south and vote for Palin.
- Frank Graves, President EKOS Research
The Conservative Party points to the fact Graves donated over $11,000 to the Liberal Party during a time when taxpayers paid EKOS Reasearch $61 million under the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. The Conservatives also raised questions about the CBC’s impartiality because the network always presented Graves as a “neutral pollster” in his frequent appearances on air.
Graves later apologized and denied any bias, but he repeated his calls for a culture war, and also says he has emperical proof to support his comments about Western Canadians and Conservative supporters.
There is a higher incidence of people who are less tolerant to homosexuals and more wary of other races, within the Conservative Party. I can demonstrate that empirically.
- Frank Graves, President EKOS Research
The Conservative Party has launched a letter-writing campaign protesting the CBC’s continued use of EKOS and Graves as their “pollster of record”.
Related Links:
[...] in April, 2010, EKOS pollster Frank Graves got into a lot of trouble in the neo-con blogosphere for advising the Liberal Party to “invoke a culture war” on the Harper Conservatives. [...]
NDP Needs to Launch a Culture War « Murray Dobbin's Blog
July 22, 2011 at 4:55 pm
What is wrong with these people. Canadians may be spread out across a vast landscape and posses many petty regionalisms, but we are all still one nation. (Québec is another nation, but Ièll discuss this later)
This guys speaks with such divisiveness… like Canadians in the “West” are foreign to those of the “East” and posses no virtues.
With the exception of Québec, regionalism is idiotic. We can relate to each other more than to any other nation, so why must we squabble like children?
D.I.D.
April 26, 2010 at 2:23 pm