Someone famous – Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and Benjamin Disraeli have all have received credit – once said that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. That’s the nagging thought many people have when they read the results of polls in newspapers or hear about them on television. The same goes for readers reading a book about poll results. A whole bunch of opinions collected in book form may take on the appearance of fact, but that doesn’t mean that they are true.

From crime and punishment to the environment, from health care and the Internet to religion and pets, pollsters Darrell Bricker and John Wright have aggregated the opinions of hundreds of thousands of Canadians in 17 categories and broken them down by province, region, sex, age, education level, and income, to name a few classifiers. This is wonderful and comprehensive bathroom reading, since any given opinion poll is a snapshot and thus doesn’t take long to digest. It’s fascinating to learn, for instance, that a married, upper-income Canadian is twice as likely to keep a secret from a spouse as a middle-income Canadian or that, frequent National Post editorials notwithstanding, eight in 10 Canadians believe that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation provides value for taxpayers’ money.

For those who like USA Today-style factoids, this book will provide hours of fascination, but as an exercise for lovers of reading, endless lists tend to make the eyes glaze over. No doubt marketers, pollsters, politicians, demographers, and other generators of sales and purveyors of spin can use a book like this to further their arts, but for the general reader it might be more efficient, to say nothing of being more fun, to take a walk to the local coffee shop or the office water cooler and have an old-fashioned conversation.