This is a post about politics. While it’s obvious that I support a specific set of values, I don’t want to support one party or another in this post because I know that different people vote for different reasons (and honestly, I think this is a dark age of Canadian politics in terms of all parties). What I am interested in is talking about things everyone might be able to agree on so we can all vote in a way that better represents us.

We live with bias. The information we get, from any source, whether it be medical, political or cultural, never matches up perfectly with the real world. It makes it difficult, sometimes, to judge any information we get that’s not first-hand. But, by understanding bias a bit better we can navigate it a bit better.

I came a across a bizarre point of view this weekend from a person who refused to read any editorials or basically any source of information that didn’t come directly from the party leaders’ mouths or their websites. It didn’t strike me how strange this really is until I could sit down and think about it a bit but it demonstrates confusion between two fundamentally different types of bias.

First nothing can be biased without reference to something else. If I try and guess your age and don’t get it right on, my guess is biased relative to your actual age. My bias is that I think you’re older or younger than you actually are.

When we’re talking about political parties what is the reference? If, like the person I debated, you think the reference is what the leaders say and the parties say they stand for, then it’s true that you are getting rid of the bias by only listening to them directly. But is that really what we’re interested in? Is that the way you can best inform yourself about which party represents your views? I think you’d have a hard time convincing anybody that it is.

What we’re really interested in is not what the parties say they’ve done or what they’re going to do but what they’ve actually done and what they could feasibly do in the future. This is how we should be measuring bias or spin which, when you think about it, makes the politicians and political parties the last people you would want to listen to because they are the ones most likely to give you a biased answer about what they’ve done and what they can do. Why would any rational politician disclose any of his or her failures? It would be like going to to a Honda dealer to ask him whether you should buy a Honda or Ford. I think it’s pretty obvious what the answer is going to be and you aren’t going to learn anything from the Honda dealer’s answer.

The problem is that this makes life much more complicated. If you’re only worried about what the leaders actually say, then it’s easy to avoid bias because you can go back and listen to or read the leaders’ speeches. If you’re actually concerned about a party’s real track record or their ability to put through policies they’re suggesting, you have to do a lot of homework. You have to dig up reports and statistics and, if you want to be really thorough, find out how those statistics were collected. That is not how people like to spend their Sunday mornings.

That is where I think tools like CBC’s Vote Compass, which I wrote about previously, can be immensely useful. I’ll never sit here and tell you it’s perfect but if you look in the FAQs, there’s quite a detailed description of how it was designed so you know what you’re getting into. And it can save your Sunday morning.