Quebec polling firm Léger tracking the trends in U.S. election
Peter Black – Local Journalism initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
Former prime minister John Diefenbaker, who died 45 years ago this month, is remembered (by those who remember) for his Prairie renegade style of politics, for winning the largest majority government ever in 1958, for pissing off president John F. Kennedy by refusing nuclear missiles on Canadian soil, and for his erratic and ultimately rela- tively brief run as PM.
He also contributed one of the best quotes in Canadian politics. Asked what he thought of polls showing his Progressive Conservative Party trailing the incumbent Liberals in the 1957 election, Dief the Chief quipped: “I was always fond of dogs as they are the one animal that knows the proper treatment to give to polls.”
The point of the comment was not so much that Dief was a dog-lover, but that political polls are not to be taken as fact. Diefenbaker, how- ever, turned out to be doggone wrong about the poll but won the election nevertheless, taking more seats than the Liberals but losing the popular vote by 125,000 votes or so.
We bring up polls, not be- cause they seem to be proliferating, which they are, but because this recent story in Newsweek caught our eye: “Ka- mala Harris is leading Donald Trump by her biggest margin yet according to a new poll. The poll, conducted by polling com- pany Léger between July 26 and July 28, shows that when third party candidates are included, Harris leads Trump by seven points, with the pre- sumptive Democratic nominee at 48 per cent compared to the former president’s 41 percent.”
We don’t know what to make of the poll, but we certainly know who the pollster is, with no margin of error. Léger is the Montreal-based market re- search and analytics company, the largest Canadian-owned firm of its kind in the country. It used to be known as Léger Marketing and before that, Léger and Léger.
The two Légers were Marcel Léger, a former Parti Québecois minister, and his son
Jean-Marc, an economist by training. Père et fils created the company in 1985, follow- ing the elder Léger’s defeat as a PQ MNA in the election of that year, losing for the first time the Montreal riding he had held since 1970.
Before his retreat from politics, Léger had been a leading proponent for creating a federal wing of the PQ, the inspiration being, as described by Graham Fraser in his definitive history of the early years of the party, “the apparent contradiction that Quebec ridings that voted PQ provincially voted Liberal federally.”
One of Léger’s cabinet col- leagues ordered a poll (!) which showed about 45 per cent of voters would vote for a PQ candidate federally and deliver as many as 40 seats. At the urging of leader René Lévesque, the party’s national council meeting in 1982 rejected the idea.
Léger was undaunted. While still a PQ MNA, he founded and served as leader of the Parti Nationaliste du Québec which won 2.5 per cent of the Quebec vote in the 1984 federal election.
Less than 10 years and several constitutional crises later, the Bloc Québecois under Lucien Bouchard won 54 seats in Quebec and became the Official Opposition in the House of Commons.
Alas, Marcel Léger did not live to see his prophecy come true; he died at age 63 in February 1993, seven months before the federal election that year.
But we digress. Back to polling. Under the leadership of Jean-Marc Léger, who has become a much-sought after commentator and advisor, the Léger company has grown exponentially from the little shop once known as the PQ’s pollster.
Much like papa envisioned expansion into a larger and different political market, the son has embarked on an aggressive conquest of polling opportunities in the United States. After making some 11 acquisitions of Canadian firms in the polling business since 2000, Léger bought its first American company in 2022, New Jersey-based 360 Market Research.
Léger said in a La Presse interview at the time, “I developed this company through acquisitions, but my dream has always been to go to the United States. I have been preparing this expansion for 20 years.”
With Newsweek now as a client, Léger would seem to be well on his way to seeing his American polling dream come true – proving that while dogs might pee on poles, humans are eager to embrace them.