A question in the most recent Forum Research poll on Toronto illustrates a point about how our political allegiances shape our perceptions about how well certain policies in the city are working. The poll itself is locked for subscribers only, but the Toronto Star reports the interesting part this way, on the question of how satisfied people were with the performance of private contractor Green For Life (GFL), who have been collecting garbage in the area bounded by Yonge Street and the Humber River for less than a week:
Among those who would vote Conservative in a provincial election, 73 per cent said they were very satisfied with GFL. Among Liberal supporters, 46 per cent expressed the same satisfaction level. But only 24 per cent of NDP voters said they were “very satisfied.”
For the record: my own garbage pickup Friday morning was satisfactory—the bins were emptied when I came home from work (which is the earliest I ever check them) and they were lined up neatly at my property line rather than heaved over at a random location along the block, as they sometimes have been in the past. But I have no particular level of satisfaction yet with the service after a single week, and no particular sense of the how the larger issues for the city arising from this contracting out will look after a few months.
Two other interesting notes from that poll after the jump:
Olivia Chow, in beating Rob Ford and John Tory in a hypothetical three-way race, now appears to be a favourite in fields that are split on the right and the left. Tory would tend—many would think—to cannibalize Ford’s centrist-conservative vote in such a race, but in an earlier poll Chow came out ahead of Ford and Adam Vaughan. Vaughan, one might expect, would have cannibalized Chow’s support among lefty urbanists. But, you know, the race is along way off, etc. etc.
Oh, and this: Mayor Rob Ford and radio host John Tory were more strongly supported by older residents but Ford’s greatest appeal was among lower-income households in Scarborough and North York. But then we already knew that.
PHOTO: RENE JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR
