Toronto Star pollster decides to play loose

It seems that Ekos' Frank Graves has decided that some of his polls cannot be trusted.

After polling 500 Canadians this weekend, the results showing a Liberal collapse were too shocking to Graves to possibly be true, so he decided to add to the sample, which simply confirmed the original result. He then decided to sit on the poll until after last night's debate.

What this tells you are two things: one, if a poll from EKOS with a sample size of only 500 people is released in future, take it with a grain of salt. Obviously, it confirms the bias of the pollster/client or else they would deem it necessary to expand the number of people who are asked. In other words, "statistical credibility" sometimes comes a distant second to confirming certain assumptions.

Two, certain polling firms and their clients obviously have a vested interest in maintaining the Liberal status quo or they would have released the poll immediately when they had finalized and interpreted the data.