Porter’s announcement early this month that they are in the process of maybe buying several Bombardier CS100 aircraft to fly out of Billy Bishop Airport has been met with mixed feelings. Based on the enthusiam of employees at their press conference, it’s obvious that Porter are pretty happy about the move. But city council and even Billy Bishop airport itself seem to be a bit more wary about it, mainly citing increased noise and the impact that expanding the airport to accomodate will have on the lakeshore as the reason they shouldn’t go ahead with it.
So Porter has taken to the court of public opinion to find out what Torontonians really think about the announcement, surveying 19,500 residents (supposedly in one of the largest publicly released polls in the city) last week to ask them if they support Poter’s plan or not. When asked if they support allowing the jets at Billy Bishop as long as they don’t make any more noise than the planes currently flying out there, 66.2% were in favour. They were also asked if they support lengthening the runway as long as the area currently used by boats is not changed, and 62.5% of respondants were in favour. Finally, survery respondants were asked whether Toronto City Council should allow the jets to be flown out of Toronto Island Airport, 51.3% were supportive, while 20% were undecided.
Now, it’s easy to question the accuracy of such a survey, but it really depends on how they did it. Usually, companies hire third party companies who write the questions and have their call centres call people at random to do the survey in order to avoid bias. And this is what Porter did, hiring iFusion Research to conduct this research for them (they didn’t even use real people to do the surveys, it’s all automated).
UPDATE: The National Post released the actual survey document, and while some of the language released could be seen as slightly leading and biased, the questions they actually released figures for are not so bad. (There is definitely a reason they didn’t tell us about Question 3).
What do you think? Jets at Billy Bishop bad for Toronto? Do you think Porter’s survey is too biased, despite farming it out?
[via Newswire.ca]
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Megan Patterson is the Science and Technology Editor at Paper Droids and currently a Toronto Standard intern. She also tweets more than is healthy or wise.
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