You can’t handle the truth

Sometimes you’re better off not knowing. Just ask the Canadian Embassy in Kyiv.

This past January, the embassy reached into a little-known pot of money called the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives to help a group called Free Crimea survey Crimeans about a variety of subjects. The questions included whether respondents were happy with having joined Russia.

For those who have forgotten, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014. The move came after a controversial referendum — conducted with little advance warning and with Russian troops in control of the peninsula — in which the vast majority of Crimeans apparently supported becoming part of Ukraine.

Canada and the rest of the West dismissed the referendum and have since been demanding that Russia return the strategically important peninsula to Ukraine. Except, according to the Canadian government-funded survey, the vast majority of Crimeans do, in fact, support being part of Russia.

All told, 82 per cent of the 800 respondents said they fully back Crimea joining Russia, while 11 per cent said they support the move in some form. Only four per cent said they opposed the union. The survey, conducted by telephone between Jan. 16 and Jan. 22, is considered accurate to within 3.5 percentage points.

Asked about the results, Foreign Affairs spokesman François Lasalle took a decidedly agnostic view, writing in an email: “Like all polling results, these should be read as a partial snapshot, obtained within the constraints of the Russian occupation of Crimea.” He went on to reassert that Canada would never recognize the annexation.

As for the decision to commission the survey in the first place, was it money well spent? The Russians probably think so. Lee Berthiaume