It's definitely not 'overwhelmingly popular,' but polling shows majority support (66%) from Canadians for use of the Emergencies Act at the time of the protest.
Upon digging, Wikipedia most prominently cites secondary sources here. The first of which is linked to a group called "Maru Group", whose website is dysfunctional. They are owned by Stagwell Marketing, whose CEO, Mark Penn, is directly linked to the US and Canadian Government, and more specifically to companies which were directly hurt by the trucking protest. Maru Group's sampling is tiny, they asked only 1500 people and they give no information on how they gathered this data.
Better polls have the numbers of people supporting this measure somewhere around 50%.
For anything even remotely controversial, I stick exclusively with primary sources and ignore Wikipedia. The site is clearly compromised by admins who only want left-leaning secondary sources summarized. If you come across a controversial topic with biased, or even faulty information, the admins will remove edits which don’t comply with their bias, ban persistent users, and eventually “protect” the article. Even one of the co-founders has railed against the current state of the site.
It really should. I'm a PhD student (which does not overly qualify me anyway) but the more I look into works with quantitative measuring methods, the more I have a hard time trusting polls and statistics in general. Even in academic papers, or at least the ones I reviewed, more often than not the data is massaged in some way and leaves a lot to be desired.
It's best to immediately get suspicious if a polling company is owned by some parent firm with a clear conflict of interest.
That's really great work, thanks -- could you share a link to the 50% polls? This is probably worth porting back to the Wikipedia page to set the record straight.
They are also in the Wikipedia article, just further down. But what is really interesting is that the 66% source is dominantly cited in almost every single press article on the matter.
You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source. In this context, Wikipedia would be a tertiary source. Yes, I get that this is their mission statement, but I find that when citing secondary sources as truth, you have to be even more careful.
A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.
>You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source.
No, I'm not. I cited a document titled "Wikipedia is a tertiary source" in order to establish that prominently citing secondary sources (which is what makes Wikipedia a tertiary source) is established Wikipedia policy (as described in the document).
Yes, it's stated there that tertiary sources can in principle cite primary sources directly. But in practice, if you try this, you'll be accused of violating Wikipedia policy: in particular, primary sources for anything vaguely political will not be considered reliable (even though the dependence on secondary sources from the approved list is a major source of bias) and if you can't find an acceptable secondary source then other editors will conclude that the material is not notable.
> A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.
I agree; but as far as Wikipedians seem to be concerned, if newsletter XY is on the approved RS list, things that it says happened must have actually happened (and you'll only be allowed to challenge that with another source from the approved RS list; they'll say you're doing "original research" by pointing out directly that the poll doesn't actually say ABC, because that's, like, just your analysis of the poll).
Wikipedia is not concerned with truth, in that being able to disprove content in supposedly reliable sources doesn't entitle you to correct the material.
Better polls have the numbers of people supporting this measure somewhere around 50%.