Author: Jason Markusoff

It’s apparent that a fourth Liberal victory has triggered a surge in anti-Ottawa sentiment in Alberta, but have things changed so much that a populace long opposed to pulling the province out of the Canada Pension Plan now supports it?One reading of fresh polling commissioned by the Premier Danielle Smith’s government argues as much. A Postmedia writer got his hands on a provincially funded survey by pollster Janet Brown’s Trend Research, and used the results to argue that most Albertans — 55 per cent — now back an APP instead of a CPP.The article compared that to only 23 per cent support in a Leger poll earlier this year, which is similar to multiple survey findings in 2024 and not much better than Brown herself tracked in 2022.One more Liberal prime minister later, and now the province is ready to walk away from CPP?Not so fast. This takes some squinting.As happens so often, the answer may not be as important as the question used to obtain it.”Different questions will give you different results,” Brown said in an interview with CBC News, after publicly releasing the entire government-commissioned poll on her own website, for transparency’s sake.Janet Brown is a pollster based in Calgary.