The Measure of Democracy: Polling, Market Research, and Public Life, 1930-1945

J.L. Granatstein, distinguished research professor emeritus of history
at York University. He is the author of Who Killed Canadian History? and
co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most Influential Canadians of the
20th Century, Prime Ministers: Ranking

I must confess at once. I was Daniel Robinson’s Ph.D. dissertation
supervisor, and this book is heavily based on his thesis.
Notwithstanding that, I have no hesitation in saying that this is one of
the most important works of Canadian history to appear in years. The
reason is simple: opinion polling plays a huge role in our lives,
affecting our politics and shaping the way the goods we buy are sold to
us. Every day, the pollsters provide the data that determine our lives,
personal, collective, and national. Our opinions may not matter much
individually; collectively, they rule.

Until Robinson, no one scholar had tried to find out the origins of
opinion polling in Canada. With great energy, Robinson went to the
sources (naturally enough, those sources were largely in the United
States) and showed how and why polling developed and how it spread.
George Gallup was polling’s true founder, and curiously his right-hand
man was a Canadian, Saul Rae, later a distinguished Canadian
diplomat—as well as the father of the noted NDP politician Bob Rae.
From America, polling crossed the border as a market-research tool in
the Depression years and turned heavily to political- and
opinion-polling during World War II. The Mackenzie King government—or
some of its ministers and officials (including Rae)—realized that
polling could provide a government with information of use in shaping
policies of great import. Politicians also realized that polling could
tell the ruling party (and opposition parties too, if they had the wit
to use it and the money to pay for it) how it was doing and what issues
would, or would not, sell. It was likely no coincidence that the Liberal
Party stayed in power in the election of 1945 when many other wartime
governments were swept away as soon as victory was at hand. Polling
mattered and it still does, and Robinson’s book is a splendid guide to
its origins and development. That he writes well and clearly is a bonus.