Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Massive poll a massive scam? Part II

It gets weirder still.


Back here, I pondered some of the weirdness around Campaign Life Coalition's "MASSIVE NEW POLL" that supposedly indicates 56% of Canadians oppose Dr. Morgentaler's Order of Canada. Never mind that the results were so hopelessly skewed that they don't prove much other than 90% of Canadians don't give a shit about this issue -- I was curious to know something about the company that did the poll.

However, I was unable to find any contact info for "KLRVU Polling". A Canada 411 search of KLRVU (in a few different combinations) returned nada. A Google search also returned nothing other than what's been written about the poll in the last 24 hours. This is strange indeed: certainly any polling company that, according to the CLC press release,
"is a privately owned polling company working with private firms since 2006 providing research services"
would at least be listed in the phone book?

Then I discovered that the CLC press release that ran in CNW, identical to the lifesite article in every other way, also had a phone number for "KLRVU Polling", 204-999-7446. A reverse lookup turned it up as a non-published number, very strange indeed for any kind of business. A Google search of the phone number revealed that it's being used by two businesses in Winnipeg. One is a small custom jewelry engraving business called "Lasercut Designs" (936 James St., Winnipeg), and the other a company called "WMD Mobile Media" (address: 4626 Roblin Blvd, Winnipeg) that has something to do with billboards (but naturally! has no website yet). So far no evidence of anything to do with polling services. However...

The Lasercut Designs site has a link to their online Ecom site. The Ecom site uses CPU Technologies, a provider of E-commerce software. A link at the bottom of the page goes to a CPU site that displays its various software offerings. This could be the polling connection: maybe through CPU the people who run Lasercut Designs (Allan and Katherine) were able to get a polling software program of some kind, which they then used to conduct the CLC poll?

Add to all that the fact that "INFOLIST Canada", the company who provided "KLRVU Polling" with the random phone-calling algorithm used in the MASSIVE NEW POLL, is also Canada 411 and Google-challenged. The result, accurate 19 times out of 20, is that the CLC's MASSIVE NEW POLL is raising more questions than answers.