The CRIC Standards Committee and CRIC POR Thought Leadership Council have proposed the following amendment to 6.1 of the CRIC Public Opinion Research Standards and Disclosure Requirements. This amendment has been reviewed by the CRIC Board and is being circulated for member feedback. Please submit feedback to [email protected] by February 15, 2023. All feedback will be reviewed by the CRIC Standards Committee and CRIC Public Opinion Research Thought Leadership Council and a final recommendation will be provided to the CRIC Board for their approval.

Current wording of III-6-l:

III-6-l For research released on public policy topics or election voting, the detailed tables or representations thereof by standard demographic questions with weighted and unweighted number of respondents so that the public can transparently see the original number of responses by standard demographic category and the weighted number of responses by standard demographic category. This data must be made available upon request for research released on other topics.

Proposed new version of III-6-l: (words highlighted in yellow above removed-word highlighted in green added)

III-6-l The detailed tables or representations thereof by standard demographic questions (e.g., age, gender, region and other demographics used for weighting) with weighted and unweighted number of respondents so that the public can transparently see the original number of responses by standard demographic category and the weighted number of responses by standard demographic category.

Background and Rationale

The requirement that detailed tables be released only for public policy topics or election voting was added to the first edition of the CRIC Public Opinion Research Standards and Disclosure Requirements to reduce the burden on research agencies when releasing polls on general interest topics that were not related to public policy or election voting. Since the first release of the standards, concerns have been raised related to this exception including the following:

• it creates ambiguity on what topics constitute “public policy”
• research that is not on public policy can still have significant impact on the lives of Canadians, businesses and public institutions
• it creates inconsistencies in what the media and public should be looking for when evaluating the credibility of research released into the public domain
• it creates a barrier to transparency by only making tables for non public policy research available upon request

To address these concerns, the CRIC POR Thought Leadership Council and CRIC Standards committee unanimously agreed to remove this exception. This amendment will remove any ambiguity and ensure that all research released by CRIC members into the public domain is accompanied by a full set of tables. To provide further clarity, definitions of standard demographic questions were also added.