Is Anyone, Except Maybe MacPherson, Taking Beaver Poll Seriously

	Friday » August 3 » 2007
Trudeau Canada's worst? Hardly The media's appetite for anything that looks like a poll lifted this dud onto the front pages of the nation DON MACPHERSON The Gazette Thursday, August 02, 2007 CREDIT: ALLEN MCINNIS, THE GAZETTE After former prime minister Pierre Trudeau died in 2000, thousands of ordinary Canadians turned out on Parliament Hill to pay their last respects to a man whom many consider to be the country's best prime minister since 1968, the year he took office. Mark Reid wanted to start a critical public discussion of Canadian history. What he got was national exposure for a previously unknown punk rocker and a junk-news story spread round the world, implying that Pierre Trudeau is considered the "worst Canadian" of all time by his countrymen. Reid is the editor of the Beaver, the Winnipeg-based history magazine that this week published what it oversold in a press release as the results of an online "survey" of the "public" to "determine" the "worst Canadian" of all time. The implication was that the survey was scientific and, like the polls on other subjects that are routinely reported in the media, representative of public opinion in general. The results contradicted previous surveys showing the enduring popularity of Trudeau, who left active politics in 1984 and died in 2000.