Canadian Politics Today

Let's be clear here. I've rarely seen people post raw data to these forums. I'd love to get my hands on some of the data sets that these "analysts" are using. What people post are executive summaries of researchers' analyses. Even when you post a Pew Poll and they're showing results, these are descriptive analyses that they've created from the raw data. It's not the data itself. These things almost always need to be contextualized with regards to their researchers' methodologies, including their data collection techniques and assumptions they make. This is why I'm very critical of a lot of The Fraser Institute's reports. If you dig into their methodologies you see they do a lot of things to inflate numbers (for example, taking the mean average property tax for a city and applying that to everyone living there as part of their "taxes" or estimating the amount of alcohol and tobacco people are buying to apply an "average" amount of excise taxes paid). It's sloppy work that doesn't pass academic rigour and that's why they're not publishing their results in academic journals.