I am following up on a post I did last week on CBCs bias and Peter Loewen. Apparently some key facts of his political history were left out in the piece done on his involvement with vote compass. Sandy from crux of the matter has the rest of the story.
From crux of the matter
While CompassVote may indeed be biased, that is not the point of this post. Rather, what is the point is that Peter Loewen has nothing to do with it if it is.
First, Loewen was NOT the Compass Poll creator. In fact, he wasn’t even on its development team. Yet, the headline on this Toronto Sun column by Brian Lilley states that Loewen was the “creator” of the poll and Lilley writes in his second sentence that Loewen was one of key people behind the development of the poll. As Loewen will explain himself in the e-mails to follow, he will simply be involved in analyzing and publishing the results after the election is over.
Second, Loewen was not actually on the Ignatieff leadership team in 2006. Rather, for the most part all he did was carry out some research with Daniel Rubenson on the effects of communicating leadership candidate messaging via direct mail — hardly the stuff of partisanship.
Moreover, as University of Calgary professor, and former advisor to Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan explains in his e-mails, Loewen also worked on the Stephen Harper leadership team in 2004 doing pretty much the same kind of thing as he did for Ignatieff, as well as for Bill Black in the 2005-06 Nova Scotia PC leadership campaign. In addition, Loewen was a housemate of Pierre Poilievre‘s during university. So, the man is hardly a political partisan.