A veteran pollster says the city of Port Moody must tread carefully when using surveys to inform policy decisions that could have implications for generations.
Mario Canseco, the president of Research Co., said surveys have to be constructed and conducted according to sound, scientific polling practices for their results to be a valid indicator of opinion.
“Bad data won’t help you make the right decision.”
Canseco said a questionnaire a Port Moody councillor proposes be included in the city’s property tax notices is so flawed that its results would be meaningless.
He said a draft of the 13-question survey designed by Coun. Hunter Madsen to gather community input about issues that could be considered in the upcoming update to the city’s official community plan (OCP) lacks a clarity of purpose, and offers respondents too many options.
“There’s so many ways this could be sliced and diced,” said Canseco, who’s designed polls for 18 years and obtained a copy of the draft questionnaire that Madsen plans to introduce at Tuesday’s meeting of council’s committee of the whole. “It’s tough to figure out the motivation of what they want to find out.”
In his report to council, Madsen said the questionnaire’s findings would give council and staff “an exceptional opportunity to deepen and update our insights into community interests, concerns and policy preferences.”
Among the topics the survey purports to explore are:
- the preferred pace of the city’s population growth for the next 20 years
- priorities for developing the city’s downtown areas
- support for development plans for various neighbourhoods like Moody Centre, Oceanfront and the Murray/Clarke street corridor
- preferred building heights in the city’s centre
- ways to address the impact of increasing densification of the city on Rocky Point Park
- the level of tolerance residents have for increased traffic
At its meeting March 9, council approved the creation of an additional survey to its timeline for updating the city’s OCP, as a follow-up to an initial poll that was recently completed gauging residents’ thoughts about Port Moody’s current OCP.
According to the city’s manager of policy planning, Mary De Paoli, the city received 365 responses to the first survey.
She said the goal of the second survey is “to obtain community feedback on key topics for which council would like more community input,” as well as to “increase the number of touch points with the community,” and provide a bridge to a third survey about land use options in various neighbourhoods that is planned for this fall.
She added that staff wants to hear more about council’s priorities for such a survey before working with a consultant to formulate it for distribution.
Canseco, who also writes for Glacier Media, the parent company of the Tri-City News, said for the city to get a proper sense of residents’ wishes on major policy issues, it needs a “deeper discussion about what kind of data you want.”
He added the quality of the information collected is more important than its volume.
“A sample has to be representative, the right mix of gender and age groups as defined by the census,” Canseco said. “We don’t just pull this out of thin air.”
A proposal to distribute the questionnaire in tax notices is also problematic, he added, as that would exclude swaths of Port Moody residents who rent or otherwise don’t own property. “It signals there’s two classes of citizens,” Canseco said.
In his report, Madsen suggests the city could also offer residents an “online survey interface.”
A draft of the final survey is to be presented to council by April 20.
